About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
I’ve got a backburner full of unanswered questions, none of them big enough for a post, and all of them bothering me enough that I want to dump them out of my brain.
It always helps me to write through my puzzlement, and I’m hoping that putting them out here will help me make decisions on at least a few of them!
Keep or return the large WaterPik set that PiC bought on sale to Costco?
I haven’t had time to do more research on what set makes the most sense for our situation but I wanted something that would be relatively portable because we have limited counter space and travel regularly.
Conclusion: I think we should return this for now.
Buy dog health insurance or self insure?
The Nationwide quote was $1100 a year for full coverage which gives 90% back on vet bills, and you can use any vet:
*The relevant wellness stuff that I expect to pay for every year would be far less in any given year than the premiums except for the dental cleaning. Any year she got a dental, the cost would likely be at least $1000:
Our mortgage, recast twice though it has been, is still an astronomical 4 figure number that I’m quietly desperate to reduce as fast as possible. To that end, though we don’t have much spare every month, our payments have been rounded up to the nearest thousand to whittle away at that principal slowly. Drip drip drip!
Before I could bask in the rewards of taking a long term approach, I discovered a hole in our plans.
We started paying a multi-hundred dollar therapy bill monthly at the end of 2017 and I blithely assumed we could cash flow it. Yes, but…
This is where the drips worked against me. I lost track of when the extra therapy bills ate up our whole cash buffer in the checking account but we slowly dripped and dribbled that “extra” money out the door. It’s entirely gone now and we’re back to a paycheck to paycheck situation.
All our money first goes to their various prescheduled destinations (investing and savings), then we have exactly what we need to cover our bills as they come up. This is NOT ideal. As loathe as I am to have money sitting in checking accounts not earning any interest, the scenario where a missed paycheck would send me straight to pulling money out of our savings and that stinks. We do maintain a large cash savings for major bills like insurance and property tax but that isn’t intended to be tapped for any normal recurring monthly expenses.
Sadly this means I’ve got to make even more budget cuts. The “big” mortgage principal payments of $200 are now reduced to only $20 extra per month. Our cash buffer needs to be at least $3000 to be useful for more than a minute and that’s going to take quite a while to rebuild. In the meantime, I’m considering the impact this will have on our charitable giving.
Small win: We had an extra long stretch on the social calendar in addition to my tripled workload. It was touch and go whether I’d make it through without blowing my top. I made it!! What were your wins this week?
I’m thrilled for Stacking Pennies, one of my original early days money blogging friends. She is expecting!
The Fuck-over-ability Index: As a manager, I definitely don’t pry into my people’s lives or encourage them to overcommit financially so we can overwork them. That’s messed up. I expect them to do a great job because that’s the job while I do my best to compensate them fairly and treat them well. And regardless, I expect that attrition will happen because that’s how it works.
The quiz was reasonably accurate for us though. I scored a 22: You can push back on your boss if they’re being totally unreasonable without fear of immediately going into financial ruin if you lose your job.
Waffles on Wednesday talks privilege. I like it when people are willing to speak on this, and when we practice gratitude for our many advantages and blessings.
A trustworthy immigration lawyer I know vouches for this group of lawyers fundraising to litigate against Jeff Sessions. If you can support them, that would be a tangible way to fight the ongoing horribleness with immigration in the US.
Sandy dug into the fine print of the Tulsa Real Estate Fund and points out some very valid concerns. It would be awesome for this fund to succeed, but as a mentor and I lamented, not on the backs of our own people (respectively). We see investing schemes and money advice that are about exploiting the community rather than building it up and it’s highly concerning because there are a lot of people trying to make their financial situations a little better, and a lot of people out there to take advantage of the shared connections, to take advantage of them. I truly hope they make some minor changes to ensure that doesn’t play out here.
Anthony Bourdain’s passing saddened me, he was such a creative thinker and I admired his risk taking and unique perspectives. One of the reasons I liked Anthony Bourdain (as much as you can like someone you’ve never met) is because I admired his ability to deal with his own pain and anger without projecting it on others, and instead trying to portray the humanity of cultures that were not his own without trying to look superior or like he’s the first to discover them. There was no appropriation or disrespect, it was entirely the opposite, and that was refreshing.
E. Nesbit‘s The Book of Dragons
Maybe it was just my mood but I didn’t really like this one at all. It felt far too old timey and juvenile. Which makes sense, it’s a children’s book. But there are children’s books and then there are books that delight children and adults alike. This wasn’t the latter.
Terry Pratchett‘s Nation
I did really like this one – I hadn’t read it for ages because it wasn’t Discworld and I’ve been in the mood for great comedy primarily but I’m glad that I gave this one a go.
Pretax contributions come out of his paycheck first: taxes, retirement contributions, health, dental and vision coverage, pre-tax FSA, his disability and life insurance. His benefits are way better than my employer’s.
After that haircut, our paychecks hit the joint checking accounts. 30% of our total take-home pay is immediately transferred to our joint savings account for long term savings or investing, another 10% is sent to a savings account, held against the large bills coming up in the course of the year: life, car, home, and earthquake insurance, property taxes (A DOOZY), income taxes if we unexpectedly made more and deducted less over the year. That will need to increase to 15% in 2019.
The remaining 60% covers all living expenses: mortgage, utilities, daycare, credit cards (gas, groceries, discretionary spending, dog supplies and medications).
Scalzi on coolness vs not coolness. This is exactly how I’ve been thinking of the cool / not cool designations in our friend groups! But it does leave me I’m confused where I go because I’m definitely not cool (people don’t expend energy coming to me, by and large), am very ok with that not-coolness, but also don’t put energy out to draw people in, either.
Not due to racism, obviously, but JB doesn’t have much of a relationship with my Dad right now. It wasn’t due to lack of effort on our part at first but I’ve stopped trying. Ze doesn’t seem to notice that my parent isn’t in zir life. Ze has noticed that ze hasn’t met my mom and knows that she’s dead but perhaps due to age, or because I’ve supplied multiple surrogates. I am maintaining a policy of not lying but am working on giving zir more neutral and graspable answers suitable for a 3 year old.
Ever since spending time with a pregnant Auntie Crystal, JB has been pretending that ze has a baby in zir belly. Ze also pretends that PiC and I do too. It’s a little weird but whatever, we play along. Ze also enjoys reassigning our genders, for some reason (YOU da mommy, and you a BOY. YOU da daddy, and you da GIRL). Not sure where that came from.
Oh and ze also has an invisible baby hamster that gets wrapped up in zir favorite blanket, or goes missing every so often. Invisible baby hamster gets handed to me at the end of the night to “put on Daddy’s belly to keep warm”.
Morning Glory no more
Alas, JB no longer wakes up like a bright lightbulb clicking on. Ze has morphed into me: groggy, grumpy, so not ready for morning to come.
I’ve had to harness all the good cheer that I can find so that I can pass it on to zir and get us all out the door at a reasonable hour. I keep thinking that we really need to outgrow this or else it’s going to make the transition to school really tough. That’s coming up much sooner than I’d like to think.
I’ve got a backburner full of unanswered questions, none of them big enough for a post, and all of them bothering me enough that I want to dump them out of my brain.
Our mortgage, 
What I read
Thanks to being 
Imagination Town