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
Read More
June 19, 2017
Listening to the West Wing the other day, Toby’s yelling about the need to consider options to save Social Security such as raising the minimum age penetrated my conscious brain. He pointed out that people are living decades longer than they used to, and Social Security was predicated on a life span that was considerably shorter.
As I understand it, you can start claiming benefits at 62 if you’re willing to accept a lower amount but for each year you wait until age 70, the amount increases 8%.
The archived Social Security site says:
If we look at life expectancy statistics from the 1930s we might come to the conclusion that the Social Security program was designed in such a way that people would work for many years paying in taxes, but would not live long enough to collect benefits. Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65. But life expectancy at birth in the early decades of the 20th century was low due mainly to high infant mortality, and someone who died as a child would never have worked and paid into Social Security. A more appropriate measure is probably life expectancy after attainment of adulthood.
It goes on to point out that if we look at the life expectancy after reaching adulthood, then we are indeed living a few more years than we used to.
Obviously, we have many awesome FIRE bloggers who would dispute this retirement age as the appropriate one but they’re (we?) an unusual segment of the population right now.
In my family, we either live well into late 80s and 90s, or we die before 60. If you make it to 60, there’s a solid chance that you have another 20 or 30 years ahead.
Whether they’re good years depends on whether they worked physically demanding manual labor jobs (high likelihood), how good their basic health was, whether they had access to appropriate health care if it was needed. Last and maybe the most important: did they save enough to last them during their later years?
I’d say the latter is a complicated question because, until now, retirement plans in our family have been “move in with the kids and be their childcare in exchange for full support.”
There have been some exceptions.
My amazing grandmother worked her own farm well into her 80s. She had enough saved to last her until her death and still leave a healthy inheritance. One aunt did the usual childcare thing but then moved out when the grandkids were too much of a pain – that’s pretty much unheard of.
PiC and I are the first couple in my family that I know of to actively plan to not follow the usual game plan of have kids, work all our adult years, missing their childhoods, and then depend on them for support while raising their kids. That model simply doesn’t work when there isn’t a cohesive community all around you doing the same which equips them to provide support as needed. We’re hundreds of miles from our dearest friends and relatives, and that’s not likely to change any time soon.
JuggerBaby may be an only. We may want to grow the family more. We may try to foster and adopt if my health allows. There are so many possibilities and it hardly seems possible to plan for them all, but it must be possible.
We have been saving for retirement for years, I started when I was 21. I don’t have a FIRE date in mind but once the dust settles, I’ll decide what it is and our salaries together will work on reaching it.
I’d love to set it at age 40 but that’s just a pie in the sky number right now. We have to let the dust settle with the house, the renovations, the mortgage, and all that jazz before I dive headfirst into another massive plan.
:: When you plan to retire? Do you have grand plans for that time of your life or is that still hazy?
June 14, 2017
Skills
Complete sentences and abstract thought
JuggerBaby normally skips words ze can’t pronounce or doesn’t think are relevant. This makes for conversations more akin to translating pantomime and Choose Your Own Adventure than communication. It gets even fuzzier when ze slips into a play-pretend mode in the middle of a normal conversation. At dinner we might be talking about people ze knows, the food’s characteristics, and then suddenly we’ll be pretending to drink tea, or cooking. I’m sure JuggerBaby wonders why we’re mentally slow and why it takes us 5 minutes to catch up to zir imaginings.
As usual, the norm abruptly changed this month.
Out of the blue, ze started telling us “I like this!” Who taught zir that concept?? But munching down on some pastry, ze will cheerfully pipe up: mama, I like this!
And the next day: mama, I need water, please!
And then: no more stah-berries? No more boo-berries? Onee peach right now?
It seems like ze is grasping the more abstract concepts that we don’t always have exactly what ze wants, when ze wants it. That led me to thinking of how I don’t remember ever complaining of hunger as a young child. Though I certainly skipped meals with unhealthy regularity in the early days of this blog to save money, I will never forget to be grateful that my child has enough to eat.
Fruit according to JuggerBaby and language shifts
Stah-berry – strawberry
Boo-berry – blueberry
Peesch – peach
Backberries- blackberries
JuggerBaby’s taking liberties with the English language again. Suddenly everything comes with an “y” at the end of it:
Noy = no
Oh noy! = oh no!
Boy = bowl
appy ertay oo-oo = happy birthday to you
moy = more
Toddler portion sizes
Speaking of eating, it seems that JuggerBaby is finally eating about the recommended toddler portion sizes for a meal. From the point ze started eating solid food til about 2-3 weeks ago, ze has eaten 2-3 times the recommended-by-pediatricians amount, and has suddenly switched to a much lower gear and eats far far less. At first I was a bit worried but ze wasn’t starving, just self regulating. A few times it was really because playing during dinnertime was more entertaining than eating, but waking up two hours early and STAAAARVING seems to have taught zir a lesson in eating when the eating’s good.
Counting
Ze can count up to ten, but ze hasn’t made the connection between the numbers and the idea that they are used in a specific way. Ze used to count all the items on the dinner table, this is how I know ze knows 1-10, but ask zir to count at any random time and ze will cheerfully do so: one-two, one-two, one-TWO!
…. that’s six.
Reading comprehension
Ze is on a huge mimicking kick right now. Clearly both we and zir teachers are doing the same things when we read. Normally, when I read simpler stories to zir, I try to engage zir by asking what things are on the page. It’s backfired. Now ze insists on holding the book up and points at every illustration quizzing us: wat izzit?
Now I encourage zir to act out parts of the story instead. See me next month when ze turns me into zir very own thespian to direct.
Household chores
The industrious little helper monkey I always joked about has arrived! JuggerBaby now insists on peeling oranges for me, and vacuuming, obsessed to the point of falling to the ground crying when I hooked up a new attachment to the vacuum and didn’t give zir first dibs.
Too like a mischievous monkey, though. You can never turn your back on zir without possibly being leapt on. You might be unable to lift your left leg for reasons of 30 pounds of child suddenly latching onto it, or having that same child dart around you cackling and racing to shut the door in your face.
Helper monkeys may be more work than help.
It’s also really strange to see how zir empathy works, or doesn’t. Ze thinks nothing of slapping you across the face, clawing at you like a angry cat, pinning down a limb and trying to bite the belugas out of it. Not a drop of remorse to be found, and if you were caught by surprise and yell “ow!” ze laughs like a homocidal sociopath.
At the same time, I’ve explained that some games are too rough because my hands hurt and each time I decline to hold hands and play a rough game, ze gently holds that injured hand, asks “mama ow?”, pets it, kisses it and gently hugs me. Or ze will get wildly enthused about something, grab my painful hand, and even before I can wince, ze catches zirself and says “oh no! Mama ow!”
Even stranger, it might have been a few days since my hands were that dire, but ze will remember and scold me for playing with that hand, patting it and reminding me that it hurts.
It’s hard to reconcile the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde flip flops.
Sweet sleeper
We always have our ups and downs but I cherish those nights when we have a peaceful dinner, quiet bathtime, go through a pile of books and then ze settles in for sleep. I’m not sure how it’ll work when we open up the crib so ze isn’t trapped anymore but ze usually has several good nights in a row settling in without a fight for a long night of sleep. The irony is I can’t thoroughly enjoy the peace because of my own recalcitrant body, but I appreciate the ability to lay down starting at 8 or 9 and stay put!
Precious #parenting moments
- JuggerBaby kissed me on the nose and then head butted me twice. That sums up our relationship pretty well.
- My two freaking year old just told me “I do me, mama, you do you.”
- JuggerBaby grabs my hand and shakes it: nice to meetchu!
- JuggerBaby hovering a piece of an orange rind near zir mouth: “ahh? ahhh?” Joke’s on you, kid.
:: What helper animal would you pick? What’s your favorite summer fruit?
June 12, 2017
On the one hand, I am Superwoman.
I handle my full time job like the pro that I am. My family is fed, hygienic, healthy, and mostly happy – though Seamus would submit to you that my refusal to share carnitas tacos is inhumane and unacceptable. My hobby (writing here) is still fun after nearly 11 years. My friends are wonderful people and I gladly support them through health, home, and career crises on a sometimes daily basis. Without a doubt, I’ve knocked the money thing out of the park on a regular basis – I save expansively, spend moderately, invest bravely, and generate odds and ends income creatively.
I remain Seamus’s most dedicated groomer and vet tech, I tend to his medications, food, and all nursing care so that he’s had the best six months of allergy-related symptoms of his life.
On a good day, one would assume I had it all together in a neat little package with a bow on top. When things are normal, it’s true – my default mode is set to awesome with a few dashes of slobby.
I had to check three times yesterday if my pants were on and buttoned before I left the house. After the backwards pajamas the night before, that shouldn’t have been such a close call. I’ve gone five days in a row without brushing or combing my hair – the blessings of short hair! If there wasn’t a mirror in the hallway, those three times I remembered to brush this mop would have been exactly zero. This isn’t really new territory for me – after a few years of working mostly remotely, I’ve reached an unprecedented level of non-concern about my dress because the only thing that matters at work right now is that I am awesome. Which I am.
But.
With the new home in the picture, all the prep work with our (fantastic!!) general contractor has driven me to distraction. Literally.
I’m burning the candle at both ends. I’m doing my usual: daycare dropoff/pickup days, cooking dinner (PiC cooks breakfast and packs lunches, I make dinner), managing our regular money stuff.
Pile on organizing the new mortgage, setting up the new utilities, reviewing and revising our labor and materials budgeting, contract writing and review, preliminary design, and discovery of more things wrong with the place. We intended to make the kitchen functional and update a bathroom. That leaking tube means we definitely have dry rot in the framing. After several hours of site visits and digging deeper, the remodel has turned into a major gut and rebuild problem. I won’t even get into the thousand moving parts that the GC and I are keeping in motion aside just to get a contract organized, from the almost routine surprise discoveries as we get to explore the space further in limited spurts.
But what else do we have behind Door #3, Vanna? We have summer! Summer, which is the absolute worst for Seamus’s allergies. I’ve changed his medication, his diet, his exercise routine, everything. It’s done wonders. But nothing we’ve come up with has been able to ward off the summer allergy attack – so once a year, for three months, I have to clean, salve and wrap his feet 2-3 times a day to keep the hot spots under control and the skin from tearing.
Y’all. The wall? It’s been hit. My entire being has gone through the wall like the Kool-aid man and fallen over.
I’ve gotten TONS done in a short period. The price was my sanity and health. My body tried to quit!
It’s one thing for me to forget what’s going on with the wardrobe. It’s another thing to pull out of the driveway and take a puzzled Seamus to daycare instead of to the vet. And it’s entirely another when I drive to a nearby shop to pick up a few things, but start walking home because I had forgotten that I’d driven! That was both funny and, in hindsight, a bit alarming.
My gastrointestinal system went full Dark Side for a week, constant pain and threat of vomiting kept me up nights. Digesting food was no longer a job for THIS body. All major joints were creaking fit to challenge the Tin Man, my fingers were moonlighting for sausage commercials. Taking calls for an hour took all the breath out of me, I had to sit for three hours just to stop breathing shallowly. My ribs hurt when I did that silly breathing thing.
A friend prodded me: time to ask for help (stupid!). Even after more than a decade of being together, I still don’t remember to ask PiC for help! He’s Right There.
I texted him and confessed it was time. He’d been pressing me to do a little less but couldn’t tell what he could take off my plate without getting bitten. He gladly offered up some chores he would take over and I picked a few.
Now the trick is actually letting go of them. One finger at a time!
- PiC has started makin more design decisions on the house, solo.
- I’ve negotiated a new lower rate for a year with Comcast. I can worry about finding a better replacement for them next year, not now.
- We have a $200 credit with Munchery that I’ve hoarded for months. Expensive though they have gotten, it’s time to just use the credit so I’m not cooking 3 times a week. We can get 2 or 3 more deliveries over the next few months so it’s time to strategically deploy that money already spent.
It’s taking a long while to repair the fatigue caused by the many days of unremitting pain but I am already seeing a little bit of improvement, and best of all, I don’t have to avoid food anymore!
We’re keeping our eye on the ball, this is going to get worse before it gets better and we have a lot of work ahead of us still.
Speaking of the work, initial rough quotes for the now MAJOR renovations are right around what I was expecting which is to say: $$GULP. It’s a good thing the past five years have been centered around building whopping loads of savings held in CDs and some stock options. Ideally the stock options would have been exercised over a year ago but having failed to be psychic, we’re going to have to take the short term capital gains hit to access that cash. Drat that lack of a third eye!
:: What are your favorite ways to reduce stress when work or home issues blow up?
June 7, 2017
I have to 5 to-do lists on Trello, 3 calendars for work and home scheduling, a paper planner, and countless spreadsheets for every financial decision we make.
Am I the most organized, productive person on the West Coast, ticking items off one list after another?
Nope.
That used to be true. But these days, the massive system just keeps me on top of things rather than several steps behind.
In today’s reality, my subconscious brain makes the call on what I’m going to get done regardless of the priority or urgency. I can make myself focus on the urgent deadlines but if I just sit back and let my whims steer the ship, you’ll see that it basically chooses decisions to make that I am capable of making based solely on my ability / energy no matter how bizarre it might seem.
This weekend was all errands: food shopping, more food shopping, setting up our Costco membership. Many miles were walked.
So many miles.
After dropping JuggerBaby off in zir crib for a nap, I crawled into bed and pulled out my phone for some research. Instead of dealing with house-hunting stuff, I researched holiday cards and picked the design that we’ll use this year. Mental note – still need to confirm that it’s cheaper to order 75 cards from Costco than to stitch together “10 free cards!” offers from Tiny Prints and Shutterfly, paying mostly for shipping and an additional 30 cards.
Sometimes I wonder why we spend time and money on holiday cards but then I remember that it’s important to PiC, so we do it. Mostly I do it. I don’t mind, it’s part of my money-related control freak thing, but it does take energy.
It’s not even June yet but house-hunting requires 10 units of energy and I only had 2, so a 2-unit of energy item, holiday cards, was served up on my mental board. This way I’m usually always getting something done even if it makes no sense.
This morning I couldn’t get out of bed without sixteen body parts twanging and sending up alarms so I’m taking a half day to rest. But before collapsing, I had started the rice cooker and slow cooker, so I’m “cooking” dinner even while I’m laid out, unable to lift my arms.
Would that I were always so well prepared.
:: How do you save yourself on tough days?
June 5, 2017
On Money
Income
Our normal income comes from two full time day jobs.
We experiment with earning money on the side, including minimal cash flow that we don’t touch from an investment property and investing in dividend stocks.
Some side income comes from Swagbucks, selling clothes on Poshmark which is hit or miss, and tracking activity through Achievement (my introduction to it).
The long term goal is to replace our day job income before my health declines and prevents me from working.
*** *** *** (more…)
May 31, 2017
Know what happened? We survived our trip!
It was a weird trip for me, not having prebooked every single item with my own hands, but that’s how some of these trips go. It’s been a while but I made myself just go with the flow as much as I could, and work on self preservation instead.
The flight there
It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It definitely could have gone better. We enjoyed a relatively easy boarding, except for that rush to get a tag for our stroller that we had to gate-check, but ze was pretty happy to run down the plane aisles to our seat and get buckled in like a pro flyer.
It was a very long haul from there. Food was fun, airplane food trays are great, and so is knocking liquids off my tray like a grouchy cat. We did lots of stickers on windows and climbing over Mt Parents, and cleaning up spills.
JuggerBaby only had a few mini, thankfully brief, meltdowns. Ze hates being touched or cuddled when trying to settle down for sleep, though, preferring to fling zir arms wide open and flop like a half stunned fish out of water, singing like an alley cat for about 20 minutes before passing out cold. Good luck doing that on a plane seat!
We offered laps to lay on but Angry Cat was Angry. We spent 5 of the 8 “sleep” hours with PiC providing a bookend on the aisle seat and me being a human barrier on the edges of all three seats so ze could sort of flop safely in the remaining trough of the seats. Pretty awful, pretty much. I didn’t get a wink and ze maybe got four hours of naps pieced together.
The flight back
Peaches and cream, how I craved sleep on this trip! We kept waking up at 2 am, 4 am, 5 am.
You know what’s great? Baby safe melatonin! JuggerBaby had a bad cough while we were gone, and one of the things we discovered was that Zarbee’s also makes a nighttime version of their cough syrup. I timed it poorly, giving it to zir half an hour before the food was served so ze conked out without eating dinner. Whoops. That bought us a solid blissful six hours of non-wrangling time.
What we packed
Everything in ziplock bags as a cheap alternative to buying packing cubes. I can squash a lot of clothes in my pseudo cubes and they’re reused endlessly.
Snacks
2 hard containers that are the perfect size to hand off to JuggerBaby to clutch, and refillable with the magic that is raisins. We’re not insane, we go nowhere without a pound of raisins. Everything else goes in disposable ziplock bags.
Toys
JuggerBaby still licks everything and thinks cleaning up / packing / unpacking is awesome fun. Therefore everything we pack is geared around that.
We avoid small bite size things that ze will just eat: paper clips, erasers, bottle caps. Instead I packed three ziplock bags o’ fun.
Bag 1: a deck of cards, a bag of hair bows, crayons and paper, watercolor play pad.
Bag 2: legos, 3 colorful strings of beads, 5 sheets of bubble wrap rolled into a zipper pouch, disposable stickers hoarded from every illicitly-baby free trip to Trader Joe’s.
Bag 3: reusable stickers, window clings, a notepad and pen.
We rotate bags: one is checked for the ride home, one per parental carry on.
Make use of your surroundings
Never underestimate the wonders of the seat back reading material. At 13-15 months, they were weapons to be brandished dangerously, or flapped to make floppy fan noises to the pure delight of a giggler. At 2 years plus, they’re great for spontaneous “what do you see” games. We went through a 22 page transit magazine in another language twice, spotting pictures. Still no idea what the magazine was about, but that was 20 solid minutes and now I know JuggerBaby has no idea what a pineapple actually looks like.
Seamus
I missed his face excessively. I also missed our previous dogsitter excessively. It’s good to have a back up but as nice as these folks were, they’re just not the Original Best sitter. OB would send updates and pictures without reminders, and paid very close attention to his medical needs. She would even catch him licking when he was starting a flare up and take care of it before it got worse. She’s even bathed him and done his laundry when we’ve been on long trips.
The back up sitters fed him and medicated him, as far as I can tell, but his bedding was grubby, I had to keep reminding them to send me updates, it was just … not right.
:: What’s your favorite international destination? Would you go with or without family (chosen or blood)?
May 30, 2017
[Part 5] We’re under contract!
We submitted what felt like our millionth (it wasn’t) offer. As usual, once that was in, I filed away all our emails on that address and moved on with life: checking any new MLS listings, checking our financials, taking the kids for a walk.
At 2 pm the next day, our realtor called. Our offer was accepted with no more than a minor change to the closing date! Holy crap.
I explored my feelings like I was checking for a hole in a tooth – is that regret? Panic? Buyer’s remorse? A little of everything? It’s still a bit unclear but it’s not excitement that’s for darn sure. That has a place later in the timeline when we actually get to move in but that’s months away. Many months. And many dollars.
We debated the new date – a change from Wednesday to Friday. Our agent doesn’t like closing on a Friday but it was also only a two day difference which would make a rent back a total pain in the pertuckus. I prefer fewer complications in an already thoroughly complex transaction, please. We agreed, and braced ourselves for the appraisal.
We’d taken the chance with the appraisal – we’d chosen not to take the contingency. No offers with any contingencies had even been considered even when our offer price was competitive. On this one, we accepted that if the property assessed at a lower value than our offer, we’d be both highly annoyed and have to pony up the extra cash because our lender would only cover 20% of the appraised value.
I did the calculations to confirm that we could bear that extra cost if we had to. It’s a good thing we did, too, because it did appraise lower than the sale price. Curses. It wasn’t by a heartbreaking amount, we had discussed the possibility and accepted it, and we had budgeted for it, but it still bothers me to think about it. You know what bothers me most? Having to input a lower value on the appraisal line than the total paid value when I adjust our monthly numbers! Nerd.
It’s not the house of our dreams
That doesn’t matter because that house doesn’t exist for anything less than $3M! Which means it might as well not exist at all. We have champagne tastes, sometimes.
We live in humdrum reality! What we get is a major fixer-upper that we can (hahaha …. have to) renovate to suit our needs, of modest size, in a quiet neighborhood. It’s near conveniences like groceries and banks, it’s a single story, with a smallish backyard where I can do some gardening and Seamus can do some serious sunbathing.
It also comes with fungal infestations, termites, appliances that haven’t worked since 1976, windows that haven’t opened since the Reagan administration, and bathtubs that have been leaking since Timberlake was a Mouseketeer. That’s just what we can see on visual inspection. I can’t wait to see what happens when we rip up carpets designed expressly for the psychedelic age.
What I’m getting at is that what we saved upfront on loan costs, we’re spending on repairs and then some. At least we’ll be living with things that we picked, but I could have lived with a strangers’ bad taste for a while to save money, y’know?
I’m already slowly losing my mind
Aside from the money part ….
Supplying 16 more rounds of paperwork to the lender, seriously, didn’t we already go through this at the beginning? Why are we going through all of the statements again?
Getting recommendations, vetting vendors, scheduling walk-throughs with the general contractor, with the architect, with the inspector, with the other contractor, taking time away from work but still getting all my work done on time.
Updating the Spreadsheet to End All Spreadsheets with our projected income, expenses, down payment, closing costs, estimated labor & materials costs;
Mapping out all expenditures against the calendar to see when we’ll run out of money, and set the upper limit for our remodeling budget!
PiC knows I want nothing to do with picking colors for tiles or handles for cabinets. I don’t care about appliance finishes so long as they work well, quietly, and don’t create extra work for me. He cares so he’s on that mission, as well as making all the phone calls because I hate talking to people during my workday.
I head up all the financials ferreting out every possible saving and promotion I can find for things we already have to do. There’s a new checking account bonus at Chase that we’ll snag, plus they’re running a promotion for $595 cash back if you set up automatic mortgage payments with them. I’ll have to keep the account open for 6 months, which is fine and worth the nearly $800 we’ll reap for going out of our way with a new account for half a year.
We discuss our decisions and process together, but mostly leave the other to their set of jobs. It’s a good sign that our partnership hasn’t frayed under the strain of another full time job demanding our attentions while still trying to do full justice to our day jobs and parenting.
Squirrel!
I keep getting distracted! I’m supposed to be answering emails from the lender, and leaving our money the hell alone until we close.
Our dividends portfolio needs beefing up so I hop into researching the stocks that I wanted. It doesn’t help that TradeKing has become part of Ally. Every time I go to stare obsessively at our savings, I stare at our portfolio. But no: none of that cash can buy stocks, it’s already earmarked for renovations.
Then that reminds me I researched a new real estate investment: Fundrise. This was a really interesting prospect and we should put … oh. STOP, I can’t invest in an eREIT right now, renovations!
I need to book cheap travel for important family and friend life events for the year so obviously that means I should maximize the travel booking rewards by grabbing a new credit card for … oh. No, I can’t open a new credit card right now, we haven’t closed yet.
It’s not that I don’t have plenty to do, it’s that having the clock ticking down til escrow makes me feel like I’m in limbo and I hate limbo. I need to be doing things.
Except right now, doing money things is exactly what I can’t do because it’ll disturb the Escrow Equilibrium. I hate being told I can’t do whatever I want with my money.
FOCUS!
45 days until I can Gollum all over our money again. FINE.
What I am allowed to do is earn money and watch over our budget really carefully. We’re making decisions on what renovations to hire out ($$$) and what we can DIY (not that much for health and sanity reasons).
We’ll need every extra penny in case renovations go long, go over budget, or we need to carry our current mortgage a little longer than projected. PiC has had a nice streak of cash earning from his Craigslist sales, and I keep tucking every little (and big) bit away. Reimbursements from the FSA account, sales, blog income, it’s all being stashed.
That’s plenty to do along with keeping the day job ticking along.
:: How do you occupy yourself when you’re not allowed to mess with your money?