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
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March 14, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 354: Smol started the festivities at FIVE AM.
I, having had severe heartburn until 2 am, was less than pleased. And less than half conscious. Thank goodness PiC took them for the morning round as usual.
I finally crawled out just after 7 am, barely functional and wishing for day’s end. What a way to start the week!
*****
JB had the gall to watch PiC making their lunch, to their exact specifications, and then asked: can I buy lunch today?
I came down on that like a ton of bricks. How rude!! Children, I tell ya.
*****
We had leftover ramen for lunch, yum. I’m glad that PiC pushed me into catering to my cravings yesterday. There was nothing on Bentocart we wanted so we decided that local takeout would be our “ease the pain” meals this week. It’s still surprising how much decision making capacity is freed up by choosing ahead of time to pay for just two meals that someone else cooks ready to reheat for dinners and maybe some leftovers for lunch. The planning ahead is one huge bonus, we’re no longer stressing over what to order and pick up while juggling two kids who need our attention now now now. We plan ahead and get the meals in the course of our chores. It also frees up enough energy to cook the rest of the week, without scraping rock bottom, or snarling to ourselves like bewildered rabid badgers!
Saturday afternoon I had cooked a big batch (4 large chicken breasts, from 2 Costco chicken packs) of the baked panko chicken. Remembering to spray oil on the foil before baking was instrumental to this batch turning out better than my first try and JB declared it their FAVORITE. That was a big enough batch for two dinners and a snack. I’d not have this foresight or energy without the takeout assist.
*****
I finally asked the right questions and updated my spreadsheets with a whole chunk of investing information on a portion of PiC’s portfolio I didn’t have before. We make decisions on that portfolio together but since I’d assumed the website was through his company intranet, I couldn’t access it. Not true! So now I have a whole load of information at my fingertips to work with and make better decisions with. That’s exciting.
***** (more…)
March 11, 2022
1. I had a massage on Friday that really helped my muscles loosen up and bonus didn’t have a massive pain rebound afterward. I still needed to lay down and rest more than half the day Saturday and a few hours pm Sunday but that’s still a bit of improvement.
Challenges this week: everything.
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March 8, 2022
With the usual caveats that I know that I’m usually doing the best I can with what I know / knew, and we’ve managed to make our way to a decent place financially with the requisite combination of hard work and good fortune, as I map out our 2022-2026(?) financial plans, I wonder what I don’t know now.
How much I didn’t know five, ten and fifteen years ago when I made important decisions about our money!
I didn’t know that my experiment with real estate wouldn’t necessarily be the game-changer originally hoped for, not when balanced against my desire to be an ethical rental owner who did repairs quickly, maintained the property well, and keeping rent relatively low. It’s possible that just putting that seed money into our investment accounts, and the maintenance costs over the years, would have generated similar or better returns for less angst and less work. But I also sold earlier than the plan originally called for so it’s also possible that had I held on to good renters for several more years, if the whole project hadn’t risen to truly irritating levels, it would have beaten market returns. It made enough to be worthwhile but it wasn’t as much fun as I had hoped.
I should have prioritized my make up retirement savings over JB’s 529 plan. I wonder if Nicole and Maggie talked about this earlier than 2016. If so, I should have thought about it in the context of my own plans and revised them. They definitely discussed prioritizing retirement over college savings, I just can’t remember when it was.
I made the mistake of mixing pre-tax IRA contributions and post-tax IRA contributions in the same account.
I definitely shouldn’t have believed my dad’s lies. I suppose the internet did tell me so at one point.
So….. what don’t I know enough about today?
Roth backdoor conversions always felt like a big pain that I couldn’t quite get my hands around until I realized that quite likely our income bracket at this point in life is the highest it’ll be versus in retirement.
I’m not sure how to untangle the withdrawals from my IRA when the time comes (with the mixed pre and post tax nonsense). The account is too old to see the original transactions but might try to sleuth out what the holdings were by the time I started mixing funds. That might be possible.
I don’t know of any cryptocurrency that makes sense to me and doesn’t seem to destroy our environment. I cannot get behind an alternative investing route that is so utterly destructive.
Health insurance (affordability, what plans will be available) in the next five to whatever years, if we should manage early retirement savings, is a total mystery. This is less a my-knowledge-is-lacking and more a what-on-earth-is-America-doing problem.
How much do we really need to have in liquid funds? Hindsight says we were too conservative from 2020-2021 but that’s also only because hindsight also knows we didn’t get laid off between 2020-2021. In the moment, we had no way of knowing whether that cash would be desperately needed to keep up with the bills.
When will we have enough for me to feel secure about subtracting work from both our lives and taking better care of my health? (What kinds of compromises will that create with the perception that if we don’t have to work anymore, we MUST have all kinds of free time?) I noodle around with various spreadsheets all the time because I enjoy mapping out those possibilities but PiC and I need to keep discussing our actual expectations for that life, too. It would be terrible to work hard for a future we don’t know what to do with.
Obviously there’s a lot more that I don’t know that I don’t know, particularly with our climate and the future of the US and whether our children are growing up into a hellscape that we can’t survive etc etc, but those are the money things off the top of my head.
:: What do you want to learn more about?
March 7, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 347: An ill-timed Amber Alert at 1 am woke me up and destroyed my ability to sleep the rest of the night. 😩 It was not good. Smol was up before 6 am which was also not appreciated and so I welcomed the dawn with bones made of lava. Le sigh.
*****
JB’s latest musical obsession is with the soundtrack from Encanto and it’s deeply uncomfortable. The songs cut so close to home and especially after brain therapy, Surface Pressure broke what little remained of my composure:
I don’t ask how hard the work is
Got a rough, indestructible surface
….
Under the surface
I’m pretty sure I’m worthless if I can’t be of service
….
Give it to your sister, it doesn’t hurt and
See if she can handle every family burden
Watch as she buckles and bends but never breaks
No mistakes, just
Pressure like a grip, grip, grip, and it won’t let go, whoa-
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March 4, 2022
1. Donated to support HIAS’ Ukraine crisis response.
2. Donated to World Central Kitchen to support feeding Ukrainian refugees.
3. Went down this list of how to help and support Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion.
4. Donated to OutMemphis to support the Alternate Spring Break that helps trans people with name changes.
5. Donated to Project C.U.R.E. to supply humanitarian assistance, medical supplies and equipment to the people of Ukraine.
6. Donated to Equality Texas.
7. Donated to the Young Center to help support unaccompanied and separated children facing deportation. No children should be forced to face legal proceedings alone and yet our system does this to them.
8. Supported a friend’s crowdfunding to escape Arkansas.
9. Once in a long while, Smol has a looooong nap. Sunday morning was one of those days. I did some work AND laid down for a little bit. I’m generally primed for missing out on rest because babies have a sensor to wake up the minute a mom’s head hits a pillow but today allowed for some leisure. I also didn’t work that much, just enough to set up my other time zone people in order for their Monday, and started backing up my files to my external hard drive. Since the external hard drive is massive, I’ve decided that instead of trying to only replace the changed files, I’ll copy over the full set of files on a semi regular basis without worrying over the duplicates over time. I have so much space on there, it shouldn’t matter. After several versions of back ups, I’ll delete the oldest ones but I don’t need to waste time on that for a long while.
Challenges this week: Not sure it needs to be said? Ukraine. Attacks on trans kids and their families in Texas are already starting to result in investigations of parents (though a limited stay on that specific one was issued), the situation in Kabul is terrible, the GOP continues to attack all kinds of right including reproductive rights and voting rights.
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March 1, 2022
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from investing in index funds and dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks, cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates) and affiliate links to Bookshop and Amazon sometimes pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running. There are ways to support the blog and our charitable giving in the sidebar.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
***
Dividend income. We received $911.31 in dividends from the stocks portfolio. February is always a big month for dividends and they’re always reinvested. Eventually this nest egg will grow enough to cover more than one month of our expenses, per year.
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February 28, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 340: Woof. Still recovering from the weekend physically. And I foolishly skipped the full dose of diphenhydramine I’ve been taking to force myself to fall asleep at a reasonable hour. On purpose or by accident? I don’t remember. Either way, I couldn’t sleep until very late and then couldn’t get up early. Sigh. I don’t want to be dependent on a sleep aid in the sense that I always need it to help me sleep at a reasonable hour but I am very dependent on sleep to live. Not loving this impasse. But for now I’m putting myself back on the full dose this week to get my body the rest it needs.
Upon emerging from our bedroom, in my haze, I was greeted by a chuckling Smol escaping from the bathroom, zipper bag of trial size mouthwashes swinging from one hand, headed straight for my knees. They were in such a good mood, it was a bit contagious, especially when they started chasing me around the house cackling.
*****
I’m fighting with myself to maintain a healthy boundary in one of my relationships. A loved one is having financial difficulties after an already long and arduous road to get where they are today. I have been supporting them for years in various ways, knowing that I have to NOT go overboard and have been relatively good about making myself stick to boundaries, but I still instinctively want to rescue them. I know that is unsustainable, it can’t be my (fifth) job, and it cannot be what my life revolves around. But it’s still hard to tell that part of me to sit down and just care without trying to take on their burdens for them.
This impulse is what my biodad played on for so long and it needs to be corralled.
I also have to stop feeding that deep down belief that I only have value when and if I help people. I need to find the belief that I am a good enough person as is somewhere in me.
***** (more…)