All our “we should, someday” projects are coming home to roost.
Personally, and this approach with my clothes is all too often to my detriment, I usually wait til things are worn to a literal thread before replacing them. The Curse of the Broken Pants still holds because of this: every time I start a new job, I break another pair of pants. (Pretty sure it’s hilarious when it’s not happening to you.)
We’d put off most of it, inertia is a budget’s friend sometimes and overstuffed rooms give me claustrophobia, anyway. LB’s impending arrival has upended this complacency. All too soon, we’ll need every bit of organization and babyproofable furniture we can get to offset the chaos.
The “we should”s are turning into “holy crap, we should really do this now!”
PiC and I react to this totally in line with our usual styles of course: I mentally rank each new idea as a now or hold for later; for PiC, it all goes on the same list. Obviously, we’re now having a LOT of discussion about which are truly priorities and which are Nice to Have.
On hold:
That rattling vent that just sounds awful but works fine.
Our dream trough sink (guesstimate: $3000 for the sink and installation. And the inconvenience – I assume installation would be a huge pain).
The shower head (guesstimate: $200-300 for the replacement but installation also looks like a bear).
Do It Now:
Furniture is the biggest thing right now, literally, and of course the most expensive even with thrifty Craigslisting.
Minimalist or no, we will be adding a fair amount of stuff. Purging the place has been productive but getting things out the door can only make space for the somewhat inevitable pile of stuff, it doesn’t get us organized with the incoming baby stuff.
1. I need an actual workstation. My current workspace is open to the public and the mess is counterproductive.
2. LB has a bed now but we need decent storage for LB’s stuff: feeding, diapering and bathing supplies, clothes, books, a few toys. A car seat and stroller that I can manage. (It’s odd that such a small creature needs about six times more stuff than the enormous Seamus.)
3. The inefficiency of our closet. Meditating on the problem hasn’t brought on any genius so we’re resorting to The Container Store, that scary heaven, to provide some answers. PiC has gone there six times, I’m staying the heck out in case I buy everything. And some IKEA, that den of somewhat affordable home stuffs.
4. The tiny closet. PiC has organized the HECK out of it, managing to find a whole pile of things to sell. Defraying costs? YES PLEASE.
The funniest thing? PiC genuinely thought that he had 3 to 4 years before he had to worry about childproof furniture. I don’t think he’s been paying attention to how much a crawling or newly walking infant gets into, we’ll be lucky to be havoc-free for more than 10 months!
So, no more open-face furniture, doors on everything!
Our investments took a hit this month so interestingly, between that and our savings, we had exactly no change (except for, literally, some change) since last month.
On Money
I’m working away at Swagbucks to earn Amazon money for household and dog things we need. Feel free to join using my referral link if you like!
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Since the addition of another unbudgeted mouth to feed and body to, well, not clothe, but to get up to medical snuff, all (meager) proceeds of the blog now go to fund Dog#2’s ongoing medical care. I’ve got some saved, but he may bid well to run right through all of it since this isn’t really your standard money-makin’ money blog 😉 We’re calling him Seamus now, Shamey for short when he transgresses, as he has done on occasion.
So if you have to purchase from Amazon and wouldn’t mind using one of my links in the sidebar there, Seamus and we would be most grateful. Every penny really does count!
***
I finally secured a CPA to get started on our much-delayed 2013 taxes – wazoo! Once that’s filed, we can get started on the 2014 tax planning; we’ll have a few things to do there.
I have gotten a few recommendations on an estate planning lawyer, so I think that’s my September goal: Get our paperwork nailed down.
***
Having had no retirement plan through my employer for a while, I really ought to have done this before but I’m just now getting myself in order on that front. I did manage to fully contribute to a 2013 IRA and will do so again for 2014, while quietly kicking myself for not dealing with this much earlier. I think between income, married filing jointly, and having one spouse have access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan, we won’t actually be able to take a deduction on it but whatever. Saving is the key here.
***
Reflecting: You’d think I wouldn’t have to squeeze every penny and point program to fund everyday life. ‘Where the hell did all our money go??‘ pops up an awful lot in my head since we do make a decent income between the two of us, after all! I keep finding myself thinking it’s time to create more income and/or get a second job. But seriously…
Reality Check. We’re still paying for two households, four adults, and two dogs. The Bay Area isn’t cheap by any means, even as frugally as I try to keep our home. And we would like to be in a house that we can reasonably afford to pay off and maintain, someday, so I’m still aggressively saving our cash. And there’s really only so much health/energy I have for THIS life, forget one that includes yet more work.
On Life
We will manage a vacation this year. A semi-actual vacation where I take a few days off instead of just going off to some place and just work while we’re there late into the night and play during the day and come home and collapse.
I’d be excited about this but I’m still in “prep and take care of everything” mode.
This isn’t a tutorial on saving since the champagne’s a cheat but I pick the bubbly at home. I’m not just frugal, I’m seriously lazy.
We had friends in town recently. The default MO when this happens is we go out to brunch, lunch or dinner before they leave, depending on their travel plans. With some friends (ahem, his), it’s a fight over who pays the bill, with them snagging it more often than we can. This means we end up in a bill-war, vying to pay for the next round, every time we go out. It’s exhausting and a pain in the budget.
At the core, the problem is one of culture. For PiC, eating out is part of his family bonding culture; for me, cooking together and eating at home is part of my family bonding culture. Up til now, we have heavily favored his but it’s time to start observing mine when we’re here at home.
We’ve slashed this year’s food, entertainment and travel budget by 20% because we spent WAY too much in those areas last year. Anything approaching five figures for only two people (and for entertaining) is outrageous, IMO, and I really don’t know how the others do it considering they eat out at least twice as much as we do on their own.
We may not be able to cancel the bill-pay arms race but we’re sure as shootin’ going to approach Quality Time differently.
We’re off to a fine start hosting a champagne brunch where we focused on a couple stars for the meal: the champagne and the best bacon ever. We’re finally cracking open one of two bottles of Korbel that were gifts; they’ve been sitting untouched with only the two of us to drink it. With guests coming, I squeezed grapefruit to make orange and grapefruit mimosas.
And bacon. Oh the bacon! I’ve always been a fan of bacon but most of it’s been run-of-the-mill variety. I hadn’t know real bacon until my friend ruined me forever with a gift of Zingerman’s bacon for our wedding. Now THAT is applewood smoked bacon: aromatic even in the shipping container, cut so thickly that diced for pasta you get big chunks of smoky meatiness, with hardly any fat to trim. Swoonworthy bacon. The only catch is it normally runs $12 a lb. So it’s the special occasion bacon, even if I could easily find (make up) a reason to pop half a pound into every recipe.
The rest of the meal was simple: scrambled eggs with green onions, whole wheat pancakes with maple syrup, and almond croissants.
Bacon: $6
Pancakes and syrup: $3
Eggs, green onions: $3
Almond croissants: $2
Juices: $1
Even paying for and making the whole meal we’re paying less to feed 4 than we would for the two of us at the local diner so that’s nice. The drawbacks, of course, if you don’t like to cook is that you’re cooking and cleaning, and the guests are getting what we choose to make. Sorry, guys. 🙂
On the bright side, we’ll soon be taking advantage of a new wafflemaker to expand our repertoire. Chocolate chip bacon waffles, here we come!
Other breakfast ideas: I may relieve my friends of their smoked salmon (which they’ve been trying to get rid of) to try making eemusing’s potato cakes with salmon and eggs.
I’m good at making dinners but my breakfast/brunch cooking is pretty limited. If you’ve got any delicious and easy brunch suggestions, throw them my way.
As we pass the 2nd anniversary of Mom’s passing, I’ve been sitting with a good friend who has recently lost her mother, discussing grief and the process of grieving.
In some ways, it’s not a simple thing, not an easy progression of steps, nor a checklist you can tick off one bit at a time and arrive at an end.
In other ways, it really is quite simple to understand the gauntlet once you’ve gone through it.
“I was fine at her memorial. I was smiling and talking to people. It didn’t look like her. It didn’t feel like she was gone.”
Yes. I remember that feeling of surreal unreality.
“I’ve cried every day since burying her. I still can’t go into the same stores that I used to shop.”
Me neither. I’d run, crying, out of a grocery store because the memories were just too much. It wasn’t even one that we visited together. It was the visceral memory of a childhood habit that gripped my heart and wouldn’t let go.
“I keep asking myself why I didn’t take her to X, why did I choose to do Y instead of Z? Why didn’t I ..”
I’ve second guessed every decision I made in the last twelve years. Constantly. I’m convinced that I was the worst daughter ever because the end, ultimate, result was that she died, never having recovered from her illness.
You could float on the sea of “if onlys” and “what ifs” that we create, in our grief, treading and retreading our memories.
Hindsight, as they say, is 20-20.
But is it really? Is it really so much clearer now that events have irrevocably transpired?
A truth I’ve had to learn is that the other choice always seems like it would have been better only because I already know the outcome of the choices I did make. I have no idea what would have happened had I gone somewhere else for undergrad, if I had pursued a Masters or Doctorate. Maybe I would have had to drop out and be even less prepared to do the basics of supporting the family.
There’s a song by Little Texas that gets me EVERY time I hear it.
That knowledge doesn’t stop me feeling bone-deep regret for not pursuing a white collar profession where I could have earned enough to buy her health insurance outright (even though that would have taken years), or for being angry with her, not just her disease, as she became more ill and less mentally competent. I couldn’t take the step back at the time, it was easier to be angry than to accept and understand that I was losing her.
What might have been
In the aftermath, even after nominally accepting that I, mostly, did the best I could, and failed, I wonder what could have been done differently. And I wonder how much of my choices, and non-choices, affected this family.
Before carrying me to term, Mom had a few miscarriages.
What would have happened if I hadn’t been the one to make it?
What if my brother had a brother like he wanted?
Or what if he had grown up as an only child, with all the attention he clearly needed, without a “weak” (but meaner than a pit of crocs) little sister to take care of and be bitten for his efforts?
What if he hadn’t had me to practice his machinations and manipulations on?
What if he didn’t have a “follower” sibling with my personality and strong inclinations to academic achievement to contend with and push against in his attempts to lead me? Would he have actually reached to do something with his abilities instead of playing the comparison game and not even trying?
It’s part of the family lore that after a few days (or weeks, I forget) of getting to know me, my sibling picked me up and suggested they return to the hospital to trade me in for a better model. Unfortunately for him, hospitals didn’t accept returns at the time or I’m sure he would have just taken me himself. Kids feel that sort of thing all the time, but I wonder whether they all really would have been better off without me?
Without an extra mouth to feed, a second child to clothe, educate and worry about, would my parents have been less stressed, and more able to save? Did their circumstances dictate the outcome, or would their actions have been much the same?
Would my sibling have been the productive citizen and son that my parents prayed for? Would he have learned to use his copious people skills and talents towards a job or career, would he have felt the unbearable weight of responsibility that I grew up with, or would that still have eluded him?
Was it my fault, my existing, that played a key role in his failure to thrive? Is his failure to find a niche where he would excel attributable to my combative and competitive nature?
These are intertwined but I can’t help but realize that, like the butterfly flapping its wings, my very existence changed things.
Was it for the better?
I can’t know. I do know that as the surviving fetus, as the kid who did come along second, eventually, whatever ill my coming boded, I always felt a pressing weight. I knew fairly early on about Mom’s miscarriages. I know about the bigger than usual gap in years between my sibling and myself. Where other kids were two years apart like clockwork, we were about 3 years apart and, oh, the strength of will it must have taken for her not to smother me mid-scream in the first nine months I spent crying my lungs out.
It always seemed like I lost the genetic lottery: as the scrawny, untalented (no eye for art, terrible ear for music, only Doggle matches my astounding level of clumsiness), not terribly smart, really a bit of drifter with no dreams, youngest child, I only knew that I had to compensate and overcompensate to justify having made it.
The ghosts of those other babies, the ones my parents never met, haunted me a little. What could they have done with the gift of life? Would they have had the talent? Would they have inherited Mom’s gift with numbers, Dad’s ability to dream for the future? Would he or she, or they, have been the charmers, able to mingle and make friends everywhere they went? I certainly didn’t get any of that, so was that lost with them, leaving me with only remnants of determination and a strange love of containers to work with?
Sometimes it feels like all I have are questions, a sense of those nearly siblings’ unfulfilled potential, the uncomfortable prickles of something like guilt.
Without dwelling on the macabre, there are some studies that suggest that the influence of a sibling, past a certain point in life, is a stronger force in the development of an individual than even that of a parent. Anecdotally, I could see this. I learned from my parents, authoritatively, but I viscerally reacted to my sibling. At a much deeper level, I absorbed what I know of human nature from my interactions with him, by growing up next to him, and observing his experiences. By following my big brother. And I can’t know how my existence, my following, and my watching affected him. A bit like Schrodinger’s Cat, I guess.
Having made it this far, it feels like it’s my job to make good, to redeem the family name. I can’t change the past, I can only work toward the future.
I try not to think about
What might have been
‘Cause that was then
And we have taken different roads
We can’t go back again
There’s no use giving in
And there’s no way to know
What might have been
Our favorite guesting ritual is cooking a meal for our hosts.
There’s always a bit of shuffling figuring out what to make and cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen but cooking a nice meal for hardworking (often parent) friends and cleaning up for them’s a nice way to give them a bit of a break and thank them at the same time.
For our new parent friends especially, going out is not so much the fun and easy time that it used to be. Depending on the age of the kids, and the parenting style, they’re generally on the hook for crying, projectile food, running, screaming… all ingredients for a good time, right? It’s just easier to eat at home and weird as it is, PiC and I always enjoy a good ramble through the grocery stores wherever we travel.
Grocery shopping in Hawaii was one hell of an eye-opener.
The ingredients for a basic taco night for four adults and 1 child, which probably would have cost about $30 even here in the Bay Area, was a shocking $60. Granted, I wasn’t buying on sale cycles like normal, and didn’t have any coupons either but still, I’m certain we could manage turkey tacos for less than that on the mainland.
That included: 2 lbs of ground turkey, taco seasoning, hard taco shells, tortillas, onions, 5 avocados for guacamole, 2 limes, 1 bag of chips, a few tomatos, and shredded cheese.
I walked the rest of the produce section and aisles to get a feel for the rest of the store and it was equally scary.
Milk is consistently expensive, running between $9-10 per gallon; kale cost 3x more than I would normally pay (between $1-2 per bundle on the mainland; $5 on the island); bananas that are usually between 29-79 cents per pound were $2.49/lb. Apples were nearly $4/lb; and cereal ran $7-9/box.
We often joke that we can’t afford to feed another mouth around here, PiC snacks enough for three and meals that would serve 4-6 don’t last past the first sitdown, so paradisiacal as Hawaii is, we couldn’t even afford to feed ourselves there!
We’re so spoiled by how reasonable food prices are, even in the Bay Area, and especially in Southern California.
1. PiC and I had a mini rant about Walmart the other day, on the heels of the blowup about their Ohio store’s doing a food drive for their own employees, when we saw a Walmart commercial advertising their “opportunities”. The spokespeople for Walmart would have you believe that the fact that the company culture supports “associates” and takes care of them during the holidays doesn’t highlight the fact that a company could actually “take care of” their employees by paying them living wages and that’s where their responsibilities lay.
2. For a good part of my childhood, my parents were small business owners who took very little salary for themselves, but paid their employees both as decent salaries as they could afford and Christmas bonuses. Admittedly this wasn’t the best financial decision they could have made for our family in the short term, but if health problems hadn’t prevented them from continuing to run the business, we would have slowly built up enough savings to make it worth it in the long run. In the meantime, we knew our employees were able to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads. And as crap as it made my 20s, and as much as I would have made some minor changes to how things were run if I had a more active hand in business decisions (yeah because I was all of 9 years old. totally plausible), I’m comfortable with knowing our employees didn’t have to struggle just to feed and clothe their families, they just had to do a good job while they were with us.
3. Abby’s ruminations on J.Money and his thoughts on Tom Corley and Linda Tirado’s Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense remind me that people who have always had enough to eat, money for a rainy day, and a support network find it much harder to understand the decisions that poor people make, that seem to obviously be bad choices, but in reality, many of them aren’t really choices at all. I’ve been there, and remember the things that burned in my gut much like shame when I had to make those “stupid decisions” because I didn’t have the cash to make the smart one.
Note: I never smoked, drank or did drugs to get by but damn if I didn’t understand the desire, at times. I never gave up because I had my parents to support, while I wouldn’t call it hope, I never acknowledged that not fighting was an option. Still, when I was affected by THEIR bad decisions, that really sucked too.
A. You don’t have float money. You have exactly “enough” to get by from day to day which means if there’s a sale at the grocery store on pasta, you don’t have the extra $5-10 to buy enough to last you until the next sale cycle. So you buy off sale cycle, you only buy enough for today and tomorrow or even just right now. You resort to super cheap, filling, but super unhealthy fast foods, compromising your health. I used to buy a 99 cent corndog for lunch/dinner on days that I didn’t have food to bring from home and I had to run from school to work. It was the cheapest thing I could get, and I guarantee that was not a healthy choice. But I loved corndogs and it was a dollar for a few minutes of “happy” and food on any given 14-hour day. Or you can’t fill your car up with enough gas to last the week, you can put in $5 for now, and milk that until you hit E and then have to pay whatever price-gauge is at the next station. Also you buy cheap stuff because you can’t afford the higher quality stuff. So it breaks or falls apart, and you have to buy it again. And again. And again.
B. You don’t have time. You can work enough to pay the bills but then you don’t have time (or money) to go to school so you can stop working a dead end job without any hope of advancement or decent working conditions. Or you can work less, and struggle to pay all the bills in any given month. So you pay what you can, week to week, day to day. Bills slip, and it only takes one late fee to really screw up what you thought you were going to be able to clear that month.
C. *Observed: You don’t have hope. So you make stupid decisions like buying crap you don’t need, because your luck is crap anyway. After all, you scrimped, saved, and did without and where’s that gotten you? Nowhere. So you also think that luck has more to do with your life and what happens than what you do (I saw this develop in more than one family member, my incredibly strong, adaptive, and hardworking mom included.)
Confession: I had hope for several years, then I gave that up and just relied on gritting it out.
D. You live in the short term. Today’s work, tomorrow’s bills: rent, utilities, food, gas. Saving for a rainy day doesn’t exist when every day seems like one, saving for retirement sure doesn’t exist. You have to be willing AND physically able to find ways to squeeze every last penny out of every last opportunity: overtime, credit card rewards (without ever paying interest or late fees), loyalty programs. This takes time, which you don’t have, and attention which you don’t have.
That’s definitely only scratching the surface.
I made it out of there by working my ass off, taking every scrap of overtime available ever, and by good luck and good fortune. I was fortunate enough to be employed by the people I worked for: whether they were good people or not was irrelevant, the fact that I was able to make it work so that I could claw my way out of debt and to build up savings was a blessing.
I was fortunate enough to gain the respect of good people who would vouch for me when I needed it.
I was fortunate enough to become friends with people who had retired from super high income, high powered careers who were willing to advise me and help me make the hard professional decisions as a neophyte to the business world. My parents were decidedly blue collar, working class folks who didn’t know enough about today’s world to help. They could only listen and try to help guide.
I was fortunate enough to have just enough brainpower to plan a career path, at least somewhat vaguely, and not just focus on the immediate horizon.
I was fortunate enough to have discovered Fatwallet’s Grocery and Finance Forums in the early years. They taught me to save every scrap, every penny, that I possibly could, while trying to generate a little extra creative income AND to think about the future.
I was fortunate enough to always have been able to pay the internet bill: the source of my inspiration, ideas, and money blogs that taught me things that FW hadn’t. For all the crap that the internet represents, it was an amazing resource.
While we all have culpability in the choices we make, it’s far too simplistic for people to say: being poor is your choice.
And this is why SingleMa’s post on giving always resonates with me. People may not have given me money, my path may not have been smooth, but at every step of the way, while I struggled and fought for what I needed, I was given a helping hand by people who had zero obligation to do so, whether they knew they were helping me or not.
I’m not normally much of a Halloween person but this year I had high hopes of dressing up my victim … Doggle, and taking him either trick or treating or to a good friend’s house to play. Instead, we’re sadly in Southern California to lend a dear friend moral support and planning support. Her elderly mother, weighed down by a series of illnesses and then a serious fall breaking her hip, simply couldn’t bounce back and I’m grieved to say we lost her. I don’t care how old you are, losing a beloved parent is never easy.
***
This month has been busy as all get out and I’m rather glad it’s coming to an end, or I would be if that wasn’t rapidly pushing us toward a conclusion I’m not ready for (the end of the year). Which means that we have to make the most of this trip down south for wedding stuff as well as life stuff.
We need to (deep breath):
Visit friend with a new baby,
Visit friend who lost her mother,
Meet the photographer,
See the venue for the first time & figure out if anything else needs doing,
Deliver any wedding stuff that we don’t need here so we’re not transporting a moving van’s worth of frippery the weekend of,
Buy suits for PiC and my dad,
Buy or rent a traditional dress for me,
Attend a wedding,
Attend a family dinner, Oh and WORK.
Talk about your last minute trips!
We decided this would happen only 2 days before and it was a flurry getting ready! (I thought it was wise to start preparing by doing seven loads of laundry…..)
I booked three hotels because it’s a long stinking drive down to SoCal, and if we want to be convenient to certain people without spending 2 hours in traffic either way, it’s a hotel or bust.
Booked 1 hotel for 50% off. Yay for catching billing errors from our last visit and their profuse apologies = savings: ~$100 or less. Includes breakfast or lunch.
Booked 1 hotel with SPG points: 7,000 points + $50 pet fee instead of spending $200.
Booked 1 hotel for cash: $120 + $100 pet fee. Occasionally this fee is waived so we’re hoping for the best.
We’re also renting a car for the week. We’d normally take the Dog Chariot but we need more room for transport of several cases of things and we need to keep the mileage on our personal vehicles low since we get a major discount on the insurance. I booked a week-long rental on Carrentals.com using ebates (3% back): $273.
The funny thing is, if I rented the same car from Tuesday through Sunday, it would have been billed at a MUCH higher per day rate and the total estimate was nearly $600. !!!
In total, this near-week long trip will cost about $800 in travel;
probably another few hundred on wedding clothes that are meant to be rewearable for years after this;
and miscellaneous costs for food.
[insert aggrieved face here] Staying home is so much cheaper.
***
On the bright side, we’ve decided to put about $20K toward principle on the mortgage. We’d squirreled away cash for a re-finance but thanks to some legal mumbo-jumbo with the HOA we can’t at the moment. Might as well put it to work reducing the mortgage, then!
Also, made a dinner at home for friends this weekend. Not counting the cost of garlic or butter, I think we managed to feed four for about $20: Roast chicken, mashed potatoes w/onions & garlic, braised bok choy, and roasted beets. Unfortunately for a cooking-for-guests night, I wasn’t terribly impressed with what I turned out. PiC loved it but I’m convinced he’s far too kind when I cook.
