Good Things Friday (185) and Link Love
September 9, 2022
1. My attempt at meal planning while grocery shopping:
- Romaine hearts and lemon to make a salad with pork roast and rice
- Russet and sweet potatoes to bake and serve with chicken of some kind
- Broccolini to saute and serve with rice and steak
2. I started a spreadsheet of recently successful meals so that I can stop reinventing the wheel and pick from the various columns when I’m not sure what kind of meal to construct. Let’s see if this actually helps.
3. I actually made all three meals! I swapped the components around a bit, rice goes better with the chicken I made than potatoes, and the broccolini got replaced by salad on a hot day but THREE balanced dinners in a row?? Unprecedented!
4. The FDA authorized updated Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccine boosters. I’m checking Kaiser regularly to find out when we can get boosted.
Challenges this week: knowing that the country has given up on fighting COVID, tests won’t be funded, vaccines won’t be funded. School stopped pooled testing. Thinking about when we need to start holding on to our test kits instead of sharing freely makes me want to kick something.
Do Your Damn Job (a memorial)
The Part You Throw Away: Sunday Morning Transport story for September: A powerful story about family from Elizabeth Bear about what you keep, what you mend, and what you throw away . ~ Fran Wilde, Sept 4, 2022.
How Can I Build Wealth as a First-Generation American? (podcast)
I didn’t get the chance to read Nicole and Maggie’s Myths about the value of college well enough the first time around so I’m linking it because it should be read. As a liberal arts major, I did start with a much lower salary than the engineers etc of our group but I climbed my own way up the ladder well enough. I’m still wondering how we’ll manage this for JB and Smol Acrobat because we have far more income than my parents ever did and that’s going to impact their ability to get aid.
The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse: Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.
This male Victoria rifle bird trying to impress a female with a mating dance
Video from IG travelandwildlifephotography pic.twitter.com/8jcIOUDKzU
— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) September 1, 2022
I keep a bulleted list on my phone of the ingredients needed for various previously-successful meals, so I can copy and paste to the top of my shopping list. It can be useful when I am NOT inspired.
Oh that’s a good idea, I should try something like that!
Our plan for funding college is to [run screaming!] ahem try to be strategic and
think outside the box. Some colleges offer discounts for their staffs’ family members, so if they want to attend somewhere local I might try to get a job there first. We have extended family and friends with younger children in several cities with decent colleges, so setting up a nanny-for-housing arrangement might be a possibility. Or if they end up going to the same place as my niblings (their current plan as preteens) my sibling & I can share housing costs.
We’ll be having them apply for scholarships and grants, and a part-time job is pretty reasonable for most (though not all) college majors.
Depending on how the next several years go until then, we might be able to do a bit of front loading our retirement savings now so later we can cash flow some college help each year. We plan to distribute equal amounts to each student or younger kid’s savings account though, just in case our financial situation changes for the worse partway through.
I admire your out of the box thinking!
We’re in this weird middle of making enough to fund either our retirement or funding only part of it and retiring at the more traditional age (my body/health protest this option mightily) in order to help them a bit more. We have a decent amount saved for one kid but now that there are two of them, it’ll only be probably half as much as either might need, depending on where they go. I don’t know. I think the best we can do is set up accounts to give ourselves options to choose from and see what we need for each kid when the time comes.
Do you have any college-type plans set up for them?
We call their accounts their “Future Funds” because we’re open to the idea of them choosing trade school or an apprenticeship, or going after specific certifications rather than traditional college, or even just using it to buy a car/job tools towards the end of highschool if it lets them get a significantly better paying job to earn money for college faster. So a regular savings account made more sense than being stuck with the withdrawal limitations of a 529 account or state-school-only savings credits. (And we’re not high income & can’t contribute much, so for us the tax advantages would be very minimal.)
We’re in the same boat that we *technically* could be contributing more to their accounts now, but in the long run we feel that having financially stable parents will do WAY more for them then having $X,000 less in student loans. Even if all we end up being able to directly contribute during college is the same $20 a month my parents gave me, at least they’ll only have to worry about their own finances. And in your case I guarantee JB and SMOL will be WAY happier having a health-prioritized mom than fat bank accounts!