By: Revanche

Money & Life Report: August 2024

September 4, 2024

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. The sidebar has ways to support the blog and our charitable giving.

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.

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Dividend income. We received $1,056 in dividends from the stocks portfolio. Immediately reinvested, we need to grow our portfolios enough so that if we lose our jobs, we won’t be totally up a creek. That’s a concern again! Layoffs at PiC’s, absurdity piled upon absurdity at mine.

I was gifted a $100 Clipper card in a stroke of pure luck. A friend of a friend didn’t need their card anymore and wanted to give it to someone who would use it. My Clipper card had malfunctioned several months ago and after too many phone cards PiC managed to at least rescue the balance, but that solution meant I needed to replace the card itself.

Spending

I’ve long avoided committing to things for fitness because of my health issues but I have now committed to working with a trainer now ($$$/month). I have a preference for an every other day schedule and I have to modify how I do certain exercises but outside of that, anything is fair game, so it’s an enormous help to have someone knowledgeable do all the thinking: what exercises with what other exercises, how many sets, how many reps, in what order, on what days. There is flexibility for me in the recommendations, enough so I can scale up or down based on real time health status. I’m so grateful we can afford this. I also realized that this tiny nibble sized commitment is the key to sticking with more things like Duolingo lessons in multiple languages (just in the free app for now). If I can manage just 2-3 minutes a day, every single day, that’s good.

Sort of spending. Did a little deal: I redeemed points for a $50 Office Depot gift card. Then I purchased 2 packs of Duracell batteries with the 100% rewards back deal for $52.72 after tax, paid for with the gift card and some rewards balance. Once it was delivered, I was credited the $47.98 in rewards (pretax refund). Then I pricematched it to the Amazon price, using their Chat, and was issued a refund check of $16.61. So I will end up $16 up on two large packs of batteries we can use to fill our battery saver and gift. Their promotion was VERY light on details so it felt like going on faith a bit but it worked out.

The last weekend of the month was all the spending. I found the perfect gift for our friend. Renewed our PTA membership. Shipped a deeply discounted food puzzle for our friend’s new dog. Bought air filters for the car. Ordered nasal spray for another friend, shipped COVID tests to yet another friend, and ordered a batch of reusable longer term Vogmasks. Bought a pair of earrings to support Indigenous artists. Replaced my flomask strap that suddenly deteriorated. Bought a cartload of odds and ends, including a utensil organizer that I’ve been wanting for the past ohhh 7 years (not THIS specific one, just any one that was better than our current set up), from IKEA now that they have small order free shipping now for orders of $50 and up. Donated to Donors Choose campaigns. Made a start on buying parts for JB’s Halloween costume since they want a costume we can’t get in a kid size. Phew. Some of that was paid by gift cards, but it still added up to hundreds, plural.

Not spending

I still haven’t adopted a dog. I borrowed! I also asked total strangers if I could pet their dogs and petted all kinds of sweet pups.

Smol Acrobat has been fussing, wanting a haircut for a couple weeks so we finally found time to oblige. PiC decided to cut his too, so that was a savings of about $50. JB, being older, has more of an opinion on their hair now which neither of us can accommodate well enough but our COVID cautious family friend offered to cut their hair. Mine as well since I won’t go to the non-masking salon for a trim. We haven’t taken them up on this yet but we will!

Giving

We have worked really hard and been very fortunate that our hard work paid off in significant ways that I only dreamt of when I first started this blog. Though we have not reached our FI number where I can feel like all income is gravy, we’ve always felt it was important to lend a helping hand. Many people say they’ll give back later, when they’re financially set. I say that if we don’t practice and prioritize giving now, we won’t give later either.

We donate to organizations that help people and animals in need and do direct aid.

The Lakota Giving Project is year-round now and we always welcome donations to support Lakota families. See how you can help at the link.

It’s the start of a new school year so we’ve ordered the fall quarter’s supply of snack food for fellow PF blogger and friend, Penny’s, classroom. She’s a teacher in an area where more than half her kids are from low income households, some are unhoused, so that means many of them come to school hungry. She shared this heartbreaking situation with one of her students who’s perpetual hungry on Twitter a few years back and that’s just not right, so I shipped a giant care package to her to slip the kid snacks as regularly as she could get away with. We couldn’t stop there, I organized for whomever among the PF Twitter community wanted to pitch in and we’ve been shipping several cases of snacks to her classroom every quarter ever since. This hasn’t just had the net positive effect of feeding hungry kids, though that’s all I needed, but she’s also seeing the snacks positively impact test scores (since we make sure to refill her cupboards before state testing)! Fed kids learn and test better, if you really needed a reason to feed kids. I wish there was a good way to send healthier foods too but that takes a whole lot more planning and work than I have bandwidth for.

Saving and investing

Operation: Juice the 401k is in full effect this month. My paychecks are quite a bit smaller for the rest of the year and with some tweaking of the savings budget, it seems like we can make it work.

We’ve repaid the emergency fund for the car purchase. Though we did have to borrow from it to cover the late paycheck debacles and to lend cash to a friend in a tight spot. We had to sell some stock, unplanned, so it all went to repayment so that’s one responsibility fulfilled for now. That makes it easier to tolerate the belt tightening for the 401K contributions. Thinking ahead to next year, I wonder if it’s worth just carrying the same level of concentrated contributions for the first half of the year or if it’s better to invest steadily throughout the year. In the normal course of things, I’d invest evenly through the year but if this job just doesn’t get better I’d want to have maxed out the 401K for a second year before leaving. Best case scenario, things settle down and I can just go back to normal investing but we’ll see.

Net worth

Small movements up in investments, mainly. Everything else is holding steady.

On Life

We had a no kids date for the first time in years. WEIRD. It was fun, even if it was kind of nerve-wracking for my catastrophe brain before we left, and maybe we should do that kind of no-kids thing a little more often than once every several years.

In the middle of the night, one Saturday night, JB thought they might have lice because their scalp was itching and they squished something that was on their face. Unfortunately they threw it away and I couldn’t get a positive ID on the thing so I had to go through their hair for 45 minutes, cm by cm. I found what I thought could possibly be eggs but couldn’t positively identify them because my eyes are old and tired. It’s time to buy a microscope for home use. Since I couldn’t be sure it was, or wasn’t, I had to act as if they did have them. I sent them back to bed since it’d already be infected if they did have it, then spent my entire Sunday and Monday treating their hair and washing everything fabric they might have come into contact with (8 loads of laundry??). So that kit we bought for Smol Acrobat’s lice scare wasn’t wasted money after all.

Books!

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree was not at all what I expected. I thought we’d have more Thune (from Legends & Lattes) or more of the other characters from Viv’s band. I’d still love that. But it turned out to be a prequel (which was also a surprise to him as well in the writing, as it turns out) that was still delightful while working through an idea I struggle deeply with: sometimes people are meant to be in your life for a season and that’s ok. And maybe they come back around, years later, and that could be ok too.

Dhonielle Clayton’s The Marvellers was on my find and read list since SDCC 2023. (Interesting random fact she’s also the COO of the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books, which we have supported.) A book about magic school that faces racism head-on instead of perpetuating it may feel too blunt but you know what? It should be.

:: How was your month?

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