Money & Life Report: April 2026
May 6, 2026
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 $255.80 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
I’m doing my research into unemployment and pulling all the numbers that I will need when submitting my application later this year. Sure would be nice to have more information, and more money, to ride out this period.
Spending
$$$. I splurged on clothes and books for the niblings this year. They’re at an age where there’s so much good age appropriate fiction out, for one, and their parents are uncritically exposing them to that TERF’s book series which makes me absolutely bananas, for another. So they’re getting very tall stacks of better books by non-TERFs from me.
$$$$. JB unexpectedly has more dental, and then orthodontic, treatments this year due to some weird growth patterns. We’re going to have to do oral surgery and they are dreading the heck out of it but I am hoping that the treatment plan that we’re choosing will be straightforward. Unfortunately it will all have to be out of pocket because there’s no way to safely delay it to next year so that we can change our dental plan at open enrollment. Ugh. We’re looking at nearly $10,000 in dental this year just for them. Woof.
$$$? $$$$$? JB ALSO needs specialty eyegear. Depending on the route we take, that could be several hundred or a couple thousand dollars. -__-
Not spending
This is going to become a category I focus on a LOT MORE with the job going away. The above spending category all happened before I found out. Maybe it would have changed my choices at the time, for at least the gift spending.
At the moment, I’m not positive what to cut first. We have started to spend frivolously in recent years (in my definition which is anything more than the barest necessities) but not hugely so.
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.
Saving and investing
At some point, I’m going to need to stop our savings for investing. I’m figuring out when that must happen. Thank goodness I maxed out my 401K, my paranoia on that point was spot on.
Net worth
An odd jump in investments this month. Given oil prices and grocery prices and bills going up everywhere, I’m reminded that this is part of the K shaped economy where the higher earning people are benefiting more from increases in the stock market but I wonder how long we’ll be in that upper portion without my job. I guess some of it’s really about being in the market at all and we’re pretty well in it. So my losing my job doesn’t remove us from that category without our divesting our assets as well
On Life
The layoff and calculating financials, etc.
The details of the layoff are slowly surfacing. Too slowly. The pace is making everyone batty. And it’s so disrespectful.
I’ve used that time to game out bad and worse financial scenario combinations to give myself a clearer view of how quickly we’d go through my cash savings. If we’re getting his income and my severance+unemployment and judiciously cut back, along with just my job loss, no new job for me, and no emergencies, then our savings remain untouched through the end of 2027. Any emergencies will mean going into savings sooner. Two job losses going into 2027 (we’ve always been hyperaware that PiC’s job isn’t safe) means we’ll need to use more than 51% of savings, and we’ll only make it another few months into 2028. I certainly hope that we won’t be anywhere near either of these worst case scenarios but it’s better to know how long the money will last.
The job hunt isn’t going at the moment. It’s really frustrating looking at job listings right now. I want nothing to do with most of them or the companies posting. It’s all AI-powered this and maximize that. Since I need to recover from all my crunchy-crunchy burnout first anyway, I’m not making myself dizzy with all the non-options, but I’m going to keep a wary eye out on the horizon.
Reading.
Isla Jewell’s Books and bewitchment gave me literal nightmares. It was supposed to be a light fluffy thing but the main character being responsible for two grown ass younger sisters took me out. Those sisters being over 20 years old and having no savings, “being known for overdrawing accounts”, making assumptions about money they didn’t yet have and making life decisions based on those assumptions, all leading to, most notably, looking at the main character to solve all the problems they made or at least made worse. 🤬
That night, I dreamed that my brother was back in my life, I’d let him yet my laptop for a few minutes and found him stealing data from it while I frantically tried to stop the data transfers and hearing him talk on the phone about going to compete for some reality show thing because he wanted to be rich and famous and wanted me to approve of him drinking again. I woke myself up yelling at him and trying to punch him.
T Kingfisher, Wolf Worm. I knew better than to read this at night but … I read some of it at night. The creepiness factor was as expected but it was too easy to read and too hard to put down.
Courtney Smyth, The Undetectables. Very unexpected showing of a main character with fibromyalgia and the related fatigue – it was a bit unnerving how well they described some of the experience. The actual story, the mystery, was
Robert Jackson Bennett, Shorefall. Good read!
Kit Rocha, Deal with the Devil, Dance with the Devil and The Devil You Know. There was something very soothing about the Mercenary Librarians. I can only hope that in our future dystopian lives, we build the same kind of community. Unfortunately I’m the opposite of supersmart or superskilled or superstrong so I’m not sure which role I could play but we can work on that.
Seanan McGuire, Butterfly Effects. Sarah’s story! And poor Sarah, what a crappy species to come from. (Though I feel the same way about most humans…) I love the Incryptid series. I need to reread this one again, it feels like I missed a lot of the usual seasoning that we get from these books.
Ry Herman, This Princess Kills Monsters. I had forgotten what the plot summary was when this hold came up so basically read it randomly. It was written well enough so that even my stress-addled brain still enjoyed the twist on many old fairytales.