Money & Life Report: August 2026
September 2, 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.
***
Dividend income. We received $1,221.50 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
Litter watch. 4 stray litter receipts this month resulted in 9.2 cents in Fetch and $0.05 in ibotta.
Spending
Lots of back to school spending. Joining/rejoining PTAs, repairing my sewing machine, new baby gifts, school supplies for kids (not mine), therapy, some supplemental clothes for the kids, and emergency supplies for power outages and possible future natural disasters (knock on wood). We can muddle through a regular outage ok but this highlighted a few areas of weakness for us, which means more spending to come. We need better water supplies and I need to figure out how to safely refresh the gas generator (which should have been run annually but I’ve failed on that front) so that we can use that along with the Yeti. The Yeti is good for short stretches but it can’t support all the critical stuff for 2-3 days.
We treated ourselves to a little bit of takeout a couple times and all of this goes toward the minimum spend requirement for the Chase Business Ink card.
Not spending
(extra) I cooked a lot this month! More than twice a week some weeks! I even baked a couple times. It was nice to make real food out of real ingredients instead of having to rely mostly on Costco prepackaged food and takeout. It’s kept us alive! I’m not disparaging it at all! It’s just nice to remember how to make food again.
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 Back to School season! We sent the Allen Youth Center at the Pine Ridge reservation some requested art supplies and I’m working on another order for a family that needs help battling hantavirus.
Saving and investing
Just the usual here for now. I have a little while longer before I have to stop our regular saving and investing. I do need to figure out that stopping point. Do I stop when I go on severance? Do I stop when severance runs out?
I’ve done the math and, barring big lumps, I think we can get by on just PiC’s salary after we cut out daycare and savings. I’m afraid to trust that math though, I keep worrying that I’ve forgotten something significant. I have a good lump of cash set aside to cover larger expenses just in case I got it a bit wrong though so there’s not really a big penalty to getting it a bit wrong.
Net worth
It just occurred to me that this is going into my 6th year. 2021-2025 were the first five. Do I trim the graph down to just 2026 for the next five years?
I think technically I did reach the 5 year goal in the allotted 5 years, but it had to move up to account for the ????? of healthcare costs in the future. It moved up the second time because the first change just looked funny.
On Life
Reading: 5329 pages!
CM Waggoner, The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry.
Cassandra Clare, Sword Catcher and The Ragpicker King.
Kate Quinn and Janie Chang, The Phoenix Crown
Erin Entrada Kelly, The Last Resort
Jean Kwok, Dominion.
Emily Krempholtz, Violet Thistlewaite is not a Villain Anymore
Tessa Yang, The Jellyfish Problem
CL Polk, The Feywild Job. A fun D&D style story.
K.X. Song, The Night Ends with Fire. I was not a fan of where this left off when it ended.
Travis Baldree, Brigands & Breadknives. I was delighted that this book was finally available and even though it’s quite different from the prior two, it’s good. Plus, breadknife!
Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption. I thought this would be too dense for my current brain state but I quite enjoy the Ana and Din stories. Though some of Ana’s meals were stomach churning.
John Chu, The Subtle Art of Folding Space. The generational / sibling trauma in here was too real. For half the book, I pondered the exact same question I did about my own parents: why are they protecting their shitty kid at the expense of their other kid? I can’t understand why they refuse to acknowledge how shitty the older kid is or why they continue to insist that the younger kid should appease the shitty sibling. My parents didn’t ask me to appease my shitty sibling in the same way but they kept enabling his shittiness. Maybe for lack of resources and ability to do anything else, but it was an extra layer of awful for me when I lived through it.
Food!
I’ve been cooking AND baking this month. More than once, for both! That’s the most time in the kitchen making real food in months. Nay, years. I’ve made roast pork, baked chicken drumsticks, baked potatoes, brownies and banana bread. That explains where a lot of my time has gone.
Just finished the third Ana and Din book (also excellent) but stomach churning doesn’t begin to describe it.
Oh no, there’s more of the gross?? *braces self*
I’d start the next chart at the point where you changed the five year goal. Just my opinion. How do you set a goal like that? My current goal is to pay off a significant debt, but after that I’d like to start building. Any resources you recommend reading?
I just got Trade in Blood from Libby, and I’m looking forward to it! I also downloaded the Ilona Andrew’s app. I also got the vellum sheets for TKWNKM, so I’m planning a re-read to place them in the right spots.
Thanks! I’m going to fiddle with that change a bit and see how it goes.
In 2021 we were still pretty deep in COVID, waiting for vaccines, and it felt like the world was falling apart. I decided to graph this out to make it visually clear to me where we are (or aren’t) making progress year to year. The goal line I set was just a reasonably large round number that would get us close to what we really needed for retirement. It was a no harm no foul sort of goal – I figured I wouldn’t make it in that five years and I would just adjust sometime in that five year span when I took the time to sit down and really calculate what we wanted in investable assets for retirement.
Turns out I didn’t ever do a calculation that I liked but in the end, I just pushed it up because of the uncertainty of healthcare.
How lovely that you’re getting some mental space back for cooking and baking! That sounds very satisfying.
Did you read the whole book with the terrible parents and shitty sibling? That doesn’t sound like enjoyable reading even without your personal connection to that story line.
I didn’t realize how much I missed ENJOYING baking and cooking. In the past few years, it’s felt like just another burden but now it’s starting to come back that when it’s not the 1000th thing crammed into a day of entirely too much, it’s really nice to be able to put food on the table or eat a dessert I’d made.
I am glad you are getting so much of your capacity back from your lousy employers! That has got to feel good.
Your reading lists have been so completely on point for me that I have stopped reading the descriptions of the books in kobo in favor of just getting them (if they are in kobo plus) or wishlisting them. And, speaking of wishlists: I periodically go through mine to see if any have made it to kobo plus, and this week over 25 of them were!! Oh my heart, swoon …
I haven’t been reading a ton, because we are starting to rev up our little business in preparation for our opening, plus never ending homeowner stuff, plus research and writing the book, but I realized I have read over 110 books this year! Which, wow, retirement is awesome, why did I decide I wanted to have a job dealing with waste plastic, again? Stoopid having a conscience, education, various types of capital, and plenty of time (hahahahaha!!), grumble grumble ….
Anyway, here is an edited list of some you might enjoy:
*Daggerbound. T Kingfisher. Not as good as Swordheart, but still good. Main character epiphanated (yes, I realize epiphanize exists, but I like epiphanate better, and not just because I made it up) in a way I found to be somewhat abrupt – but epiphanies are sudden, so …
*Track of the Cat. Nevada Barr. I don’t think of you as loving mysteries, but if you are mystery-curious, this one is worth reading for the ending. It is SAVAGE, and unexpected, and I loved it. LOVED it.
*Spells and Sandwiches; Masks and Mirrors; Flames and Frying Pans. Kate Moseman. I will be honest: these are kind of dumb, but they were cozy dumb, and I liked them for the most part. Middle aged chef, witchy things, NYC, strangely responsible vampires.
*A Knot in the Grain. Robin McKinley. I love her writing. She wrote The Blue Sword, which is one of my childhood favorites.
*The Buster Holmes Restaurant Cookbook: New Orleans Handmade Cookin’. OK, I only out this one in for novelty’s sake, as I got as far as the possum recipe and noped out. 🤣
It did feel good! And then I massively overdid it XD I am adjusting – again.
I’m not a mystery reader in the sense that I try to solve the mystery before the end but I can enjoy a good mystery if it goes quickly (because I’m tense the whole time waiting for an answer).
Cozy always has a place in my reading lists – there are days the brains absolutely need cozy.