Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (216)
July 22, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 110: The more miserable and angry I get at work, the more I wish for things I can’t change.
Like how Captain Awkward is awesome and I could wish I’d been reading her many years ago when I started making decisions about my family and finances if I was dwelling on what might have been. This one in particular is a different script but a very similar base to my dad’s problems and maybe seeing this could have helped me recognize more of what was happening at home. Thankfully, PiC has never been problematic, financially, even though we came from two very different financial backgrounds and experiences. He’s known from Day 1 that I’m both more involved and more self-educated on finances, and that I’m the better money manager of the two of us even before I had much (any) money to hold onto. When we eventually combined finances it was really a matter of transitioning the reins over to me. That doesn’t mean our money lives are perfect, just that our styles are compatible and it’s not a point of friction. Thank goodness.
But occasionally, like now, I find it hard to wash away the bitterness of regret of how much money I wasted on my lying parent and how that could have served our own family and happiness and lives. I sacrificed so much of my past back then, not knowing i was also sacrificing so much of my future. The amounts of money in rent, utilities, food, gas, phone, insurance and other miscellaneous bills would have filled an entire nest egg and then some. And if that had been growing all this time… Sigh. Anyway. I shake myself off and say that’s all in the past. I’m glad I eventually broke free. I’m glad I shared the journey here. I’m glad that sharing helped a few other people.
Year 5, Day 111: Daydreaming about things that would feel like luxury in our everyday lives to redirect my work angst over incompetence and inefficiency.
Plastic and wood hangers instead of wire hangers. This one is just a little silly.
The freedom to nap as long as I want after a good massage or just because, without guilt. Someday.
A warm kitten that likes belly rubs and didn’t need anything else from me. Someday.
When I was a kid, I used to long to be at other people’s houses. Mine was empty, lonely, dirty, shabby. I loved my dogs and wanted to be with them but my home didn’t feel like a home. Now I don’t want to be at anyone’s house but mine. I like my home. I live with someone who helps contribute to the upkeep and maintenance. It’s cozy enough. It’s neat enough. It’s enough. I think that’s why Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car makes me cry. Escaping the-home-that-wasn’t was hard for me to envision in my younger days and now having made it out of my smallish town, I still get weird feelings about that.
Sushi three times a week. Nommmm. Someday.
A stack of 20 Innkeeper books and an entire 3.5 days to do nothing but eat, sleep, read, and occasionally get a bit of sun. That many Innkeepers don’t exist, so *hope* someday!
A whole week when no one asks me to do anything for work, home, school. Someday!
What little luxuries do you already enjoy or would love to add to your life?
Snippets of this song has been on repeat in my mind all week so I had to fully commit to it.
Year 5, Day 112: I ran some simulations on cFIREsim to soothe my general anxiety that’s been bubbling up. My variables: starting retirement in 2027, ending in 45 years, with today’s portfolio balance, and today’s spending (because I assume that costs will go up even if we drop some spending areas, and we’ll also add some spending areas). My simulations failed 20 of 106 total cycles, or succeeded about 80% of the time.
If I change just one assumption: my goal portfolio balance instead of using today’s portfolio balance, the simulations show 100% success.
I tweaked one more, keeping the goal portfolio balance and added an increase in annual spending because who knows, things could get really expensive some years: my simulations fail 4 of 106 total cycles, or succeed 96% of the time.
Here’s the problem with me using this simulator: I don’t have a good understanding of what the results really mean. It’s mildly reassuring to see that if I could stick with my job until 2027, and added enough to all our investment accounts to hit the goal portfolio balance, it seems we’d likely be fine even with some moderate fluctuations in spending. It’s validating to see that the goal portfolio balance I picked appears to meet our needs. But I don’t really get what I’m doing with these numbers. Also, I’m not sure it’s likely we’ll actually hit that goal portfolio balance in 3 years even with really aggressive saving/investing.
To give my brain something concrete to grab onto, I organized our accounts into three buckets to show a more realistic picture of how we could access our money in the future: Money available to us before age 60, money available when PiC turns 60, and money available when I turn 60. Numbers are still squishy but maybe this will help me get a grip on what we can expect. Also I probably want to figure out which accounts are the most advantageous to withdraw from first, and which accounts we want to preserve. Because it’s (probably) so far off, it’s felt too squishy to set a real structured plan. Also the future of healthcare is a real bugbear. I don’t know WHAT the future there holds but it’s sort of depressing to see how things are right now. It’s already so expensive and healthcare companies are so corrupt.
Year 5, Day 113: I’ve been saving this Anderson Cooper chat with Nicole Chung on grief for several months. Even though I feel like my grief for my mom has evolved to a more tolerable stage, it’s not just under my skin every day and night, it’s sunk into my bones so that I am deeply and profoundly aware of her absence at a cellular level. It’s become a part of me. The grief is still part of me, the regrets that I’ve struggled with, the guilt of not having been able to achieve even more all still reverberate through me at times. Lots of this conversation struck a chord with me:
“How do you learn to cherish your life when grief has made it unrecognizable? I’m starting to feel that we do so not by trying to fill a void that can never be filled, but by living as best as we can in this strange, yawning terrain. Our loved ones have left behind. Exploring its jagged boundaries and learning to see it as something new. I believe this because I feel that I am becoming someone new, someone who can remember and mourn and live without punishing herself.”
Much of my grieving for my mom was self recrimination for not doing better for her, not saving her from our financial struggles. I punished myself for years for that. It’s taken a lot of therapy to recognize it as punishment and likely will take more to forgive myself for something I shouldn’t need forgiving for.
“Nobody was really going to see or understand or miss them, at least in the exact same way I did, because I was their only child. I was not the only person mourning them, but I was their only child and it was so hard.”
In many ways, my brother is lost to me, and my dad is too, so I feel this grief about my entire nuclear family. Mom actually died but the other two can’t be part of my life anymore either and no one knows the things that parents and siblings know about you, about me, or shares those memories. It’s such a katamari of loss of my entire family.
You say “in this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you’d hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them.”
Such a big part of grieving for me has been learning to forgive myself and recognize I don’t have control. There were things I wanted to control, and I wanted to make better for my parents that I, in the end, could not. I could not do enough. I couldn’t save my dad. I couldn’t be in there in exactly the way I wanted from my mom. I could continue to punish myself for that. I could continue to beat myself up and tell myself all this pain, this is just what you deserve because you weren’t there when they needed you. But I know that’s not what they would have wanted. I don’t think anybody we’ve lost wants us to heap more suffering on top of suffering in that way.
Year 5, Day 114: We just got a letter from the kids’ dentist: She’s going out of network because Delta Dental doesn’t pay enough. I had to ask a bunch of questions about what this means but ultimately it looks like, right now barring any rate increases, where the kids’ visits were covered 100% ($135 four times a year = $540), we are now having to pay the difference between their office fees and the maximum that Delta will pay. Right now, that difference is $150, so we have to budget an extra $600 a year for their twice yearly cleanings and checkups. I haven’t gotten the quote for x-rays yet, I’d better get that soon so I can figure out how much we have to set aside. Sigh. I get it, she’s only making less than half of what she could be, but that’s a huge blow to the pocketbook. Everything just keeps going up.
It won’t help to add a secondary plan since mine is also Delta Dental. The dentist’s office explained that Delta will only pay once up to their max regardless of how many plans you have. Sigh.
I get that soothing-through-spreadsheets thing, I’m glad your numbers are not wildly discouraging!
Aside from the general awesomeness of taking a year off, it helped validate that a) I spent exactly what I thought I did on ordinary life; b) I could spend a LOT more than that on travel. I know I won’t have the energy/enthusiasm for that forever (or possibly even every year) but it does make it hard to predict what I’ll need and want to be able to spend.
The quote about regret that really resonates for me is this one “How to hold regret tenderly: I wish I would have done that differently, and at the time, I couldn’t.” ~Syanna Wand
I waffle on whether I feel good or not about the numbers but that’s still better than how I felt about them five years ago!
I think that year off you did was super cool for both reasons. How has your experience been since getting back?
That’s a lovely and apt quote, thank you for sharing!