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.
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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.