March 4, 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 $1156 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
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February 4, 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 $222 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
I’ve been working with JB to build their business little bits at a time. When we initially started this, we agreed we would be partners and share everything, costs and profit. But I’ve really been doing all the admin, site design and legal work and letting them keep all the money. After we upped the ante at last year’s little craft fair, having them pay for their materials out of their earnings so that they understand more about how a real business works, they noticed that I’d been letting them have all the proceeds. I admitted that I had been spoiling them a bit. We agreed that we’d split the proceeds of any future shows since I’m doing a whole lot of the legwork for these shows. I’m also working on adding my own little craft contributions to the table in hopes of beefing up our application.
Unfortunately we got hit by scammers testing stolen credit cards on the site this month. It’s cost us $55 in fees so far and it’s not over yet. This is really frustrating.
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January 14, 2026
We are off a … well. The year has certainly started.
2025 Highlights in Health
- Brain therapy – This year’s one big improvement was getting hold of myself when an RSD cycle was starting. The solution, silly as it sounds, was redirecting my thoughts from dwelling on the negative thing that happened. Not arguing with myself to convince myself that it wasn’t as horrible as I felt it was, I just said “yep ok that feels terrible now think about this other thing”. Apparently my RSD brain is like an infant with little to no object permanence. So long as I wave other thoughts at it, we don’t have to live in the Misery Zone.
- Massage therapy: I wish I could have one every two weeks but at least my baseline pain has dipped down in the past few years to a lower level so I’m not quite as tense 100% of the time.
- COVID and flu prevention: We all got vaccinated as soon as the new shots were available. I continued my maintenance antiviral regimen all year. I added the antihistamine protocol (adding cetizirine and famotidine twice a day when we traveled or were around other people).
- Building strength with a trainer: I struggled to maintain consistency all year but my best week of the year was the first week of December. That week, I did a total of: 116 pushups, 68 lateral raises, 112 squats, 2.5 minutes (across multiple) of planks, 108 band pullaparts, 52 calf raises, 64 glute bridges, 92 bicep curls, 108 lying leg raises (every single one felt awful) and 76 hammer curls. It sounds like a lot but, no. That is a lot. It took an entire year to get back to the point where I managed to complete the whole week’s worth of exercises in the week! And this year’s one week of exercises is more than last year’s. After losing steam for the last three weeks, my goal is to rebuild back to this completion rate in the first three months of the year instead of only in the last week, once.
2025 Highlights in Life
- Work was, again, 110% terrible. I hate corporations so much. I hate working for one even more. (Though I might well hate being unemployed by one even more than that.) We may have benefits and better pay but it comes at such a high cost to life balance. I’ve worked twice as many hours as any one person should and that stinks.
- Parenting has felt tough. There have been small bright spots with the kids that I try to appreciate fully as a bulwark against the grief and sadness during what feels the endless slog of conflicts. I try to remember that overall, the kids are fairly decent humans-in-training. It’s easy to miss the forest for the trees when we’re deep in it but I hope I can always pull back and say that they are good people.
- A friend encouraged me to track my reading, for all my love of spreadsheets, I have never felt the need to do this but decided to go ahead and do so anyway just for fun. According to my totally shoddy bookkeeping which likely leaves out quite a few books, I have read at least 105 books this year. I tend not to remember to record re-reads but I think they count and I do a lot of rereading when stressed. Oh, I just noticed that Libby has a timeline thing and shows how many books I’ve read in past years. At least half of my reading was in Kindle, there’s some Kindle overlap in these numbers, but this excludes free or purchased books: 2018, 189; 2019, 137; 2020, 141; 2021, 115; 2022, 113; 2023, 101; 2024, 47. 2024 was hellish in ways that kept me from reading like normal. 2025 wasn’t better, it was just a different bad, in ways that didn’t prevent me reading.
2025 Highlights in Money
- We had two full time incomes and did our best to supplement that with little extras, like my $10 in sales of journals and tees.
- We ended 2025 with twice as much cash as we started the year with. This was intentional: I plan to max out my 401k as quickly as I can in Q1 2026. Again because my pessimism says: will you even make it through half the year? Who knows! We need that extra cash for cash flow during those high-contribution months.
- Our net worth climbed steadily, incrementally.
- I invested in my very own 401K for a second year.
- I helped JB build their business a little bit more.
- The Lakota families project helped so many people.
Financial Checklist for 2026
I need to get our complete set of the documents to trusted friends. It took all of last year to collect copies of everyone’s vital documents and I had to settle for good photocopies for one set. It’s hard to tell whether we could even get official copies of that set given the office doesn’t seem to answer emails or any other communications. I MEANT to send the envelope home with one friend when they were in town but completely forgot. They’ll probably be out here again before I remember to get it in the mail.
Thoughts for 2026
Both of us continue to worry about our job stability in 2026. Mine has to do with completely unrealistic corporate expectations: last year was awful, this year’s worse. PiC’s worried because his employer’s just cutting people left and right and it came awfully close to him in 2025. We’re not ready to retire financially (the damn healthcare problem), though I have the WORST senioritis. If I knew we had a really solid severance, I might be willing to lean hard in that direction. But realistically, we’re hoping that, worst case scenario, we both make it to the end of 2026 employed. That gets us to the end of daycare and the start of kindergarten. I’ll run the numbers on where we should be in terms of emergency cash and investments by then. I don’t know what my company’s layoff calculation is but if PiC’s employer doesn’t change theirs, his would be a reasonably generous severance.
At the same time, we hope to expand JB’s horizons. Whether it’s picking up an instrument or a new sport, or both, we’re thinking of how to budget both the time and money for that. We have floated some ideas to SmolAc as well to offer them the chances to pick either an instrument to explore or a sport but they’re awfully recalcitrant about all ideas. We didn’t force JB into any of their activities, so I hope a little time will allow SmolAc to feel the desire to join something too.
Our money
Same goal: Save more, invest more, give more. Achieve FI in ??? years. Mostly I’ve stopped filling out the FI calculators. It’s too depressing.
(Again) All our expenses will go up next year. The increases are substantial enough that we may start losing ground financially. We can’t expect COL salary increases to keep pace with the expenses, nor can we expect the stock market to continue to perform like it did this year. (Though a friend points out that it usually DOES). I’m looking into what we can do to mitigate rising costs.
Little life things
My monthly call list fell apart mid-year when things at work got extra bad.
Household project: Declutter, donate, organize. ✔️ We’re going for Year 3. I bought myself a third round of Sterilite latching storage boxes for holiday gift transport, for storing next size up clothing for the kids, and organizing the garage better. The garage is looking pretty good all things considered.
No hard pants! Was a time when I lived in jeans but I migrated into my sweats in the pregnancy of SmolAc and only recently relented to wear non-sweats for a work thing once this year. This year however, I’ve acquired a couple pairs of fleece lined joggers and leggings for when the sweats just aren’t warm enough in this frigid house. I was gifted some casual soft linen/cotton pants that will double very well as casual business wear if I’m forced into that nonsense again this year. I even picked up some wide belts to better put together an outfit with my Maya Kern skirts. I might be as well-equipped as I have ever been to avoid wearing hard pants for a full year. Fingers crossed!
Personal project: Learning to sew very basic things has been a mix of fun and frustrating, but ultimately satisfying after I manage to complete a thing. I was working on drawstring bags last year. This year I moved on to cute little Japanese knot bags that I’ll make in various sizes once I feel like I’ve got the hang of them. Maybe sell them with JB at a craft fair if/when we have one next year. I also made a pile of tablecloths in prints that amused me instead of paying roughly the equivalent price for tablecloths I didn’t really care for.
The Lakota Giving project continues, thankfully. I worried that 2025 would be significantly worse than 2024, which was much harder than 2023. A few regular contributors have dropped off but we have managed to help more than half a dozen families directly each year along with masses of community donations.
:: How was your 2025?
January 7, 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 $569 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
Surprise money: PiC’s coworkers awarded him a hefty chunk of Applause points so he redeemed it for a hefty Visa GC. That’s paying our internet and phone bills!
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December 3, 2025
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 $1,142.96 in dividends from the stocks portfolio. (We spent six times that amount this month. UGH.)
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November 5, 2025
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 $246.60 in dividends from the stocks portfolio. All reinvested.
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October 8, 2025
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 $82.50 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
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