About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
Read More
October 7, 2019
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from an investment property and investing in dividend stocks. That money is saved for future repairs and reinvested, respectively. We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. Our side income comes from Swagbucks and cash back sites (Ebates, Mr. Rebates). Some posts have affiliate links that pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running and I’ve added a way to support the blog in the sidebar to the right!
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income by the time my health prevents me from working.
***
Dividend income. We received $313 in dividends this month. Our year to date net dividends are $2,879.40.
Bank bonuses. HSBC finally paid up! I’m so glad to be done with them. They are the absolute worst.
ALSO our long awaited tax refund also finally arrived! Woo! I promptly deposited it into our anemic account meant for paying the property taxes – it’s way behind the mark it should have hit in order to pay it in full on time.
(more…)
October 4, 2019
This is my weekly list of things that were good this week, even if they weren’t all unadulteratedly good things. Please share your good things in the comments!
1. Our neighbors were in a horrific car accident last week, we’re so grateful that they’re all ok. I’ve known so many people who got into terrible wrecks, and we’ve buried a few of them, that it gives me a touch of anxiety every time JB and PiC go off together.
2. My eye exam put me out of commission all day. The doctor warned me that it was possible I’d lose 4 hours after the dilation but I didn’t think it’d be quite as bad as it was. Normally I really can’t afford that kind of time off with my workload, the past 14 months have been awful, but I caught a small break this week in that my urgent stuff was done before that appointment. Small favors.
3. We had a fabulous, though short, visit with a dear friend who happily embarked on culinary adventures with me. I’m so proud of myself for working on seasoning this dish well enough that the flavors were complex and not the one note that only salt, pepper, and chicken broth were initially bringing to the table. The adults approved and JB came back for seconds, then thirds after dessert. The biggest compliment!
4. I finally found time to read a novel from a fellow blogger: Family Trust by Kathy Wang. I’m still marinating thoughts because there was so much there.
5. Who’s got two thumbs and is super jazzed that Target’s Market Pantry brand green beans are regularly 55 cents a can, beating Costco’s 61 cents a can? THIS LADY. Seamus has been giving me the business for not having his expected veggies in his dinner. Costco, our main supplier, has been out for ages! I made do with extra carrots and sweet potatoes but the green beans are the cheapest and lowest cal supplement (34 cals per cup, vs 62 cals for carrots and 180 cals for sweet potatoes). We need low cal and filling to keep this old guy lean, it’s easier on his arthritis.
Bonus, I can pay for it with gift cards so those Bing rewards are feeling extra special. WOO. Now I need a sale of some sort to apply to their already cheap regular price. You’d think it was ridiculous to be thinking about saving 6 cents a can, and yes that’s just $21.60 a year, BUT with a recurring quarterly bill of $400-450 for just two of his FIVE DAILY medications, I have to look for every penny of savings that I can find.
6. If JB wants a Halloween costume, that has to be settled NOW. Ze finally picked a costume and while we couldn’t get it as a hand me down from anyone, Target had the costumes. The popular color was selling for $35 and a less canon color for $20. Since I’m not about to pay $35 for a single use item, and the cheaper one was one of zir top favorite colors anyway, that’s the one we were getting. But I made myself wait. There’s a fine balance between getting everything done early and not paying full price for non essentials and that’s the only highwire act you’ll see me engage in! Two days later, voila! 30% off Halloween costumes! Brought that sucker down to $14 with free delivery when combined with the canned green beans goldstrike. Now ze needs to love the costume and wear it at least twice.
7. Every year, my birthday present to myself is giving the library a check to buy a diverse list of authors I want to read, in e-books. This means I get to enjoy them and other people can too. I sneak back to check back on the status of those books and am elated when I find they’re waitlisted. That means people are reading them! And I hope enjoying them. I’m starting my wish list for next year now: Rena Barron’s Kingdom of Souls trilogy.
8. Earnings from MyPoints have been incredibly slow in the past two years so I’m happy to finally have enough points to redeem for a $10 Amazon gift card.
:: You know the hard thing about emotions and chronic pain? As much as I can look back and say I had lots of little bright spots in this week, it was still really hard to feel happy because every single day has included hours of flare-up pain. How was your week?
October 3, 2019
I’m quite proud of this work journal for young kids that I made. A preview of the interior:
Remember to focus on the important stuff that money can’t buy.
The Four Tigers Sword: a Twitter thread
Look at this beautiful rainbow baby quilt! I would love this for me, as an adult 🙂
Have you made any easy eco-friendly switches in your life that you want to share?
The cost of reproductive choices
So many reasons to love Piggy and Kitty. I want to quote the whole post because it’s all my favorite but I’ll settle for just one. HOW DO I PICK: “Guess what happened the last time I was on the phone with my sweet, loving, stubborn, old-fashioned grandpa, and he said something racist? That’s right: I read my beloved g-paw for so much filth the trash can got jealous. Thrown off guard by my vehemence, he immediately apologized, and has successfully checked himself since then.”
A little bit on Anthony Stewart Head. ASH has a very special place in my heart as Giles and I hope that his time away while working on Buffy was worth it for him. It makes me think about whether or not he actually made enough money to make it worth it for their family, too, or whether this was one of those moves you make to sacrifice in order to build your professional reputation even if the money doesn’t make sense. I made a move like that about 8-9 years ago, forgoing the higher salary in a lower COLA to get out of a toxic sector of my industry. While it took me four years to get back up to that higher salary I could have gotten right away, the move away from the toxic sector was worth at least 30% of that salary. The amount of stress I would have been under would have destroyed my health entirely. At the time, I was stopping to dry heave outside work every day and my vision suffered. A few more years of that and life would have been over.
Qandeel Baloch’s brother was convicted of her murder and sentenced to life in prison. I should hope so. He was utterly remorseless and felt that he had the right to murder his sister just because he didn’t like how she was living her life. And a look at her life before the end was sobering. I’ve never quite understood how people live when they garner attention in media or social media. In today’s world, it seems like there are no holds barred anymore, even in death you are no longer accorded an ounce of respect or dignity.
Totally unsurprising: “Before my transition, people assumed I knew what I was talking about. They didn’t talk over me in meetings. They trusted me when I spoke, and they didn’t look to others for confirmation of my ideas. There was a baseline assumption that I was competent and capable. Since my transition, it’s distressingly common for people to talk over me, to look to men for validation of the things I say, to assume that I couldn’t possibly know anything about [technical topic] because I’m a girl. I’ve actually had people tell me, “what could you possibly know about that? You’re a girl!””
Oh no, bear
https://twitter.com/bushcamp2/status/1175382248272515072?s=19
September 30, 2019
I started blogging before the Great Recession and as I prepare for the next one, whenever it may finally touch down, I’m thinking about all the ways we’ve evolved since then.
1. I am a reformed workaholic.
This is huge. I didn’t think I’d ever stop being a work junkie, or stop chasing the highs of earning money and overtime and achieving. I never dreamed of wanting to let go of all that because it’s what paid off debts, paid bills, built up our savings and saved my bacon.
via GIPHY
After the Great Recession, I clung to that even harder because I got a sense of how much worse it could have been if I hadn’t been addicted to earning.
Cliched as it may sound, getting pregnant changed all that. It didn’t come in a dramatic blinding revelation or the glow of motherhood (I never got the glow, I feel cheated). It came, as most things do, in a flash of logic.
I thought about all the choices we were getting ready to make, all the sacrifices, and how it just didn’t make any sense to do any and all of those things if we were not actively choosing to be present for zir life as well. At the rate that I used to work, I would miss every second of it. It felt right to actively make the choice to shift my mindset from a woman for whom a career was everything to a woman who had chosen to embrace a career and a family with a whole heart. (more…)
September 27, 2019
This is my weekly list of things that were good this week, even if they weren’t all unadulteratedly good things. Please share your good things in the comments!
1. I was bitten by the organizational bug this morning and I tackled two areas: the gifts box (which was overflowing into the next box over and unseemly) and one of the storage boxes that I’ve been whittling down. I asked PiC to take charge of selling the never used Crumpler bag that is amazing but is twice the width of my body so I’ll never use it, and I tucked three nicer leather handbags into two dust bags. They’re so nice and I’m not ready to decide to release them. At least not as donation items.
I offered some discounts on my old listed items on Poshmark in hopes of moving them and am about ready to relegate some of those older items to the Donation bin. I have many pain and fatigue regrets but mentally feel so much better.
Did you declutter anything this week?
2. My birthday weekend averaged out to ok: one day was absolutely terrible and the other day was quite good. Conclusion: shooting for a good whole weekend was aiming too high.
The good part: we had a lovely lunch with a long time friend. It was great weather, amazing food, great company, and then we found free kids’ activities after a nice micro dessert and enjoyed crafting for a bit. We tipped the nice facepainting lady $2 for a little bit of facepainting design.
Then we relaxed at home with a Studio Ghibli DVD from the library to rest up before a delicious homemade dinner because of course, I’d overdone it and my body was done. PiC was kind enough to run to the store to grab a few necessary ingredients to make dinner happen and dealt with washing and drying the car seat from an earlier failed cupcake retrieval incident so we could rest.
3. You know what would be nice? The ability to tell when my tank is running on empty that’s more than “I just don’t feel so good.” I had a scare one day when I just didn’t feel well, probably needed food, but pushed through anyway and ended up feeling even sicker and weaker than before. This scares me because I can’t be sure if these days are the first of many bad days, and we can’t afford for me to be out of work for a prolonged period.
That isn’t the good thing. The good thing is each time that feeling passes, and I can have another not terrible period, and I’m not out of the game yet. The other good thing is being able to talk about it openly and freely here. It’s scary when you don’t know when your health is going to give out but knowing that it absolutely will, it’s just a matter of time. For a long time, I held that fear close to my heart and didn’t have anyone to talk to about it.
:: How was your week?
September 26, 2019
I adore Maggie’s latest coloring book: Pixel Museum Art!
Jonathan at My Money Blog on college tuition. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as a function of our overall budget and what we should save and why.
My car incident over the weekend that’s going to cost money when I am already feeling squeeze is making me feel this post extra hard. We COULD dig into our savings and not live so lean but we do that for a very good reason and it’s worth sticking to that reason. It is. Remember that, self.
I’ve read quite a few FinCon recaps but OFG’s resonated most with me. Not a surprise, is it? It reminds me that I loved the two FinCons I went to because I got to connect with people I only know online the rest of the year and that the money part is actually just a bonus. That’s harder to see in lean years like this one where we don’t have much wiggle room in the budget to afford, basically, a mini vacation for me.
Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture. Obviously, I use gender neutral pronouns here for JB and I like that it pushes me to change my socially instilled default gender mentally from him or her to gender neutral and to reduce my assumptions of gender outside of this blog. I know it bothered at least one blog reader enough to snark at me about it but I’m sticking to it.
Beyonce’s Homecoming and the Emmy snubs. I don’t claim to understand the Emmys but how does James Corden’s light and amusing car show (which is a lot of fun) win over Beyonce’s intense Homecoming? I’ll never understand.
How To Lose A Third Of A Million Dollars Without Really Trying. I’ve not yet tried to break into publishing but I’ve got a lot of questions after reading this.
How does an actual agent not teach their clients the very basic things about what an advance is, how earning out works, and how does one land an advance of that size and not ask a lot of questions to be sure you know what’s happening and why? It felt like this was very much like lottery winnings going down the drain.
Helpful doggy
https://twitter.com/_TheBestDogs/status/1174594179122499585
September 23, 2019
Last year, we had to replace all the appliances in the unit ($2000). This year, we had to replace the hot water heater ($1000). A huge moneymaker this place is not, especially since the monthly profit margins are very thin. The PM makes about as much as I do in a month.
Then, after 4 years of on time payments, the tenant was late paying the rent. There were extenuating circumstances, I’m told. One person was ill and the other person had an issue at work, so they were several days late. While they’ve not been perfect tenants, we have several issues with HOA violations a year, they are minor issues and don’t speak to the quality of the tenant as a payer of rent.
I’m concerned with whether they pay in full, on time, and whether they are treating the property with respect. They are doing both, so while I didn’t love the late payment situation, as long as they ended up paying in full before too long, I was willing to be understanding.
My property manager had what I thought was an outsized reaction. They filed a “7 day pay or quit” notice and asked me to agree to issuing a 30 day vacate the premises notice after they paid for this month. I was taken aback. Why on earth would I throw out tenants for being late once? I’m not trying to let them take advantage of me but after one late payment? That was unreasonable.
I discussed the situation with a landlord friend who agreed that being understanding of tenant life situations includes letting them pay late one time without kicking them out immediately after they make that payment. If it happens more often, that’s a concern but at the moment, after 4 years? A single late payment does not warrant a vacate the premises notice, thank you very much.
After asking for more context, I found that the PM was (overly) worried about the potential for a non-payment situation in which case it would take time and cost money to evict, and cost us both in lost revenue. That would suck, yes, but again, a few days late one time just didn’t warrant that panic, to my mind.
We agreed that we’d wait to see what happened next month. If we had another late payment that indicates the tenant isn’t able to keep up with the below-market rent any longer, then we’d discuss what actions to take.
It is rather frustrating to keep having to deal with their HOA violations, though, because that’s precious time taken out of my schedule. I’m not sure if we can charge for repeat instances because it’s generally the same problem repeatedly and the tenants don’t have any consequences but we do. Repeat transgressions suck up a lot of my time but they also end up costing a lot of money as well in HOA fines.
:: Do you have to deal with HOA violations as a tenant or as a property owner?