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
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May 30, 2019
Many ways to help protect reproductive rights.
Petite Aitza on anti-Blackness and Black privilege in Europe.
Kassandra took a huge risk with ditching her job and she doesn’t regret it one bit. I took a professional risk years ago and it’s been well worth it for us as well. What risks have you taken that paid off?
Protect your accounts.
I remember the pain in this scene so clearly: Uncle Phil from ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ may be the best TV dad in history — this scene proves it
I adored APW long before I was thinking marriage and long after, so it piques my interest that Meg is going to do a vow renewal. That seems like it could be a lot of fun for the right people. Would that be a thing you’d enjoy doing? I wonder what interval of time would feel appropriate to do a renewal (for us, if we were ever into the idea).
Men are responsible for 100% of unwanted pregnancies.
I find it kind of annoying that JB used to eat eat zir veggies, and is now going through an “I don’t like it” phase. I should be glad that it took so long to kick in.
Gentle dog and calf
May 27, 2019
I told Done by Forty that I had nothing valuable to contribute to his bond swoop plan but as I was talking to Penny about her mortgage repayment, the two posts started pulling things together for me. Thanks for sharing, y’all!
I despise our mortgage. I hate that enormous looming debt that chips away at my brain every month because it’s twice the mortgage we had three years ago and I was so close to paying that one off. I hate the opportunity cost every month of the mortgage. This is nothing new.
And yes, we would have some kind of housing bill to live somewhere no matter what we had chosen and this was the most stable way to go in this area. Renting is too iffy with rent increases and comparable homes rent for the same as our mortgage + tax bill at this time. We are, of course, on the hook for maintenance in addition to that bill. We weren’t just being flippant when we bought, it was the right choice at the time.
Our priorities:
- Replace our current W-2 income with passive income through dividends. I once planned to build a real estate empire but I don’t enjoy our long distance rental ownership. Dealing with the property management and HOA is aggravating so I’m focusing future investments on index funds. That isn’t to imply I would enjoy hands on rental ownership more because I wouldn’t. I like being ethical and having a clean, safe place for people to live who then pay that mortgage but I don’t want to have to be hands on and fix things, or see people and talk to them, or screen tenants. I’m not a people person, they are exhausting.
- Retire in a reasonable time span (ideally in 7 years but I don’t have an FI date, our costs are too high at the moment).
- Have no mortgage in retirement – this is one of our biggest expenses at the moment along with childcare but I know it can easily be replaced with healthcare so I want to eliminate it.
(more…)
May 24, 2019
1. Friday: The water bill came today and it was $10 less than it’s been the last three bills! Woot!
2. Saturday: May has mostly brought us rain, not much of a spring here right now with the grey and gloom and fog, but it also brought us berries in season. 2 lbs of strawberries for $4!
3. Sunday: New discovery – blister roasted peanuts. These are yummy. They do not at all replace cake in my life so I still have a desserts-shaped hole in my life but I do like the peanuts.
4. Monday: My GP confirmed by email that I have positive MMR titers so I don’t need to worry about updating that vaccine. I hate that we have to even think about this but there are outbreaks all along the coast.
7. Monday: No idea where it came from but JB came home and didn’t have attitude or whine all through dinner. We had a pleasant and short dinner where all the food was eaten and no one was irritated. I can’t remember the last time THAT happened!
8. Tuesday: I could look at laundry as an endless cycle that’s never finished. OR I could look at it as something I’m endlessly good at because I do it well every week. Even if the machine betrays me and forces me to do extra work to soak out stains from the machine.
9. Wednesday: Our local Costco, on a good day, usually takes about 22 minutes from drive up to drive out. They had about ten pumps. Today, I discovered they had built an entirely new station on the other side of the lot in the past six weeks with thirty-two pumps. There was zero wait. It was astonishing. (On the other hand it cost $50 to fill up and PiC and I have noticed that our MPG has been dropping dramatically in the past few months and we don’t know why. :sob:)
10. Thursday: FINALLY. It’s taken me all year to get my act together and find a possible swim class for JB. FINALLY. (In fairness, PiC put in a fair amount of time and research too but he found all the super expensive and rigid academy type places that I didn’t want to use either.)
Then we followed up on a decent suggestion from a friend and seem to maybe have found the right place there? We have registered and I hope they have great instructors because this option is the most affordable one we could find within 20 miles.
:: Tell me some of your good things!
May 23, 2019
We tried being a one car family (involuntarily) and it’s just not realistic at this point of our lives with a kid and two dogs, so my enjoyment of the Bitches’ rant here had everything to do with their writing and nothing to do with my opinion.
Tami on dental health. I had never made the connection consciously but Mom was a diabetic who had serious dental problems (that I thought we had resolved) but she died young of heart issues. I have to wonder now if she would have gotten better if I had been better about making sure she had regular cleanings annually.
Angela, on living with high functioning anxiety.
Tanja’s Don’t Let Life Pass You By While Saving for the Future really hits the nail on the head with my realization this week.
Rich and Regular on Robert Smith’s amazing gift to the Morehouse 2019 graduating class: One of the worst things you could do is replace the burden of student loans with the burden of guilt disguised as gratitude.
Now I have to start reading Laura Lippman, on the strength of this essay and feeling like I like the person she is here: “Motherhood is a story where I don’t control the ending.” On second thought, I don’t think I can hang with her thrillers. Possibly too much tension.
Similarly, I’ll never read anything by this author: Dean Klein. I can’t decide which combination of adjective sums him up: ridiculous pompous entitled?
Chuck Wendig on Poop noise.
Then Sam Sykes waded in
May 20, 2019
I’ve always pushed myself professionally to be the superstar, to deliver beyond expectations, to perform at my highest possible point to justify the raises and promotions I’d then advocate for.
It was important and right for the growing my career stage of life but I deliberately slowed that pace down a bit in the last few years as I focus on my family. That tendency to operate at a fever pitch has stuck with me, though, and the decision to pursue our path to financial independence turned it back on to an unhealthy degree.
There’s a strong correlation between my job hitting the level of Unbearable Stress, my impatience with work, and desire for FIRE growing into an unmanageable monster. After half a year of every possible thing going wrong at my job, and all sorts of nonsense at PiC’s work for the past year, my brain latched onto FIRE as The Way Out. I had always been on this path subconsciously because of my health, why not crunch the numbers and make it a reality?
I planned and planned and fretted. That fretting even helped me understand an anxiety that’s been bubbling under the surface, and that was good.
What was not good? Crunching the numbers revealed how much time we still have left before we can take off into the sunset (a lot considering my nerves around the idea of age 50-55) and that was its own problem. I didn’t like discovering that we need to plan for at least 15 or more years of income-producing work, not a bit. I didn’t like the idea of having to figure out how to either hold on to my current job for a “really long time” or finding a better way to produce the same or more income. I didn’t like that this was the best case scenario because I plan for worst case scenarios, I never formulate plans that bank on everything breaking our way. That is not how life works.
All of these pointed to two big problems.
First, I was trying to resolve a short term (I hope!) problem with a long term solution. It’s no wonder that produced more worrying than it solved. While it was a distraction, and in some ways a good one because I focused deeply on streamlining our financial efficiencies, it became counterproductive. (more…)
May 17, 2019
1. Friday: I dropped small Mother’s Day notes in the mail to a few people who mean a whole lot to me. I haven’t ever been able to write them before.
2. Saturday/Sunday: As usual, JB was up bright and early and I let that early wake-up drag me out of bed earlier than usual too so that I could start the laundry and catch up on work. Made good headway (Monday will thank me) and PiC spoiled me all weekend with taking JB so I could work, rest, and generally deal. I have extremely conflicted feelings about Mother’s Day (my loss, many dear friends have lost mothers too early) and like to keep it very quiet.
3. Monday: I was stumped for dinner ideas. Thankfully, PiC steps up when my ideas run dry and took care of it.
4. Tuesday: One Day at a Time was on in the background and I really enjoy that show.
5. Wednesday: Spinach and kale greek yogurt dip + cucumbers make a good healthy snack.
6. Thursday: We traded morning routines today and it worked really well. I got the dogs walked and fed, we saw a rainbow and got drenched. He got JB ready and ze didn’t whine or complain about getting ready! (I think. I don’t know, I was busy elsewhere.)
:: Tell me some of your good things!
May 16, 2019
Matt on the cases people make against charity. I definitely have a scarcity mindset and things like the unpredictability of the health insurance landscape (an example: the squeeze of high deductible high plans) or the high cost health care in general feed mine. But I still give, one way or another, to people who need help, to small creators, to causes we care about.
Related: activism is exhausting. For those of you who care about the world as it feels like it’s disintegrating around us, especially with the attacks on reproductive rights of late, this thread helped me do a little something for the people actually on the ground fighting for those rights.
Bitches Get Riches: I Was Happy to Marry a Poor Man. Then Things Changed.
Nicole Cliffe’s told the funny version of her grandmother (CW: suicide, substance abuse, and sexual abuse) online but this is the serious version.
Men who behave like this at first look like any other men, thus I look at all of them askance until I KNOW I’m safe around them. I also think he should have been moved to the worst seat and arrested coming off the plane.
Contentment is dramatically underrated.
K Wright nails what I think when people or companies like Chase are flippant about why people struggle with money.
Nicole Dennis-Benn: “I Wanted to Be a Mom. I Didn’t Want to Be Pregnant.” This is beautiful and has so much truth.
Don’t be a Natasha Tynes. I don’t get why people feel the need to police (particularly black women) people for doing necessary things like eating.
The politest (puppy) eviction