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
If a friend was ill and you sent them food for a week, would you let them pay you back?
If you visit chosen family every year, they always feed you, and don’t let you contribute, would you engage in a long, probably losing, battle over it? Or is this a thing that family does and you’re supposed to sit down and shut it?
Income and savings
Once upon a time, at least ten years ago, I told a friend “I can’t wait until I make $100,000 a year. Can you imagine how much I could save???”
Answer: Not as much as I had originally planned. But still a healthy amount!
How much could you save on a $100,000 salary and do you have a single income, dual income, and/or any dependents?
Skills
“You know, I lied before. I didn’t really learn to play guitar. I just kinda … gave myself the ability. I did the same when I learned French.” – Chuck, Supernatural
If you could, would you just give yourself talents (musical, lingual, or athletic)? What would you pick?
Massive loans
We’re whittling away at the redwood that is our mortgage and I periodically check to see whether we should refinance for a lower interest rate. Now is really not the time – interest rates are approaching 5%! Our rate is a not great but not horrible 3.875%. I miss our previously pretty great rate that was a full percentage point lower.
What’s the best interest you’ve ever had on a loan?
My first round, I didn’t bother to comparison shop. I was in a hurry to make some kind of progress in shifting the glacier of boxes in my office so 3 books, 7 DVDs, and one broken 16 GB iPhone went straight off to Decluttr. They downrated the broken phone as though I had miscategorized it, even though I’d marked it with the lowest option they had given me on the selling screen, and we came away with $10.85.
Notes: Decluttr pays for shipping and doesn’t return unsold items. They won’t take items without barcodes, which annoyed me about two or three sets of CDs and DVDs that were in great shape but inexplicably had no barcodes. Your barcodes must be identical and the items must be in good shape. You need to enter a minimum of $5 worth of items to complete an order.
My second round, flush with having successfully emptied out 5 boxes of packing boxes, I was able to take an extra 15 minutes to check other DVD sites to see if we could get better prices. This time, out of ten DVDs, Decluttr offered me $1.37 for 4 DVDs. Second Spin offered $5.40 for 8 DVDs. Since the point was to maximize both income and clearing out stuff, Second Spin was our friend this time. Or so I thought.
Dogs missing their kids. Sera can’t stand that JB is gone at all day at school and just about jumps out of her skin when they come home. They don’t even hang out when we’re all home together but the dogs want us together anyway. They have a weird shepherding type of insistence about these things.
The research on materialism: “Children who recall that their parents just bought them stuff when they wanted it, or who paid them money or bought them things when they got good grades, there’s a very consistent association that when these things happen in childhood, when that person is an adult, they’re more likely to be materialistic.
And I’m looking now at what parents do when their kid’s unhappy, or upset, or they have a big disappointment—how do parents deal with that? And my preliminary evidence suggests that it’s something that’s learned in childhood. The parents might say, “Oh, you didn’t make it on to the team—let’s go out and have something to eat,” or, “Let’s go out and get you a new video game—that’ll take your mind off it.” Well, if the parents do that with their kids, we find that as adults, people are more likely to deal with distress in the same way, by giving themselves a little gift.”
I can’t even remember my parents caring about my emotions. Mom must have done but we didn’t talk much about personal stuff when I was younger, and I didn’t know how to communicate well, so – no memories. I feel like I’m starting from scratch a little bit with JB in that regard. I do remember my friends having emotions and being what I thought of as weird because they seemed irrational though. Years on, I realize that they were totally normal in having emotions and you know, being human.
How did we survive 3 and a half years? Whew. What a journey this has been. I like JB a whole lot and there are a lot of days I don’t enjoy zir company so very much because it’s so frustrating just getting shoes on zir feet every morning why does this have to be an argument every single morning –
but I guess we’ll keep zir.
Hands on your belly!
Kitchen safety is harder to teach to an antsy 3 year old than I expected. I want JB to help and to encourage that zest for helping but also don’t want zir to catch on fire or slice off a finger, so instead of saying “Don’t touch X” which never ever ever EVER works, we do “hands on your belly!”
When we’re standing next to the stove together, giving zir wandering hands a docking station of BELLY! is the only thing that prevents zir from dipping hands into boiling water to fish out that one floating dumping, or stirring the pasta prematurely, or grabbing the pot handle and upending its contents all over both of us. (more…)
That was my first recession as an adult and I didn’t really know anything about recession cycles or how the market functions – nothing! All I knew was the financial world had come crashing down, my favorite bank (WAMU) had been eaten, the banks were dropping like flies, and that I didn’t know enough about stocks to make smart picks during the tumult. I did know enough to buy BRK-B at the first buying opportunity but I had so little money at that time I bought less than ten shares. Still I bought them and they’ve doubled in value so that was one good decision made in near total ignorance.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to “recession proof” our lives and our portfolios. This time around, we’re incredibly lucky to have been able to build up a solid foundation already. I’ve still got a bit to learn but the basic outlines are relatively clear to me. We’re personally at least a decade or more away from FIRE even with a bull market so overall we need to stay aggressively invested to build up our wealth. We added some bond funds for stability recently but I’m still thinking about how much we need in bonds to endure a bear market in good health.
Several scenarios come to mind:
(A) a recession with an extended bear market but no job loss,
(B) a bear market + recession + 1 job loss,
and (C) a bear market + recession + both jobs lost.
In scenario A, in theory, I want to have cash on hand to buy more stocks / stock funds as their prices drop. This is assuming that we’re still making decent incomes and expenses stay the same – our savings would remain intact and we’d have cash flow to invest with.
In practice, I need to think about where my purchases should be made (individual stocks that bear dividends vs stock funds) ahead of time so when the prices are dropping during a stressful time, I won’t be irrational and go ostrich. With a buying plan, I’ll actually buy. Without one, I’d hunker down and miss out on good pricing.
Jonathan’s stress test, as a person looking to live off his portfolio for another 40 years, is also a useful thought process though he is far more heavily invested in bonds since he’s further along the process.
In scenario B, we would have to stop saving and investing to make up for the lost cash flow. Mind, we’d have lost half our income (at least) so we’d only be diverting savings from the remaining income. In any case, no cash flow would be available for buying but I could make an argument for diverting a bit of money to buy at low prices. Depending on which of us loses our job, we could also lose childcare which is linked to a job so that reduces one large expense in addition to creating a bit of logistical difficulty job hunting and minding JB at the same time. I’m not factoring in unemployment income specifically because I don’t know how much we could draw and how long it would last. It would simply be plugged in to cover non optional expenses if it does exist.
In scenario C, we start drawing down our savings to cover expenses and slash any optional expenses until we have a new job. We have 1 year in cash and CDs and 6 months in bond funds. Naturally, we would have to make cuts to variable / disposable income type expenses but we don’t have a ton of those. If we lost both our jobs, I would hope that 18 months would let us weather being between jobs but there’s part of me that still worries it’s not enough. I remember how long it took to get another job last time and it’s infinitely more stressful with two adults job hunting and swapping childcare. I’d still be able to do some mini gigs, probably, but that’s really minor income stacked against our expenses.
If we were in a different (better) place financially, I would take a job loss as an opportunity to take a real sabbatical but we’re not in that place yet. I keep looking at our circumstances to find ways we can do better and get to that place but we won’t be there in the next two years.
:: What are your plans for weathering a recession?
I put it out of sight, in my study, where only I can see it, and I have turned it to face the wall. So I am punishing the little fucker like the malevolent clown he was, I can look at it and remember the honour, and above all I am writing behind Lovecraft’s back.
Sniff. I knew Cait from her Blonde on a Budget days and I’ll miss her voice.
Cloud on Reclaiming Time. A friend with an older child talked about this playing into their decision not to have a second child or to add a dog to their family yet. She’s enjoying having her time back and I think it’s really smart of her to make a conscious decision to protect her time.
This is why intersectional feminism and eliminating toxic masculinity is for everyone– when men are assaulted, they are also dismissed, called liars, and disbelieved. Sexual assaulters can go on and hurt many more people before the first targets will be believed. This is atrocious. We need to do better for everyone: women, men, children.
Our library is pretty great but also drives me bananas with their book-licensing habits. They hold licenses for random books in series (see Sue Grafton below) so that you never know which books you can read in what order.
I did some digging to find out that I can make a directed donation to the library so that they will buy the e-books that I very much want to be in their collection so I and anybody else can read them. YAY! I feel better about donating to have them own the books, for some reason. Probably because I’m still staring at 10 moving boxes blocking my entirely full bookshelves.
Also, they let me know that e-books can either be owned by the library entirely for unlimited check outs OR they might be limited by elapsed time or number of checkouts. This was news to me and it kind of stinks but someone pointed out that it makes sense because the library has to replace physically worn out hardcovers, they don’t have to do that for e-books so publishers have to make up their money somewhere else.
I couldn’t write reviews on every book but they were all, unless otherwise indicated, two thumbs up! (more…)
Halfway to four
What I read