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
Micro-income: Achievement. Another 10,000 points combined for diligently answering my chronic pain surveys and being active equals $10 in PayPal. Not bad. I do wish I had a better app to connect than Google Fit though. That earns a paltry 6 points per day of activity instead of points according to the amount of activity.
Mrs. Steward on work uniforms. I am developing a very uh … shabby chic(?) uniform? I own one pair of jeans that are showing their age, a very comfy pair of athletic type pants and three pairs of leggings in variable quality and thicknesses. Most of the time the jeans and athletic pants are rotated all week, but I started rotating the black leggings with a longer top plus my super comfy cardigan. What do you wear to work and play?
A friend recently asked how I control spending. That’s both a simple and complicated answer.
If we’re just talking about the literal HOW DO YOU DO IT, these are the technical steps that I take:
First up is willpower! This is the weakest of the ways. Willpower is finite.
Depending on how challenging your days or your life feels, it can be so limited as to feel non-existent! I understand this: if you return to The Precious ten times and say no ten times, that’s 9 other times that you could have been saying no to something else or exercising better judgment.
However, it’s the most important initial set of brakes on the impulse to buy. Once I say no the first time and it pings my consciousness again, then I push it to the next step.
Sometimes I’m fresh out of willpower but I have just enough energy to pull out the credit card. Oh let’s not pretend I don’t have that card number memorized. I do.
So let’s say I don’t even have willpower or the precious little left needs to be preserved. Call in the reinforcements!
These pretty sparkly pretty (sparkly!) Star Wars flats lured me in ….
Talking to my dear mentor-friend about living spaces, I was mulling over my wish to have just a bit more.
We are usually perfectly comfortable with what we have for 2 adults, 1 child, 2 large dogs, and hosting 1-2 adult guests for a week at a time multiple times a year. But there is still a bit of me that wishes we had just a tad more.
She declared that buying too much house was just a waste. She’s absolutely right.
The “more” I want is just a bit more luxury. The ability to comfortably host 1-3 of JB’s friends at a time (at this age, a friend means the whole family with siblings) or even just our own friends and their families for birthdays and other celebrations – 300 square feet inside. The ability to have spacious grass for the dogs to play AND a food-producing garden – 200 square feet outside. The space in the garage to fit two cars without playing Tetris each time we pull in – 50 square feet. Room to plant tall and thin plants along our side walls so that our neighbors can’t just glance over and see everything we’re doing – 50 square feet.
Even if we had to pick just two, we would have been paying a whole lot more money, though. Let’s say we got a bigger place which has, on average a lower price per square foot. Not low, mind you, just lower than our current PPSF. There’s a place listed for 1.25M in our neighborhood with about 2400 square feet. It’ll sell over list price, they almost always do, so call that a 1.3M/2400 square foot = $540 per square foot.
Just skipping the garage Tetris? $27,000. Hosting space? $162,000.
Put it that way, paying $200-400 a year to rent out space a couple times a year, for the kids to play or to host a birthday party, is looking like the far more affordable option. We usually celebrate birthdays with a special home cooked dinner and a couple of friends over, so really, it’s just big milestone birthdays we’d host.
And honestly, though I get a pang of envy whenever we visit friends in the Midwest who have 3000+ square feet, I don’t want to be cleaning all that! Our hands are full with what we do have right here. If we were actually rich then we could stimulate the economy to hire a house cleaner, a gardener, and what have you. But we’re not so it’s all DIY for the daily living chores.
So in the end, my mentor-friend stays right. At a much bigger footprint, our house would own us, not the other way around. That’s no way to live.
:: How much room do you have? Is it enough, too much, or do you wish for more?
I most certainly dream about luxury travel but we still haven’t done it. The most luxurious thing we’ve done is enjoyed a lounge as part of our travel card benefits. The travel itself remains the main attraction.
I want to jump up and down for NK Jemisin who won a third Hugo in a row. Historic! Her Broken Sky trilogy is beyond amazing. (This link is NOT broken, WordPress is just being a wart and pretending that it is, and I can’t fix it. ARGH!)
Cloud on uncertainty and grace. I’m trying to practice this now that we’re hitting some troughs in our once-balanced lives. We’ve had an extraordinarily good run in job stability and it’s ended but I remind myself that we went through a trough before this good peak and that if we are lucky and work at it, we will end this trough with another peak. I can’t embrace the good without acknowledging and understanding that bad comes with it. Or put it another way, we spent three years with professional ease which allowed us to deal with a most difficult phase of parenting and now that THAT is arguably less harrowing, the professional side of our lives needs more attention. That’s fair.
I’m glad to see Kelly Marie Tran again. The online harassment of her as a woman and POC with a leading role in Star Wars was unconscionable. Also, I adored her character in Star Wars.
First Burn
I missed this Hamildrop in April but it is SENSATIONAL. Just utterly beautiful down to the bone.
One of my long-standing bastions of money irrationality has finally fallen! It’s been a long time coming and I’m very proud of making the progress, finding the emotional maturity and steadiness, needed to take it down.
I’m incredibly risk averse and conservative in my money management. This trait (habit?) goes waaaay back.
I was once a workaholic, wrapped up in building my career and scrutinizing every single move and communique like it might have hidden gold or a secret message for success because every penny mattered. Because I had to support a family even before crossing the threshold to adulthood, at age 17, any money that I earned went to paying down debt and building up a basic savings account instead of investing in a Roth IRA. I had to keep cash on hand at all times because there was always something going wrong: someone got sick, my trainwreck sibling had run up another utility bill, an endless stream of flat tires, dental emergency, or more dental issues.
Obviously, after many long, tough years of working and saving, I made it through that period. But also just as obviously, I bear the scars which translate to being even more risk averse. At this point in time, I’m highly concerned about the possibility of a recession in the next few years, as well as highly concerned about our job security. There’s always been a question mark over my job, but recently one has been hung over PiC’s job, and that brought all of my fears back to the fore.
My former property manager was a disaster. For the purposes of this post and my crankiness, she’s being renamed from Crappy Old Property Manager to Fiasco. She ran hot and cold: sometimes taking care of business and communicating, sometimes taking days and weeks of emails to get something done.
The rent was usually paid on time, but every so often, we’d run afoul of the HOA rules because the tenants weren’t in compliance now and again. The issues were things I THOUGHT were simple, and wondered why they couldn’t manage to comply but I didn’t take direct action. I’m a bit of novice at this and wasn’t sure of the right course of action.
Normally I wouldn’t do business with someone this inconsistent, I was enjoying being hands off too much in these first years with JuggerBaby and all the house stuff. But no more. It turns out that there was so much wrong under the surface, I’m so glad that I got fed up before the mess got much worse.
There’s an outstanding balance that the tenants haven’t been paying from the HOA morass two years ago and Fiasco claimed the tenants were aware of it every month but wouldn’t pay down more than a fraction of it. Fiasco dismissed it as something that’ll just come out of the security deposit but as I reassess the value of each person I’m paying money to work for me, that’s just not going to cut the mustard. We don’t know what, if anything, we’ll need the security deposit to pay for at the end of these tenants’ stay, but if it’s significant, I don’t want to have wasted it on this bill. (more…)
A friend recently asked how I control spending. That’s both a simple and complicated answer.
One of my long-standing bastions of money irrationality has finally fallen! It’s been a long time coming and I’m very proud of making the progress, finding the emotional maturity and steadiness, needed to take it down.
My former property manager was a disaster. For the purposes of this post and my crankiness, she’s being renamed from