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
You joined me on this stressful, ugly, painful path last year and I’m starting to breathe a sigh of relief as I share this: decoupling our finances is finally done.
I’ve stopped paying his rent.
I’ve stopped paying his utilities.
I’ve stopped paying for his gas, groceries, car registration, insurance, and cell phone.
We removed all identification information that I knew of from the old house so he doesn’t have easy access to my SSN and placed security freezes on all three credit reporting agencies so he can’t get to my credit.
He doesn’t know our new address.
He doesn’t have any of PiC or JB’s personal information, and their names are so common anyway that they don’t show up in Google searches.
My name is not common so I routinely request the removal of my personal information from data scrapers. (more…)
This story made my eyeballs leak a little. Apologies that it’s not in a very readable format, but it’s worth it if you can.
We’re getting better and better at packing lightly but I always felt awful at it during JB’s infant years. GenYMoney inspires me to do better at it with her 12 days traveling with just carry-ons!
Boom! Lawyered: Pregnant and Going to the Doctor? You Might End Up in Jail
I remember giving what seemed like endless urine samples during my pregnancy and I am pretty sure that they didn’t tell me it was for drug screening. Simultaneously, they were really persistent in scheduling me with a maternal health drug and alcohol therapist of some sort. I was equally persistent in dodging her because it seemed unnecessary. When we finally had our interview she seemed tense at first but then started to laugh at all my bland incredibly boring answers. They were concerned I was a drug addict and that’s why I was dodging the appointment.
Call me morbid but I’m always reading articles about how people dealt with their parents’ passing looking for ways to make our estate plan and paperwork more airtight and clear cut so that in the event of one of us passing, there isn’t much work for the other person.
A stunning chart shows the true cause of the gender wage gap: “Historical drivers of the gender wage gap — a lack of education among women, for example — are disappearing. But the professional penalty women face for having children is stubborn, and it isn’t going anywhere.”
JB has been asking for a lot of Elmo lately. Normally I don’t mind but for the last couple of weeks, his squeaky voice has been getting on my last nerve so I was pleased to find this version of Elmo that satisfies zir request and doesn’t annoy me!
“What can you accomplish in a year?” I always ask myself.
The answer feels like should be “SO MUCH.” Build a business, create a life, rescue and rehabilitate a dog. Make a difference.
This year, the answer feels like a Big Fat Nothing. It’s felt like it’s been a BFN for three years now, and I started pointing the finger at JB (unfairly) forgetting that it wasn’t just our entry to parenthood that knocked me off my rails.
The truth is I’m hungover from last year.
This post started out as my thoughts on going six rounds with imposter syndrome. But the more I wrote, the more clear it was that once again my unrest was about something much more than that.
I’m happiest when my family is happy and healthy, my performance at work is stellar, my friendships are fulfilling in both directions, our money is in order, and my home is a safe burrow within which I spend 90% of my time.
It’s a given that something will boil over in one or more of those areas at any given time. That’s life. So long as most areas are stable, I can handle any issues blowing up in a couple of areas.
Are you naturally a money-worrier (hello friend), or does it depend on your situation?
It’s been said that you can’t rely on the wealth you accumulated, you can only truly rely on the skills that you have that would let you start over if you really had to. Having come up from near the bottom, for years, it was easy for me to agree with that.
I knew how to climb the ladder, having done it before. I have a strong work ethic and drive. It wouldn’t be fun or easy, but it was doable.
These days, it’s more complicated than that. It’s about money and it’s about more than money.
My worries about money on a day to day level are much reduced now that we bring in two good incomes and have dedicated savings. Some time back, our focus pivoted to building wealth with a background of simple living and frugality, no longer preoccupied to the point of breaking on survival. That was a massive change.
On baby books: “At their worst, the Baby Trainers seemed to suggest that my son was best thought of as an unusually impressive dog, who could be trained, using behavioural tricks, to do what we wanted: if we stopped responding to his night-time cries, he’d learn that he could return to sleep without our assistance and would, as a consequence, stop crying.”
I laugh because much of raising JB has been like training a slightly clever dog. A much more clever dog, Seamus, assists (judges & corrects) us in the training process when he thinks we’re wrong.
Maybe this is what I’m trying to do in therapy – work on the process of moving on and forgiveness. Saying forgiveness is hard for me because I don’t think I’ll ever truly forgive Dad in the sense that I let him off the hook for what he’s done to me and my family, but rather I need to find a way to let go of the hurt and the resentment that’s lurking. Perhaps the conflict there, the inability to accept forgiveness as defined, is what’s preventing me from embracing it.
This analysis of the recent layoffs at B&N makes me sad. Barnes & Noble and Borders crushed most independent bookstores, so they’re no saints, but it makes me sad that B&N is now laying off employees in the way that does look a whole lot like the executives are trying to milk the cash cow for as long as possible until it dies. It also makes me sad that we’ll eventually lose another cool place we liked to meet friends for kids’ activities.
It’s done.
On Money
