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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June 26, 2017
After spending an astronomical amount on my phone replacement last year, and PiC’s third replacement trying to crap out, it was way past time to recoup any of our cost possible.
Note: this review is months after my actual sale experience so it’s a little dusty, but you’ll see the reason for that below!
I first signed up for Gazelle but they offered a whole $8 for one of our old phones which is absurd. The phone works well enough if you’re not a power user, which I am.
After poking around good ole Google for a while, Swappa looked promising, so I gave it a try with one of our Androids.
This process is a little bit less straightforward than selling on Poshmark, but nothing ventured, nothing gained!
Useful tips
- The buyer pays for shipping – you have to build into your selling price.
- The buyer pays the Swappa fee – you don’t need to build in your price.
- Sellers are expected to ship within two business days of receiving payment.
- Swappa’s return policy: Sellers define their own return policies on their listing pages.
All seller return policies are based on the pre-condition that the device is received as advertised and in accordance with Swappa policies. No seller may deny a return / refund when a device is not as advertised.
To list and sell your phone
- Factory reset your phone. You could do this later, but it’s best to do it before you take the photos so buyers can see that it’s reset and turns on.
- Supply photos of your phone that show it can turn on, along with the sale code they provide you.
- Supply the ESN (which was incredibly hard to read on our phones because it was printed so tiny) so that the Swappa staff can verify that your phone is in good order.
- Write an accurate description of your phone and what it comes with. I’m still using my charging cord and wall plug for the Kindle, so I only listed the phone for sale with the protective screen cover and the phone case.
- Set your price. I used the current listing prices of the other equivalent phones as a baseline, plus a fee for shipping.
After several weeks of renewing my listing, I had a buyer!
I was notified first of the Paypal payment, then the instructions to ship arrived. I gave the phone one last going over to shine it up nicely, wrapped it securely, and took myself off to the post office where I decided to send it USPS flat rate for the tracking and the confirmation.
The buyer was a bit weird though.
I updated the sale when I shipped and provided the tracking number but there was no reply. Swappa sent him a comment asking him to confirm receipt and formally complete the sale – still no response. The buyer had a week to do so, but didn’t, and didn’t leave feedback either, so Swappa formally completed the sale for me.
A MONTH later, he emailed saying that the phone didn’t work, even though it was in working order when I shipped it.
Since it’d been 5 weeks since I sent him the phone and it was in good condition when it left my hands, as advertised, I offered some basic troubleshooting options and left it at that. He could have attempted to charge it back through Paypal, so I kept the money on the side to wait and see. It’s now been six months with no further communication so it might be safe to say that this one has been put to bed. I think.
Final verdict: My listing sold for $63 less the $7 paid for shipping flat rate with insurance. $56 blows the Gazelle offer out of the water, even with the minor inconveniences and irritations.
:: Do you sell your old tech or recycle it? Do you have a favorite site or store for resale or buying used?
June 21, 2017
I recently visited an overwhelmed friend to help with her laundry and play sounding board. Over towels and bath sheets, she confided in me. She and her spouse had been arguing over everything, she said, stressed by bad decisions, work, kids, work, kids, more stressful decisions. You name it, it was a fight.
In my world, most fights can be resolved by taking a deep breath and letting it out, several times, then figuring out what’s really getting your goat and dealing with that.
Sometimes it takes several hours, or even days, for both parties to cool down and start resolving the issue. That’s fine. What I don’t have time for is endless rounds of fighting over the same thing when the real issue at hand tends to boil down to both partners need to be respectful and/or considerate and/or more direct in some way that they’re not currently being.
That’s a simplification of course, but in general, that’s been a common theme among friends who complain about their marriages. There’s a big difference between complaining about a tricky situation in your marriage, and consistently complaining about the quality of your marriage.
In any case, I’m not a marriage counselor and I don’t offer advice unless asked. What I will do is help with the mountain range of laundry.
Y’all.
89 pairs and 6 stray socks, later? I was ready to fight someone. Leaving aside who needs this many pairs of socks? Leaving aside, also, “who needs 15 different sock styles??”, for the first time, my favorite task felt like an awful chore and no wonder. I wasted 45 minutes of brainpower on socks. I felt like climbing atop that mountain of socks and bellowing: take it all away! Simply your laundry, simplify your life, save your brain!
Reduce decision fatigue, stop wasting brain function on unimportant decisions. Make routines, give your brain the space it needs to be creative and productive.
I keep seeing this message.
Why is this at all a surprise? My best writing thoughts come to me in the shower, or when I’m laying in bed trying not to think. If I’m hung up on a work problem, the dishes get washed or the table gets picked up. In my better days, I’d go for a run. Now, Seamus gets an extra walk to shake the cobwebs. The mundane stroll through the neighborhood clears my assumptions or moves them aside so I can see the solution. Daydreaming and meandering is good for our problem solving.
The key to success is clear, isn’t it? Set routines! Set them for everything!
As a newish mom, I’ve lost the luxury of deciding that starting right now, like in my single and driven days, that from now on, I get up at 5 am, shower, work out, write write write, work work work, eat, work some more. Exhaustion would destroy whatever brain cells I had left, even if I wasn’t dealing with a baby that insisted on changing zir sleep/non-sleep routine every time I relaxed.
But I’m not doomed to suffer, ambition-free and listless, until JuggerBaby becomes a fully actualized human. I’m not doomed because I’m not a martyr, nor am I stupid.
I am going to set myself up for brain freedom and success by minimizing the mental and physical clutter. As much as I quirk an eyebrow at quoting Thoreau’s “Simplify, simplify” for the sheer weight of privilege behind the fact that he could easily simplify by choice (and see Cait’s post on the privileges of choosing to be a minimalist), it does apply here.
Begone, home clutter!
Streamline the closet.
Good-bye to my weird organization system of past jobs. Professional clothes were once separated from lounging / casual clothes to prevent me from sleepily wearing a geeky tee and jeans to the business casual office. Now that it’s all casual, all the shirts /pants / sweaters are now reunited, organized by color, so that I can see everything at once. That’s step one. Step two is making sure that only the ideal wardrobe lives in my closet.
The goal: Mornings, I can grab a clean top, add pants, and voila! Dressed!
Subcategory: Color matching: weeding out most colors. I don’t want to think about whether this clashes with that. Well, not that I do much now but let’s never waste another synapse firing on that again.
Baskets, baskets, everywhere!
Between the dog meds to accompany meals, needing to walk Seamus and JB together, JuggerBaby trying to steal the dog’s leash, phones, keys, and poo bags, and and and … we have instituted a Basket Rule. Everything has a basket. No need to wonder where Thing is, it’s in the Thing Basket. Done.
Subcategory: Nix the (unnecessary) containers. We are battling my love of containers, great and small, and cutting the clutter. Less clutter = less to clean! Win win.
Make gifts easy (and the same)
I found myself asking Twitter for birthday suggestions for a three year old boy and what a load of brainspace that burned! I fell down a black hole of looking at action figures, educational toys, and costumes. Then a friend reminded me, duh, I give money and I give books. Done!
Same with wedding invitations. We have to travel almost every wedding to some remote place that is half impossible to get to without driving for hours and spending serious cash. There’s a trend for child-free events, and we can’t leave JuggerBaby in anyone’s care over a weekend, so we’re declining most invitations. Before JuggerBaby, we couldn’t fit in more than 2 weddings per year, and now it’s even less than that. I send a lovely Nidhi Chandani Everyday Love Art card with a check. Done.
Begone, professional clutter!
Ease up on the side hustle
I have a tendency to take on way more projects in the chase for extra income than there are hours in the day, or energy points in the universe. Instead of flailing about with 20 different projects, doing them all badly, I’ve made it a point to give myself a specific window of time to test out side money projects, and then permission to just stop if it doesn’t pan out, like with mTurk.
A project needs to slot in organically with my life now, and grow organically with the efforts that I put in, because I’m not about to replace my professional job with its many perks with a job that takes even more out of me than I can give, and jeopardize the balance of the rest of my life.
Delegate appropriately, then Back Off!
My bones were made in my professional career by taking on everything in the workplace, big or small, and knocking home runs out of the park with all of them.
There comes a time, especially when you’re managing a staff, to hand stuff over and only monitor progress, not do it all myself. I’ve been managing staff for over ten years now, and it’s still hard to fight the tendency to just quickly do something simple because I know it like the back of my hand with the intention of “helping”, but instead wasting my valuable time, and getting in my team’s way.
What else can I do?
I’m evaluating what I do as I go along, without spending vast stretches of time that I don’t have mulling it over, testing my theories and changing on the fly so the list above is just a start. This ignores the social capital aspects of our lives where we choose to spend time with our loved ones for fun and support.
There are definitely more ways to streamline how we do life and work, and I’d love to hear what you do in your lives.
:: How do you juggle your responsibilities? What’s essential and non-essential?
June 19, 2017
Listening to the West Wing the other day, Toby’s yelling about the need to consider options to save Social Security such as raising the minimum age penetrated my conscious brain. He pointed out that people are living decades longer than they used to, and Social Security was predicated on a life span that was considerably shorter.
As I understand it, you can start claiming benefits at 62 if you’re willing to accept a lower amount but for each year you wait until age 70, the amount increases 8%.
The archived Social Security site says:
If we look at life expectancy statistics from the 1930s we might come to the conclusion that the Social Security program was designed in such a way that people would work for many years paying in taxes, but would not live long enough to collect benefits. Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65. But life expectancy at birth in the early decades of the 20th century was low due mainly to high infant mortality, and someone who died as a child would never have worked and paid into Social Security. A more appropriate measure is probably life expectancy after attainment of adulthood.
It goes on to point out that if we look at the life expectancy after reaching adulthood, then we are indeed living a few more years than we used to.
Obviously, we have many awesome FIRE bloggers who would dispute this retirement age as the appropriate one but they’re (we?) an unusual segment of the population right now.
In my family, we either live well into late 80s and 90s, or we die before 60. If you make it to 60, there’s a solid chance that you have another 20 or 30 years ahead.
Whether they’re good years depends on whether they worked physically demanding manual labor jobs (high likelihood), how good their basic health was, whether they had access to appropriate health care if it was needed. Last and maybe the most important: did they save enough to last them during their later years?
I’d say the latter is a complicated question because, until now, retirement plans in our family have been “move in with the kids and be their childcare in exchange for full support.”
There have been some exceptions.
My amazing grandmother worked her own farm well into her 80s. She had enough saved to last her until her death and still leave a healthy inheritance. One aunt did the usual childcare thing but then moved out when the grandkids were too much of a pain – that’s pretty much unheard of.
PiC and I are the first couple in my family that I know of to actively plan to not follow the usual game plan of have kids, work all our adult years, missing their childhoods, and then depend on them for support while raising their kids. That model simply doesn’t work when there isn’t a cohesive community all around you doing the same which equips them to provide support as needed. We’re hundreds of miles from our dearest friends and relatives, and that’s not likely to change any time soon.
JuggerBaby may be an only. We may want to grow the family more. We may try to foster and adopt if my health allows. There are so many possibilities and it hardly seems possible to plan for them all, but it must be possible.
We have been saving for retirement for years, I started when I was 21. I don’t have a FIRE date in mind but once the dust settles, I’ll decide what it is and our salaries together will work on reaching it.
I’d love to set it at age 40 but that’s just a pie in the sky number right now. We have to let the dust settle with the house, the renovations, the mortgage, and all that jazz before I dive headfirst into another massive plan.
:: When you plan to retire? Do you have grand plans for that time of your life or is that still hazy?
June 14, 2017
Skills
Complete sentences and abstract thought
JuggerBaby normally skips words ze can’t pronounce or doesn’t think are relevant. This makes for conversations more akin to translating pantomime and Choose Your Own Adventure than communication. It gets even fuzzier when ze slips into a play-pretend mode in the middle of a normal conversation. At dinner we might be talking about people ze knows, the food’s characteristics, and then suddenly we’ll be pretending to drink tea, or cooking. I’m sure JuggerBaby wonders why we’re mentally slow and why it takes us 5 minutes to catch up to zir imaginings.
As usual, the norm abruptly changed this month.
Out of the blue, ze started telling us “I like this!” Who taught zir that concept?? But munching down on some pastry, ze will cheerfully pipe up: mama, I like this!
And the next day: mama, I need water, please!
And then: no more stah-berries? No more boo-berries? Onee peach right now?
It seems like ze is grasping the more abstract concepts that we don’t always have exactly what ze wants, when ze wants it. That led me to thinking of how I don’t remember ever complaining of hunger as a young child. Though I certainly skipped meals with unhealthy regularity in the early days of this blog to save money, I will never forget to be grateful that my child has enough to eat.
Fruit according to JuggerBaby and language shifts
Stah-berry – strawberry
Boo-berry – blueberry
Peesch – peach
Backberries- blackberries
JuggerBaby’s taking liberties with the English language again. Suddenly everything comes with an “y” at the end of it:
Noy = no
Oh noy! = oh no!
Boy = bowl
appy ertay oo-oo = happy birthday to you
moy = more
Toddler portion sizes
Speaking of eating, it seems that JuggerBaby is finally eating about the recommended toddler portion sizes for a meal. From the point ze started eating solid food til about 2-3 weeks ago, ze has eaten 2-3 times the recommended-by-pediatricians amount, and has suddenly switched to a much lower gear and eats far far less. At first I was a bit worried but ze wasn’t starving, just self regulating. A few times it was really because playing during dinnertime was more entertaining than eating, but waking up two hours early and STAAAARVING seems to have taught zir a lesson in eating when the eating’s good.
Counting
Ze can count up to ten, but ze hasn’t made the connection between the numbers and the idea that they are used in a specific way. Ze used to count all the items on the dinner table, this is how I know ze knows 1-10, but ask zir to count at any random time and ze will cheerfully do so: one-two, one-two, one-TWO!
…. that’s six.
Reading comprehension
Ze is on a huge mimicking kick right now. Clearly both we and zir teachers are doing the same things when we read. Normally, when I read simpler stories to zir, I try to engage zir by asking what things are on the page. It’s backfired. Now ze insists on holding the book up and points at every illustration quizzing us: wat izzit?
Now I encourage zir to act out parts of the story instead. See me next month when ze turns me into zir very own thespian to direct.
Household chores
The industrious little helper monkey I always joked about has arrived! JuggerBaby now insists on peeling oranges for me, and vacuuming, obsessed to the point of falling to the ground crying when I hooked up a new attachment to the vacuum and didn’t give zir first dibs.
Too like a mischievous monkey, though. You can never turn your back on zir without possibly being leapt on. You might be unable to lift your left leg for reasons of 30 pounds of child suddenly latching onto it, or having that same child dart around you cackling and racing to shut the door in your face.
Helper monkeys may be more work than help.
It’s also really strange to see how zir empathy works, or doesn’t. Ze thinks nothing of slapping you across the face, clawing at you like a angry cat, pinning down a limb and trying to bite the belugas out of it. Not a drop of remorse to be found, and if you were caught by surprise and yell “ow!” ze laughs like a homocidal sociopath.
At the same time, I’ve explained that some games are too rough because my hands hurt and each time I decline to hold hands and play a rough game, ze gently holds that injured hand, asks “mama ow?”, pets it, kisses it and gently hugs me. Or ze will get wildly enthused about something, grab my painful hand, and even before I can wince, ze catches zirself and says “oh no! Mama ow!”
Even stranger, it might have been a few days since my hands were that dire, but ze will remember and scold me for playing with that hand, patting it and reminding me that it hurts.
It’s hard to reconcile the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde flip flops.
Sweet sleeper
We always have our ups and downs but I cherish those nights when we have a peaceful dinner, quiet bathtime, go through a pile of books and then ze settles in for sleep. I’m not sure how it’ll work when we open up the crib so ze isn’t trapped anymore but ze usually has several good nights in a row settling in without a fight for a long night of sleep. The irony is I can’t thoroughly enjoy the peace because of my own recalcitrant body, but I appreciate the ability to lay down starting at 8 or 9 and stay put!
Precious #parenting moments
- JuggerBaby kissed me on the nose and then head butted me twice. That sums up our relationship pretty well.
- My two freaking year old just told me “I do me, mama, you do you.”
- JuggerBaby grabs my hand and shakes it: nice to meetchu!
- JuggerBaby hovering a piece of an orange rind near zir mouth: “ahh? ahhh?” Joke’s on you, kid.
:: What helper animal would you pick? What’s your favorite summer fruit?
June 12, 2017
On the one hand, I am Superwoman.
I handle my full time job like the pro that I am. My family is fed, hygienic, healthy, and mostly happy – though Seamus would submit to you that my refusal to share carnitas tacos is inhumane and unacceptable. My hobby (writing here) is still fun after nearly 11 years. My friends are wonderful people and I gladly support them through health, home, and career crises on a sometimes daily basis. Without a doubt, I’ve knocked the money thing out of the park on a regular basis – I save expansively, spend moderately, invest bravely, and generate odds and ends income creatively.
I remain Seamus’s most dedicated groomer and vet tech, I tend to his medications, food, and all nursing care so that he’s had the best six months of allergy-related symptoms of his life.
On a good day, one would assume I had it all together in a neat little package with a bow on top. When things are normal, it’s true – my default mode is set to awesome with a few dashes of slobby.
I had to check three times yesterday if my pants were on and buttoned before I left the house. After the backwards pajamas the night before, that shouldn’t have been such a close call. I’ve gone five days in a row without brushing or combing my hair – the blessings of short hair! If there wasn’t a mirror in the hallway, those three times I remembered to brush this mop would have been exactly zero. This isn’t really new territory for me – after a few years of working mostly remotely, I’ve reached an unprecedented level of non-concern about my dress because the only thing that matters at work right now is that I am awesome. Which I am.
But.
With the new home in the picture, all the prep work with our (fantastic!!) general contractor has driven me to distraction. Literally.
I’m burning the candle at both ends. I’m doing my usual: daycare dropoff/pickup days, cooking dinner (PiC cooks breakfast and packs lunches, I make dinner), managing our regular money stuff.
Pile on organizing the new mortgage, setting up the new utilities, reviewing and revising our labor and materials budgeting, contract writing and review, preliminary design, and discovery of more things wrong with the place. We intended to make the kitchen functional and update a bathroom. That leaking tube means we definitely have dry rot in the framing. After several hours of site visits and digging deeper, the remodel has turned into a major gut and rebuild problem. I won’t even get into the thousand moving parts that the GC and I are keeping in motion aside just to get a contract organized, from the almost routine surprise discoveries as we get to explore the space further in limited spurts.
But what else do we have behind Door #3, Vanna? We have summer! Summer, which is the absolute worst for Seamus’s allergies. I’ve changed his medication, his diet, his exercise routine, everything. It’s done wonders. But nothing we’ve come up with has been able to ward off the summer allergy attack – so once a year, for three months, I have to clean, salve and wrap his feet 2-3 times a day to keep the hot spots under control and the skin from tearing.
Y’all. The wall? It’s been hit. My entire being has gone through the wall like the Kool-aid man and fallen over.
I’ve gotten TONS done in a short period. The price was my sanity and health. My body tried to quit!
It’s one thing for me to forget what’s going on with the wardrobe. It’s another thing to pull out of the driveway and take a puzzled Seamus to daycare instead of to the vet. And it’s entirely another when I drive to a nearby shop to pick up a few things, but start walking home because I had forgotten that I’d driven! That was both funny and, in hindsight, a bit alarming.
My gastrointestinal system went full Dark Side for a week, constant pain and threat of vomiting kept me up nights. Digesting food was no longer a job for THIS body. All major joints were creaking fit to challenge the Tin Man, my fingers were moonlighting for sausage commercials. Taking calls for an hour took all the breath out of me, I had to sit for three hours just to stop breathing shallowly. My ribs hurt when I did that silly breathing thing.
A friend prodded me: time to ask for help (stupid!). Even after more than a decade of being together, I still don’t remember to ask PiC for help! He’s Right There.
I texted him and confessed it was time. He’d been pressing me to do a little less but couldn’t tell what he could take off my plate without getting bitten. He gladly offered up some chores he would take over and I picked a few.
Now the trick is actually letting go of them. One finger at a time!
- PiC has started makin more design decisions on the house, solo.
- I’ve negotiated a new lower rate for a year with Comcast. I can worry about finding a better replacement for them next year, not now.
- We have a $200 credit with Munchery that I’ve hoarded for months. Expensive though they have gotten, it’s time to just use the credit so I’m not cooking 3 times a week. We can get 2 or 3 more deliveries over the next few months so it’s time to strategically deploy that money already spent.
It’s taking a long while to repair the fatigue caused by the many days of unremitting pain but I am already seeing a little bit of improvement, and best of all, I don’t have to avoid food anymore!
We’re keeping our eye on the ball, this is going to get worse before it gets better and we have a lot of work ahead of us still.
Speaking of the work, initial rough quotes for the now MAJOR renovations are right around what I was expecting which is to say: $$GULP. It’s a good thing the past five years have been centered around building whopping loads of savings held in CDs and some stock options. Ideally the stock options would have been exercised over a year ago but having failed to be psychic, we’re going to have to take the short term capital gains hit to access that cash. Drat that lack of a third eye!
:: What are your favorite ways to reduce stress when work or home issues blow up?
June 7, 2017
I have to 5 to-do lists on Trello, 3 calendars for work and home scheduling, a paper planner, and countless spreadsheets for every financial decision we make.
Am I the most organized, productive person on the West Coast, ticking items off one list after another?
Nope.
That used to be true. But these days, the massive system just keeps me on top of things rather than several steps behind.
In today’s reality, my subconscious brain makes the call on what I’m going to get done regardless of the priority or urgency. I can make myself focus on the urgent deadlines but if I just sit back and let my whims steer the ship, you’ll see that it basically chooses decisions to make that I am capable of making based solely on my ability / energy no matter how bizarre it might seem.
This weekend was all errands: food shopping, more food shopping, setting up our Costco membership. Many miles were walked.
So many miles.
After dropping JuggerBaby off in zir crib for a nap, I crawled into bed and pulled out my phone for some research. Instead of dealing with house-hunting stuff, I researched holiday cards and picked the design that we’ll use this year. Mental note – still need to confirm that it’s cheaper to order 75 cards from Costco than to stitch together “10 free cards!” offers from Tiny Prints and Shutterfly, paying mostly for shipping and an additional 30 cards.
Sometimes I wonder why we spend time and money on holiday cards but then I remember that it’s important to PiC, so we do it. Mostly I do it. I don’t mind, it’s part of my money-related control freak thing, but it does take energy.
It’s not even June yet but house-hunting requires 10 units of energy and I only had 2, so a 2-unit of energy item, holiday cards, was served up on my mental board. This way I’m usually always getting something done even if it makes no sense.
This morning I couldn’t get out of bed without sixteen body parts twanging and sending up alarms so I’m taking a half day to rest. But before collapsing, I had started the rice cooker and slow cooker, so I’m “cooking” dinner even while I’m laid out, unable to lift my arms.
Would that I were always so well prepared.
:: How do you save yourself on tough days?
June 5, 2017
On Money
Income
Our normal income comes from two full time day jobs.
We experiment with earning money on the side, including minimal cash flow that we don’t touch from an investment property and investing in dividend stocks.
Some side income comes from Swagbucks, selling clothes on Poshmark which is hit or miss, and tracking activity through Achievement (my introduction to it).
The long term goal is to replace our day job income before my health declines and prevents me from working.
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