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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August 21, 2017
Do we rent out or do we sell?
I was sorely tempted to keep this home as a rental property but ultimately decided against it for several reasons:
- Because of our refinance last year, our monthly costs are quite, relatively, low now. All told, our mortgage, HOA, insurance, and taxes run about $3350 per month. A home this size would probably be renting out for around $3500-3700 per month. That’s a cash flow of $179 to $379 per month. That’s not nearly enough to cover the maintenance and have a real profit margin. The two first years of cash flow would have to be banked against maintenance costs. That could work if I wasn’t so risk averse, we didn’t have any other drains on our income, and we had a comfortable savings cushion to cover our new home expenses. Which leads me to Reason number 2…
- We’re comfortable right now but not once you subtract the new mortgage and reno costs. We need the profit from the sale to recoup that spending. Short term thinking, admittedly, but I’m ok with that given Reasons 3 and 4.
- Both our CA properties are in the worst subduction zone possible. If and when the big one hits, both properties are highly likely to be completely destroyed. I’m not willing to bank my sense of stability on hoping there’s no major earthquake until we can easily afford the deductible on our earthquake insurance for two properties, and deal with the pain of rebuilding both. One will be painful enough.
- I don’t want to be a hands on real estate investor. I’ll do the accounting and management from afar but if we owned a property as nearby as this, I would feel compelled to do much of the property management myself. At this stage in life, that’s not something I’m prepared to do. The other option, hiring a property manager who would take 10% off the top, means the cash flow would be even less. In fact, that expense would drop our cash flow down to nearly nothing.
- After five years, we wouldn’t even qualify for the cap gains exclusion.
What’s the point, then?
I know that this is the right decision for us even if I am grumpy that the math doesn’t work.
Tax implications: Capital gains exclusion
I know, this may not be the first place your head goes to when we’re talking about getting ready to sell your home but this is a huge one in our state, given our market. Once I was sure that selling was the right way to go, I went straight to the IRS for the goods to make absolutely sure our sale qualified and that we were eligible for the exclusion.
How your sale qualifies. Your sale qualifies for exclusion of $250,000 gain ($500,000 if married filing jointly) if all of the following requirements are met.
- You owned the home and used it as your main home during at least 2 of the last 5 years before the date of sale.
- You didn’t acquire the home through a like-kind exchange (also known as a 1031 exchange), during the past 5 years.
- You didn’t claim any exclusion for the sale of a home that occurred during a 2-year period ending on the date of the sale of the home, the gain from which you now want to exclude.
All of these are true: PiC purchased this home long before we married, we’ve both lived here for much longer than the 2-year use requirement. We file jointly but I had to be sure that only one of us had to be an owner for the 2-year ownership requirement because we left the title in his name.
Marriage. Married individuals may exclude up to $500,000 of gain if they file a joint return and neither spouse excluded gain on the sale of another home within a previous 2-year period. If one spouse meets the ownership requirement, both are considered to have met the requirement.
I’m still working on whether or not we are exempt for CA state taxes but I’m reasonably certain that we should be.
Hiring an agent
I know most PF bloggers would say “go take a real estate course, and sell it yourself!” But I’m not (mostly) an idiot. That works for people who don’t have serious and severe limitations on their time and energy. I’m hiring someone to perform a service and to spare me the real pain of having to learn an entirely new skill in a compressed period of time.
I can take the real estate course when I’m not juggling fireballs and spinning ten plates in the air. Later.
We had a great agent referred to us by our friends who were really happy with her services, twice. After meeting with her and chatting by email, we determined that her rate and style were in line with our expectations.
Out of her fee, she would be paying for all marketing, the deep cleaning service, the photography. We’re paying her to advise us of regulations, the best way to market the sale, strategize pricing, do all the marketing legwork, and handling all our negotiations.
She’s the antidote for needing to sell while suffering from a fair amount of information overload, and serious decision fatigue. She’s been incredibly responsive and flexible, going to great lengths to minimize the disruption to our lives, which was highly appreciated considering how much we’re keeping moving at the same time between this sale and our renovations.
She’s even been helping with the seemingly endless packing and transporting furniture to get this place show ready. But that leads into a whole other story, for a whole other day.
:: Have you ever done a FSBO or been tempted to? Or did you go the agent route when it’s time to buy or sell? How was that experience?
August 16, 2017
Books, books, everywhere
We read three books to JuggerBaby before bed every night. On the rare occasions PiC isn’t there for bedtime, that can go up to seven as compensation for loss of daddy, but that’s only happened a few times in zir short life.
We once agreed that after being long distance for nearly a decade, we were ready to settle down and stay that way, in near proximity to our family for a long time.
We repeat lots of books; I’ve read that repetition is good for young children because it helps reinforce language. I can certainly see it developing as ze memorizes the stories and bursts out with truncated rushed narration every few pages.
It makes me wonder what my parents did at this age. Supposedly I already knew how to read so maybe they let me read to myself? We didn’t own many books, though, just the encyclopedia and a dictionary. I remember reading newsprint and smudging everything, though.
Sweet sleeper
For a whole week this month, I was instructed to stay in zir room with zir, after bedtime: Mama sleep dere peez. I’d just lay down and pretend to go to sleep for five or ten minutes, sometimes fifteen, and after several “Mama, what doin?” queries, ze would pass out. On Night 8, PiC passed out during reading and bedtime, so he groggily offered to stay for a while in my stead. Nothing doing, though. Night 8, ze kicked us both out: Mama, Dada, sleep own bed. Good night!
PiC: Can Dada stay?
JuggerBaby: No, Dada sleep own bed, good night!
Well then!
I don’t know why it continually surprises me that JuggerBaby’s sleep habits change so frequently. I’ve never been a good sleeper. Since early childhood, I’ve been prone to nightmares, restless sleep, and insomnia even before the pain became a problem. Was it just wishful thinking to hope that ze would inherit PiC’s amazing powers of falling asleep anywhere, anytime? Probably.
Manners
I love that daycare teaches the kids new concepts, but I don’t love that they don’t come with manners. This month we’ve been working very hard on the concept of manners.
Instead of “I don’t WANT it!!!”, we prefer “No thank you.”
Instead of “I WANT THAT”, we prefer “May I have….”
It took weeks but ze finally started voluntarily asking for things politely:
“May I see?”
“May I hold it?”
“May I have more stickers, please?”
“May I have mama’s purse?”
“May I sleep in big bed, please?”
Bathtime playtime
The bath is incidental, from JuggerBaby’s point of view. Ze just expects to splash in zir tub of water while a bath happens to zir. I used to vaguely plan to get zir some bath toys but ze has been perfectly content with a handful of blocks, a boat, and a few empty shampoo bottles. It used to be about building and stacking, now clearly the imagination has set in as ze “cooks pasta” by using small containers to fill larger ones and we pretend to eat “pizza and pasta and butter and avocado!” (Ew)
What’s even more interesting is that ze clearly understands the concept of “pretend” now. The “pasta” and other food groups are water but ze understands that this is pretend only, so we don’t really drink the water. “Oh, no drink?” “No, just pretend.” “Oh ok.”
I know for a fact that I didn’t grasp that “pretend” wasn’t real until well after 7 or 8. My jerk sibling took full advantage of this, of course. It’s one of the reasons I felt stupid for so long – he was a master at manipulating me from very early on and it took too many years to catch on.
I’m hoping we’re giving JuggerBaby the tools to spot these things without falling for an abuser’s tricks first. I often wonder if our coddling means ze won’t believe us that terrible people exist, when I’m closely related to some of them, because I won’t let them near zir.
Precious #parenting moments
- JB + tape measure: it taller and taller and taller!
Me: Be careful, that can cut you.
JB: and taller and ‘igher and taller ow
- JB: MY CHIN OWIE!
Me: what happened?
JB: I pinch it.
Me: so don’t do that.
JB: Oh.
- Things I’ve washed out of JB’s hair: yogurt, rice, red wax, guacamole, orange pulp, cheese, sand, fur, corn kernels, scrambled eggs…
- Me: JB, you have two minutes before we turn off the tv.
JB: NO!
Me: *mother’s glare of THAT WAS RUDE*
JB: ONE MINUTE!
Me: …. Ok.
:: Did you ever struggle with sleep? Did you prefer to sleep alone or share your room with live or stuffed companions? Is there a good effective way to teach kids about people and their machinations without hurting them?
August 14, 2017
Our savings have been decimated by this year’s spending. The new place and the work required is classified as No Joke and that spending is projected for months. Labor and materials will eat all our cash and liquid funds (CDs). We’re selling some stocks because we’ve got some options expiring in six months. Now if I’d picked up the gift of foresight at the shop like I meant to, I would have exercised those options last summer and avoided the short term capital gains tax. But I didn’t, so I’m leaving aside 40% of the stock sale for taxes.
I haven’t felt this poor in a decade. Nor have I been this stressed about the state of the world, our country’s moral deficiency, or the future in … ever.
Why, you might ask, am I not crying in the designated corner for such heartbreak? Or perhaps gibbering?
Because I have a strategy! Because even though there’s not much I can about about the fact that enough people in this country are racist, sexist, and hateful enough to have elected an evil, morally bankrupt, utterly self serving, cancerous tangerine to office, I *have* been this poor before, seriously poor, and without any of the resources I’ve got at my disposal now. So the money problem I can do something about even while I worry quietly that our economy is due for a bit of a crash soon.
We have two good incomes. Back then, I had one small one and the energy of youth to press my career forward.
This is just a small challenge. A temporary setback.
However. The last thing I want to do is find ourselves in a position where we’ve spent down every last dollar and then surprise! Flat tires! Six in a row. That was 2007. There was much gnashing of teeth and many tears of frustration.
I’ve put up a sign: No surprises are welcome here. My long experience with money, and not having it, is that Murphy usually kicks the sign over, pees on it, and moves in.
Hence, my backup plan: even while we’re cracking open one CD after another, I’m “secretly” hoarding every penny and dollar I can get outside of our usual income. Reimbursements, bonuses, rewards are all fair game.
Every month we get $208 from our daycare reimbursements. Yoink.
Those Chase bonuses? Yoink.
My Swagbucks PayPal redemptions? Yoink.
MyPoints money? Yoink.
Reimbursements of any kind? Yoink.
Any and all little bits of income are getting stashed. It’s hiding in a separate account, complete with alias and trench coat disguise.
We both know it’s there. It’s small but growing, like a tiny revolution against the possibility of more debt as a side effect of swallowing the massive mortgage. If, by some great good fortune, we don’t have to use that to make ends meet, that’s money we can contribute to good causes in hopes that we will have a country worth living and retiring in.
That keeps me sane at night.
:: Do you squirrel away pockets of money or canned goods? How much extra cash helps you sleep at night? Are you supporting any good causes these days?
August 9, 2017
Our travel cost breakdown
Food and lodgings, $125*
Gas, $143
Parking, trolley: $20
Car rental, $317
Books, $100
Badges, $240**
Total: $1,022
* We lodged with friends this year, and they never let us pay for that, so we paid for take out one night.
** This was for two days and two adults. SDCC has a great child badge policy – children are free up to age 11.
This year, the weather was so much better than last year when it was well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit!
The lottery systems this year
Badges: success for us by the skin of our teeth. A good friend wasn’t able to get enough days to make it worth coming out so this was only sort of a win.
Hotels: not necessary this year.
Parking passes: one of the 7 of us got into the lottery! (It was me.) I bought passes for all four days but on consideration, passed that along to my friend because we decided to try the trolley this year. And also because he missed the lottery. Now that JuggerBaby is mobile, it was a really big place we could save, assuming we survived the experience. Every parent of a toddler knows that they go boneless, right? This kid has been practicing that since infancy. It’s awful.
Anyway, the passes were $191.80, versus the $20 we paid for two adults, so it’s a big price tag. That convenience can’t be overstated some days, if you’ve been trudging along for 8 hours logging mile after mile on the exhibit floor! But we were already paying for a rental car to reduce wear and tear on our two cars that are incidentally due for service, so we survived without it this year.
On making it happen.
I found myself dreading the week, rather than anticipating it. This is the second year I’ve felt this way, this time it had everything to do with all the work we had to complete before and after, with the reno. Too much stress!
It was also a bit weird because many of our friends couldn’t come this year, so it was an awfully quiet year but I’m so glad we went. That’s the most relaxed and at home I’ve felt all year, eating with and catching up with Mama S.
On food.
We thought we’d try our hand at cooking with Mama S this year, but it wasn’t a good time for it. We feasted, still: my annual pancit and lumpia, the original baked pasta and garlic bread.
We packed our PB&Js for lunch this year, avoiding the fancy deli meat and veggie sandwiches we used to be weighted down by, and snacks, as always, to avoid the atrocious and overpriced convention center food. I always think it might be better this year, but it never is.
On having fun.
This was a funny old year. Half of our now-usual crew were in attendance, and we picked up a handful of first timer friends to escort around the exhibit hall. We have a Marco! Polo! system by text – we clump together when we find a good booth, we expand and filter out to explore, then text our location to re-cluster the group. There isn’t planning or rhyme or reason, it just works organically.
This year’s exhibit hall was chock full of cute things and fantastic displays. I was hard pressed not to go on a buying spree – only the knowledge that I didn’t want to pack another 60 pounds of detritus saved me.
There was an astonishing Tamatoa cosplayer, a life size Lockjaw promoting the Inhumans show, fabulous (as always) new Lego creations.
We discovered awesome artists, we visited awesome favorites, we laughed til we cried at JuggerBaby.
Empowered by the fantastic superhero costume my unspeakably awesome friends had commissioned, ze spent the whole first day “flying” in spurts through the crowded exhibit hall. No sooner did one of us catch up to the slippery scamp, ze would throw zir “wings” out and race off again shouting “uncle, look at meeeeeeeee!”
Uncle was charmed, of course, and threw over all his plans to run along behind my stampeding bull toddler all day.
I tell zir often that ze’s lucky to be cute but cute won’t last forever.
The second day, ze kept chanting “where is Spider-Man?” No one knows where that came from – we haven’t introduced Spidey to zir lexicon yet! All day, where is Spider-Man?
Uncle spotted a particularly good one and shouted back to me, whereupon I turned and pointed to our right, look, JuggerBaby! Spider-Man is right there!
Spidey heard us and went into a web slinging crouch for zir. As Spideys do.
JuggerBaby, face frozen in a rictus of horror, scaled my leg trying jump right back into the womb. “NO NO NO!”
Poor confused Spidey. He crouched further down to make himself shorter, inoffensive, non-threatening. He did a stupid little jig to look like a clown. Finally he cowered, hiding his head a little, apologetically, because JuggerBaby was having NONE OF IT.
Sputtering, I tried to reassure zir that it was ok and Spider-Man wasn’t going to hurt zir but my sincerity may have been muffled by the choked back laughter.
For the next twenty minutes, ze declared vehemently: I don’t want Spider-Man.
Never meet your heroes, y’all.
On family time.
This is the only place I feel at home away from home. At peace. I forget sometimes that this is the home away from home to retreat to, then I arrive in July and find myself breathing serenely again.
Mama S is the mother of my heart. She’s the best. Period.
This isn’t to malign my irreplaceable mother who physically raised me, just filling my heart with people who are still here so it’s not so lonely. It’s a strange feeling to grow up with tons of family and then be separated from all of them whether by distance or by feud. I’m related to terrible people so I have chosen to distance myself from them and fill that space with good people.
That means being welcomed with open arms, seeing your pictures mingling with the family pictures, sitting around comfortably chatting about old times or random events that have meaning. That means knowing Grandma’s got your back when the toddler is trying to pull a fast one.
Books books and more books!
Highly recommended books are great.
For the adults:
For the whole family:
- Skottie Young and Eric Shanower’s Oz Omnibus Hardcover
- Shannon Hale’s Princess Academy is highly recommended, I might pick that up even though JuggerBaby’s not ready for it yet. For investigative purposes, you know.
For the kids:
Little Golden Books does Star Wars books! And DC books! I did not know this. JuggerBaby loves:
:: What would you have your eye on if you made this pilgrimage?
August 7, 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 enough to prevent me from working.
*** (more…)
August 2, 2017
Right around August 1st, my Spidey sense starts tingling.
It’s Lammas, the first harvest.
For those of us who don’t live by the agricultural calendar, the beginning of the end of summer. Our leaves don’t turn until late September, so the change is just a scent in the air. The heat starts to taper off, with a few days of heat spikes to remind us of summer’s punch, a memory for next year.
Labor Day approacheth! Mingled anticipation and dread! I wouldn’t mind the slide into fall, but for 12 years, saying good-bye to summer was immediately followed by the start of a new school year.
Despite having been out of school well over a decade, a little knot the size of a peach pit still forms in my stomach, leavened only with my love for back to school sales. My peach pit bounces around to the time of “new packs of college ruled paper! New colorful paper folders for a penny!”
Back in the day, my summers weren’t any great shakes, just great long stretches of being out of school. Most were spent at work with Mom, being tutored or running the cash register at their business. One unusual summer, there was summer school which was both incredibly scary and great fun. On the one hand, I hated having to meet new people for a short class. On the other hand, in our science class, we learned to make ice cream with just salt, milk, and ice. Who doesn’t get excited over practical science? #nerd
That enrichment was short-lived, though. We didn’t have money for real summer camp and our school district couldn’t afford real summer programs.
My working-summer theme continued into high school, the more fool me. I worked minimum wage jobs to save for extracurriculars. I was so proud to pay for all my own expenses in senior year. In hindsight, it’s a shame I didn’t ever take advantage of that summer time to be frivolous because there weren’t many of those worry-free summers left for me. As a fully fledged working adult, summer sneaks right on past.
Summers during college were full of overtime. It was also the only time I got a bit of sleep since my reward for working 60+ hours a week was not taking classes for that one quarter of the year.
Summer now? We hardly notice when it starts, except when my teacher friends start attending graduations and then we have Comic Con each year.
I don’t want our summers, and years, to slip through our fingers unnoticed. Most of the time we do well enough staying present in the moment but it’s too easy to take it all for granted as we’re preoccupied with work, school, and growing up.
In a few very short years, JuggerBaby will start school. We’ll have to start making arrangements for JuggerBaby when school is out. Maybe one of my shorter term goals needs to be setting myself up for having half days in the summers so ze and I can enjoy the summer time together. My work is more flexible than PiC’s in that way but who knows, maybe he can arrange something like that too.
It’s never too soon to start brainstorming for that future.
Do we aim to take summers off and do long road trips? That could be hard with an aging Seamus. Right now, he’s usually game for a couple of trips. I can’t tell where JB’s patience levels would be with long stretches in the car.
Do we put zir in day camp and tutoring for half the summer? That’s definitely expensive and time consuming (tuition, commuting), but if there are good educational and fun programs, it could be worth it.
Do I tutor zir in languages and spend our free time playing at the park? (Mother, exercise your patience.)
These are all possibilities.
I’m curious what PiC will want our summers to look like as we go on. I’m guessing it’ll include more home improvement projects than either of us are fully committed to, though.
:: What were your childhood summers like? What do you do now to enjoy summer? Do you love the onset of fall or summer best?
July 31, 2017
[Part 7] This whole post is going to be so much money. About so much money, I mean. Lots and lots of money. Stimulating the economy beyond anything I’d ever imagined would happen in this lifetime.
Hiring out work
The contractor’s labor, and the subcontractors’ labor, is a set price for the most part. I’m saying up front that we’re paying a premium for the general contractor whom we’ll call Bob and I didn’t negotiate a penny of that. Those of you who know me won’t even open your mouths to ask if I was “too embarrassed” to ask for a discount like some people thought.
It was deliberate. I’m a star performer at work, and I know how to treat them. You pay good money to get exceptional results. You do not nickel and dime someone who is going to play a huge role in quality control, and attend to your every need. That’s the best way to demotivate them.
Every week, my decision and refusal to negotiate his rate proves that Bob is worth every penny. He’s honest, hardworking, prompt to reply to any and all questions (stupid or not), shows up whenever and wherever we ask, on top of keeping the project on schedule. By the way, he wrote up a highly detailed schedule for us to work by. All of that makes him a total gem and a complete anomaly as a General Contractor, from the anecdotes of all the horrified friends and family hearing we were on a tight timeline.
But that’s not all!
- He advises us on the best places to source our materials and helps us find discounts without compromising on quality.
- He’s cultivated relationships in the contracting world: he chatted up the project reviewer which resulted in the job being classified as an update, instead of a renovation, and saved us $2700 in permitting costs. I would not have known to ask for that concession!
- When we decided to save money on one of the “work in every room” aspects of the project (lighting) delaying it for later, he discounted his own rate by $350 to do the full job now. We didn’t ask, he offered.
- When he made the wrong call on one of the walls, costing us an additional $500 in work, he made up for it by footing the bill for expensive aesthetic work that I wouldn’t have wanted to pay for, but PiC would have wanted.
- He’s offered us lots of reclaimed and leftover supplies from previous jobs that the owners just wanted dumped. So far, that’s worth a smidge north of $1000.
- The quality of his work is top notch so we passed rough inspection with flying colors.
By the end of this job, I anticipate that he will save us at least half the cost of his fees by doing stuff like this for us. Then there’s simply no price I can put on the sanity that he preserves by doing his actual services: coordinating all the work, hiring and managing the subcontractors, picking up all the materials that we purchase and checking them for damage, making all the returns.
The power of a warranty
Pretty much everything in this place is old enough to be replaced but we have to pick our battles. The roof is old, the wiring is old, the plumbing is old, the water heater is older, the furnace probably has a beard.
However, our realtor bought us a warranty that will cover all appliances, minor roof leaks, the water heater failing. She’s not so sure how well it covers plumbing because her experience has been that they’re finicky on which bits of pipes they’ll cover. Neither of us are willing to play the odds on whether or not the old wiring will catch fire, either, so we’re attacking those items now.
We’ll cross our fingers that the roof isn’t damaged and the water heater keeps truckin’ – but if it does, the warranty is more straightforward on those.
Negotiating costs
There are two places where we can really run up the bills, according to Bob.
The first is our selection of the finished materials like cabinets, flooring, fixtures, and so on. You can choose a $200 toilet, or an $800 toilet. A $20 showerhead, or an $800 shower fixture. Oh yes, you can spend $2000 on a door! (We did not.)
There’s not a lot of negotiation to be done but there are some bits you can do, aside from asking yourself if you REALLY need that super awesome rain bath showerhead.
- Ask for large volume discounts. Home Depot’s Pro shop gives a high volume discount on any orders that are over $1500 in addition to whatever other sales and discounts you can get.
- Ask for small discounts. Our contractor gets a small discount if you use his pro account. We do!
- Bob also advised us that you can often request a 10% discount at Home Depot just because if you go to the assistant store manager, or escalating to the store manager.
- Ask for discounts just because! I online chatted with the good folks at Build.com to ask if they could beat the pricing I had in my cart and they did.
The second place is scope creep, AKA those AWOs that pop up on our progress invoices: Add Work Orders.
Those come up when you’re taking down walls to studs, thank crepes that you did and howl a few choice curses at the moon for what you found: more dry rot. If you didn’t find it, you would have fallen through the floor in about 8 months. Or your new windows would have fallen out when the dry rotted framing inside turned into a pile of splinters. Or when you realize that there’s black mold creeping across the back walls that the seller’s piles of belongings covered up. These weren’t in your original contract and that’s how the Bobs of the contracting world really make their money.
I’m so grateful that Bob was upfront about this little detail – we restructured our entire plan in the first week based on that advice and the saving is clear.
Spending choices: charge it up!
I could have chased down discounted gift cards to pay for supplies, saving 5-7%. For this project, though, I wanted the price protection from my credit card.
American Express will make it right if a store won’t honor their return policy. If something breaks or goes missing, I have protection for 90 days. We are buying tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise. I do not need to expend any personal energy fighting with any single merchant, and paying with the credit card is my insurance against that.
:: Would you (have you) have made any decisions differently? Do you have regrets on hiring someone cut-rate or did you have a great success story in getting a deal?