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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May 19, 2017
Every time I question what kitchen implements we REALLY need, the slow cooker reminds me that it earns its keep. This recipe was fantastic. Loosely translated: ridiculously easy, and cheap since we found the pork shoulder blade on sale for $1 a pound. That never happens around here! I bought four.
Ingredients
5 lb pork shoulder blade
1.5 tsp salt
2 tsps dried oregano
.25 c olive oil
8 minced garlic cloves*
Directions
*I would have done many more but I just didn’t have the oomph. I’m considering buying prepeeled garlic so that I can have all the garlic I want without collapsing.
Combine the salt, oregano, garlic, and olive oil, cover all sides of the pork and marinate overnight if you have time. I started this too late to marinate it, so I just popped it in on High for 5 hours and voila!
That was really all there was to it. It was great served on rice with steamed broccoli, or shredded for burritos and tacos. We have an abundance of guacamole this month and we’re having tacos most nights. It’s been pretty awesome.
May 17, 2017
Skills
Sleep routines
Our sleep routine is finally starting to settle down a bit – this month, ze hit a phase where it was ok to do the bath, books, song, bed routine, with two notable exceptions. Ze now insists that papa go clean up, while mama massages zir feet. It seems the memory of the massages I used to do before bed when ze first had an eczema break-out have stuck.
I can’t blame zir, if I could have a foot rub before sleeping every night, I’d demand it too!
But the one thing I’m finally remembering now is that sleep will always change. We’ll enjoy every full night of sleep we get and get through the rest.
Toilet training
Toilet training continues apace with some ups and downs. JuggerBaby has also fallen in love with Elmo of Sesame Street which means that if ze sees an Elmo on a diaper, even if it’s a swim diaper, ze quickly runs to change into that one. Thanks, Sesame Street.
Some days, ze is eager and happy to try the toilet, other days, you’d have to drag zir kicking and screaming. Like with the sleep, we just have to be patient and get through it day by day.
Table manners
On occasion, there are foods that JB doesn’t care for, or tasted and thinks is The Worst. Zir typical response is to hand the glob of half masticated gross back to me – I don’t want it!
We’ve been working on training zir to just set it in the corner of zir own plate or the edge of the bowl, instead.
It’s taken several weeks, but I think the lesson has finally sunk in. Instead of reacting like an enraged howler monkey when a bite of food isn’t pleasing, ze just calmly sets it aside and moves on. I think the key here is that we’ve not been harassing zir to eat everything on zir plate at every meal. That doesn’t seem like a battle worth fighting since ze is normally relaxed about trying out new foods. Turning it into a fight would probably mean that ze refuses to stay relaxed about trying since we’d be taking away zir ability to choose. Besides, generally, ze will return to previously rejected foods like asparagus and enjoy it.
One minute, please
JuggerBaby has been struggling with communication. Ze tries really hard to tell zir classmates what ze wants, or doesn’t want, but they don’t always understand or want to cooperate.
Bestie is great, though they have their little tiffs, ze understands JuggerBaby and they have a great system of trading. As an act of desperation, overseeing a small pack of 1-3 year olds, I taught JuggerBaby to ask zir companions to trade toys if they weren’t ready to give them up yet. It was a better approach than just trying to grab or yell MAH TUNE! (my turn!) when ze wants to play next. It worked when I was there to explain what trading meant, it didn’t work quite so well when ze offered up a trade item without explaining and trying to force the exchange. Luckily Bestie knows when JB offers an alternate toy, ze intends to trade, and will willingly trade back later if asked. So at least one kid understands zir!
The great thing that came out of our parent teacher conference, though, was the two-minute concept.
I use a one-minute version of it at home. When ze is being especially rambunctious and needs to be chased down and tackled, you still can’t force arms and legs into flailing limbs without growing a third one of your own! To ask JB to cooperate, I’ll say “it’s Mom’s turn for one minute, ok?” and VOILA! Ze will actually stop fighting and comply! It’s a tiny magic bullet in parenting.
Things we bought
Our pediatrician has never suggested that we buy anything specific for JuggerBaby, he’s a very mellow and go-with-the-flow kind of doctor, but my GP made some great suggestions for our travel planning.
Water wow
The mess-free, water-only coloring book. I love it.
The color is already embedded in the pages, all the kid has to do is brush water on the page and then colors appear!
JuggerBaby LOVES watercolors already, but there’s no way I’m flying with, and juggling, watercolor paints on a plane. Granted, this does nothing for teaching them to actually color creatively but that’s what a handful of crayons and blank pages are for. It’s also a reusable book so we don’t have to just use it and discard it, which pleases the Good Steward in me.
Reusable sticker scenes
I was skeptical about the idea of reusable stickers. JuggerBaby’s early habit of trying to eat the stickers made me doubt that it’s a good idea at all, but it turns out that these stickers only stick to their intended surface. They’re perfect!
Ze recently came into a small trove of puffy or fuzzy stickers and has been carefully sticking and unsticking it on various locations in the house. I’m pretty sure there’s a fuzzy dino stuck to my desk right now. Ze still tries to eat regular stickers, of course. Because OF COURSE.
Favorite books
This massive list is for Penny to help her with Half Penny’s library.
Little Golden Book: My first counting book: This was a new addition to our library and we had to read it three times a day, every day.
Nursery Rhyme Comics: 50 Timeless Rhymes from 50 Celebrated Cartoonists: Ze has finally picked some favorites so we don’t have to read ALL FIFTY NURSERY RHYMES daily. Whew.
Dr. Seuss’s ABC (Beginner Books, I Can Read It All By Myself): This is a car-favorite as well.
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie: We read a lot, can you tell? Ze asks for this at least five times per weekend.
If You Give a Moose a Muffin: We’re not a fan of this book, or the Pig story, because the animals seem like such takers but we use the opportunity to remind JuggerBaby that just because someone asks you for increasingly ridiculous things, you are not obligated to satisfy the request! Also, don’t feed the wildlife.
Dr. Seuss’s ABC: An Amazing Alphabet Book: It’s not clear what ze loves about this book now that ze knows zir letters, mostly, but still, we read it.
The Foot Book: Dr. Seuss’s Wacky Book of Opposites
Big Dog . . . Little Dog: Bit of a silly read but ze likes it.
Go, Dog. Go!: This is where JuggerBaby learned “red light means stop!” It’s a useful phrase for a toddler bent on destruction.
Oh, the Places You’ll Go!: A fan favorite, though ze hasn’t tried to read it by zirself yet.
Pulelehua and Mamaki: A wonderful book about the Kamehameha butterfly from Hawaii.
Penguin on Vacation: We like these books in English or any other language we can get them.
Penguin and Pinecone
Beep! Beep! Go to Sleep!: JuggerBaby can’t help but yell along with this one.
There’s a Wocket in My Pocket! An early favorite with stamina. We read this in the car a lot.
I Thought I Heard a Tiger Roar (Light Up the Mind of a Child Series): We don’t love reading this but JuggerBaby picks it at least three times a week so what do we know?
I am Amelia Earhart (Ordinary People Change the World): Technically for older readers but JB enjoys it.
I am Rosa Parks (Ordinary People Change the World): Again, for older readers, but you can tell JB is following the narrative, and feels strongly about the racism described. We also tell zir about the ongoing struggles with racism that we see today.
Down at the Beach: A delightful gift from a friend, this is read to the tune of “Wheels on the Bus”.
:: What are some of your favorite books for kids or young adults? How much sleep are you getting these days? Did you take mortal offense if your rejected food stayed on your plate?
May 15, 2017
[Part 4] We’ve looked at dozens of homes online and in person. We started working on this in February. By mid-March I was pretty sure that nothing was going to come onto the market that we wanted. We didn’t even see anything worth making an offer on until about April.
Oddly, this made me feel better about the process. Probably because it gives us more time to save!
We’ve done our preliminary budgeting and number crunching, though I did it again for every house that we made an offer on.
Together, on the advice of our broker, we wrote up our list of must haves.
She advised us to write our entire list separately, and then combine them to get our top 3 picks together. We were very Gift of the Magi on this one – PiC prioritized a better microclimate for me, I prioritized a maximum distance/commute time for him. It turns out that I don’t actually want the better microclimate anymore, which is a frugal win, because I’ve gotten used to the year-round fog and appreciate that we don’t need central air! My fibro has actually adapted to the colder weather these past few years, so warmer weather is not longer good for me. Blasphemy from a sunny SoCal gal but there it is.
We’ve now submitted multiple offers and a pattern has emerged.
- The $$$$$ option is to pay through the nose for an essentially finished home and live with it for a decade, making no changes because we cannot afford to, no matter how gaudy or stupid their upgrades were. And my goodness some upgrades are stupid. There’s the fully remodeled kitchen that had no oven, sold for $1.1M. There’s the “fully remodeled” house that might maybe have electricity but nothing else, listed for $989,000. There was the perfectly perfect house with a microwave smaller than a chihuahua and stairs that would kill me inside of a week, sold for $1.2M.
- The $$$+$$ option is to buy a fixer upper and live in a construction zone for the next five to ten years as we slowly earn the cash to pay for remodeling or do it ourselves.
Debt averse as I am, the second option was the lesser two of evils. Not by much, but still the lesser. I think.
Our process and discoveries this far:
We got a recommendation for a realtor from our friend, and we love her for her honesty, responsiveness, and willingness to go the extra mile for us. We were traveling recently and she did big video walkthroughs for us so we could view homes even while we were gone.
1. Pre-underwritten loans
Our broker connected us to lender who would approve and underwrite our loan before we even had a property identified. That’s huge so when you make an offer in this market where even fixer uppers that need A TON of work are getting 10-15 offers. It allows us to remove the loan contingency.
2. This leads me to the no-contingency buyer.
We are finding that many prospective buyers are making offers with no contingencies and that’s knocked us out of the running when we have any contingency at all, forget it if you have two contingencies!
The three common ones are the loan contingency which you need if you only have a preapproval and not a fully underwritten loan, an appraisal contingency (which protects you from being committed to the offer until you know that the appraiser is assessing the property to be worth at least as much as you offered, since they will only lend based on the appraised value), and the property condition contingency for you to take a look and be sure that the place is in the shape you expect. I might have gotten that name of the last one wrong.
3. A common thing that’s done here in the SF Bay Area that I haven’t seen elsewhere is the seller often does the property inspection, the buyer doesn’t.
On the one hand, it sucks that you’re locked into the inspection company that the seller chooses but a good broker will tell you if the company is reputable or if you should get another inspection. The upside to this is that I love getting the property inspection reports with the seller’s disclosures so I can make an offer that takes into account the condition of the whole place, not just what I think I saw, and there are fewer surprises.
4. More cash is better.
Well, duh. No, I mean strategically: I found that it was more comfortable to make offers that might be over the appraisal a touch only if we had an extra 20% in case over and above our expected down payment. It’s not great, but when every house has more than 10 offers, it’s helpful to be flexible where you can afford it.
We had intended to buy in 5-7 years, if at all, so our cash reserves are net as hearty as they would be if we’d waited. The benefit of being as diligent with our money as I am, though, is that I’m one of the few people that can be offered a personal loan by a couple friends who can afford to lend it and know that I will, without a doubt, repay them immediately on the sale of our present home. This is something I never would have looked for but they knew of the situation and offered it as a way to help us bridge any temporary gaps in funding. On the one hand, it’s a huge responsibility, but on the other, I know they never would have made the offer if they didn’t have absolute faith in my judgment and discretion and that faith is based on knowing how I’ve managed our money for the past decade. The work really does pay off.
:: Which route would you pick? Are you a DIY expert or a DIY avoider? What remodeling or renovations would you feel comfortable tackling?
May 10, 2017
With a touch of Type A-ness, and as a chronic illness person who has to be very careful about allocating energy resources, I approach all travel with the intensity of an astronaut preparing to go into space.
I’ve had to get a lot better at this over the years.
I’ve made just about every mistake under the sun, starting with forgetting to pack my laptop charger and pants on a business trip, booking flights for the wrong travel dates in the early days of internet booking, and even going to the airport on the wrong day.
Trial and error has been a harsh, but mostly effective, teacher.
And yet when I booked a trip for PiC last month, I still had a moment of panic when the confirmation email landed in my inbox – had I accidentally booked it for myself??
(No, but it was a plausible error.)
I’ve developed a very involved to do list to follow before we travel but this was our first international jaunt. This trip wasn’t a vacation, it was mostly obligatory family stuff that I can’t get into, but it was still travel with all the inherent packing and planning needs of a vacation so I made what I thought were the appropriate adaptations for flying overseas.
Three months out
- Check the dogsitter’s availability and save the date.
- Research flight and hotel costs. Research also: best seats on various planes, best mileage earning options, lounge access (thanks to the Chase Sapphire Reserve).
- Fill out passport application for JuggerBaby. Take the whole family on an adventure to the processing center and pay $80 to the U.S. State Department, and $25 to the processing center. Wait anxiously for the passport and birth certificate to be returned by mail.
Two months out
- Make a final decision on flights and hotels. Book ’em, Danno!
- Check everyone’s vaccine records, medications, and other critical supplies to ensure we have enough for the next 3 months. I don’t want to run out while traveling, nor to come back and find out that we’ve got one day of meds left! This has happened before, in unhappier days.
- Scan a copy of everyone’s travel documents and back them up in two places in case we lose the physical documents.
- Make up packing lists.
- Find out that the sitter isn’t available for either this Big Trip or a smaller trip that’s going to happen sooner. Have a minor panic and spend several hours finding possible replacements. Spend more hours interviewing.
One month out
- Get last check-ups. This round, only Seamus and I needed to be checked for clean bills of health.
- Confirm dogsitter booking.
- Decide that for 2 adults & 1 child, over 10 days, we’re taking 2 carry-on suitcases (9″ by 14″ by 22″), and 2 largeish backpacks. Redo packing lists. Pretend that we don’t go through more than one garment a day. Laugh because it’s utterly foolish.
Two weeks out
- Put together Seamus’s vacation pack: dog food, medications, supplements, launder his bedding.
- Order a refill of his medication from the mail order pharmacy – it takes 5-7 days to deliver.
One week out
- Triple check Amazon subscribe and save order – make sure that all the essentials will be delivered the day after we return.
- Ditto mail – put it on hold until the day we return.
- Recall that JuggerBaby has been the Worst about going on walks, demanding to be carried at least half the distance that ze can easily run six times over given the proper motivation. Panic about traveling with a heavy well fed toddler without a stroller, having sold your awesome but bulky infant / toddler stroller on Craigslist three weeks ago (+$50). Buy an umbrella stroller that’s only a little broken (-$35) but still functional and only 1/3 the size of the last stroller.
- Realize you’ve run out of time to have a night away for a trial run with the dogsitter. Realize you’re a neurotic dog mom who didn’t want to be parted from him for even a day, much less a week, and mentally stomp your feet about going without him. This is the second hardest part about travel.
The day before
- Top up travel sized liquids for carrying on the plane. This was a masterpiece of jigsawing and make do. I rescued a sturdy plastic zipper bag, our free-with-baby package of hospital amenities from JuggerBaby’s birth, and filled it with rescued bottles. Motrin replaced liquid infant Vitamin D, Zarbee’s replaced now useless teething tablets, eczema lotion filled the 3 year old mostly empty jar of Noxema. All under the required 3 ounce liquid limit, all reused, nothing had to be bought! Tiny frugal victories.
- Break the plastic zipper on my document envelope and curse the cheap plastic roundly. Force the clip back on and proceed with maximum caution because losing our passports at any point on this trip is a big fat No.
- Overpack our carry-on backpacks: a change of clothes for everyone, a day’s worth of diapering supplies, all the medication for everyone, a sleep pack for JuggerBaby (pajamas, book, stuffed animal, blanket, lotion and nighttime chest rub), a thousand toys and “toys” (stickers, bubble wrap, Lego people, window clings, reusable stickers, Crayons, colored pencils, paper).
- Print boarding passes because some airlines are stuck in 1993.
- Wash, dry, fold two last loads of laundry so we’ll come home to clean clothes and towels. If I were really ambitious the sheets would have been done too. #Nope
- Triple check the lounges we have free access to for departing and returning airports, make sure we have our lounge passes and be heartily annoyed that PiC’s has gone missing. If my desk weren’t a certified disaster zone I’d know exactly where it was. I think.
My policy is not to spend while traveling unless it’s absolutely necessary, but that has to be balanced with our ability to carry everything. This round of planning and packing went well. I had to replace a few things on the trip itself (cheap plastic!!) but overall I managed to pack only 15% more than we actually needed and part of that 15% was simply because the travel was overbooked and we didn’t have the leisure time we anticipated.
:: How do you prepare for international travel? Is it old hat to you, or do you get the giddy pre-travel anticipation that I do?
May 8, 2017
[Part 3] I’ve been crunching the numbers constantly and noisily. And I do mean constantly. It’s a morning, noon, and night sort of hobby.
Taking on a new mortgage when we were within 5-7 years of paying off this one was not in the list of dreams I held for 2017. Not even close!
Buying in the Bay Area is a stiff proposition. Competition is fierce, people are making all cash or no contingency offers right and left, it’s easy to get caught up in the fervor. But not I!
Even ignoring the desire to retire early, which is quite a bit further away once the new mortgage happens, there are serious constraints on our ability to buy. Which is to say, I refuse to stretch ourselves beyond our means.
Budget considerations
First things first. Ignore what the bank tells you that you can “afford”. We all know that the bank only cares about the money it’s going to earn off your loan.
This is what I did:
- Set my top comfort level limit. There’s a number that would just make me run for the corner, gibbering. I absolutely won’t buy a home at that price.
- Ran the numbers based on that limit: 20% down payment, loan amount, possible monthly payments and total loan cost.
- Looked at how much the new mortgage would cut into our monthly and annual savings, assuming all other costs stay the same: investing, utilities, daycare, food, gas, travel.
- Then I looked at how that total number stacks up against the regional comps. This was a bad comparison – our number was not competitive at all. Instead of increasing our number, I adjusted our expectations of what we could get. Adjusted = dropped the bar to the floor.
- I had a moment of madness where we checked to see if we could increase our pre-approved loan limit but then I came back to my senses. It wasn’t worth it.
- I asked our prospective loan officer 30 questions: what products they offered, the loan terms, and how much they charged to recast the loan, if anything. After deciding which of the lenders was the best fit for our needs, I gathered all our paperwork – oh so much paperwork! – and started the loan process.
We now have a somewhat reasonable range for making offers and I’ve got a fleshed out spreadsheet to work our numbers in for each time we plan to make an offer. I also asked our insurance provider to give me a quote for coverage based on an equivalent property to what we’re hoping to find.
This means I can quickly calculate our monthly, annual and life of loan costs, taxes and insurance, and see right away if we’re making a totally unrealistic commitment. This also means I can see that our “reasonable offers” are laughable in this market. But I do NOT care. We’re going to make this work.
Helpful tip 1: Even when they say you’re fully underwritten and you can proceed with making an offer, you might still want a loan contingency because the early underwriting process isn’t the final process. Things can still change.
Helpful tip 2: Be careful about what you do with cash and your accounts that they’ve already assessed. It’s a huge pain to have to explain pretty much every transaction that you make between the time they approved your loan and when you get to closing.
Helpful tip 3: It should go without saying that you shouldn’t be running out to spend a whole lot of money after an offer is accepted and before closing. Not that you should spent a boatload after closing, unless you’re so flush with cash that there’s literally no use for that money but spending. But before closing, the important thing is that the lender can decline to fund your loan if your assets drop enough before closing.
:: Have I missed anything important in this early stage?
May 4, 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 of our side income comes from Swagbucks, selling clothes on Poshmark which is hit or miss, and tracking activity through Achievement (my introduction to it).
The goal is to replace our day job income before my health declines prevents me from working.
*** (more…)
May 1, 2017
My brokerage is TradeKing, I’ve been very happy with their low fees and service. They’re offering a promotion through my referral link right now: New accounts opened with a $500 minimum deposit get $500 in free trade commission and new accounts opened with a $5000 minimum deposit get $1000 in free trade commission.
- Given my apathy towards the trajectory of my full time job (flattish for now) and the trajectory of my salary (also flattish), I’ve decided to carry on with investing in dividend stocks. It’ll be useful for early income replacement if I were to voluntarily retire, but also in case my health drops precipitously. There’s no guarantee I’ll stay healthy enough to work for as long as I want to work.
- The $15,000 that I was holding finally went into two more stocks in January – both have already paid out their dividends as well.
Year to Date Dividends: $518.20, Fees: $9.90, Net: $508.20
Income Replacement
For perspective, I like to think of the dividends investing project in terms of how much of our income it can replace, or how much of our fixed expenses it can cover.
At a whopping $508.30, this year’s dividends can pay 50% of one mortgage payment. Over the past 6 years, I’ve made a total of $1,940.80. It’s all been reinvested, I haven’t taken any dividends out of the portfolio and won’t for some years yet.
Income projection. If nothing changes, we’ll see about $1500 in dividend income this year.
:: How did your portfolio do this quarter? Would you try to replace income this way, or do you have another preference?
