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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March 21, 2016
“Business as usual”, since LB was born and we got new tenants into the property, has been quiet. Once a month the rent comes in. Once a quarter, I send the tenants the sewer bill and the property manager, let’s call them “Lou”, collects that.
Unfortunately, did I mention this? Things don’t always go smoothly in money matters and this is no exception.
The current tenants pay on time and don’t have a lot of needs. They’ve requested a few minor repairs and those issues have been addressed pretty quickly. But they have a problem with complying with a relatively minor HOA policy about clearing their curb on a weekly basis as required. It’s not that they object to complying, they simply didn’t comply on time for several weeks in a row.
They’re good tenants so far as I can tell, so I hated dinging them for something like that but the HOA is a huge stickler and sent a violation notice every time it happened. After three violations, the HOA proceeded to start fining for the violations, even though the tenants had been informed and were doing their best. The fines were $100 per occurrence!
It’s more than a little alarming to get a bill for $100 per week, with a grand total of $600, when the fines start. It’s a lot alarming that the latest bill is up to $1500. Lou assures me that they’re working on it which means that they’re confirming the lack of violations each week for the HOA and after several weeks of “clean” behavior, the fines will be removed.
That’s little consolation while I see the fines skyrocket. This is the part I hate about going through third parties. As much as I like that having Lou lets me stay hands off, the part of me that manages money and the household particulars chafes at not being hands on so I can fight the charges if shenanigans occur. The bills are in my name!
So that sucks. But the whole point of the manager is to deal with stuff like this.
Basic appliance repairs eat into a slim profit margin
I have a home warranty which covers the repair and replacement of appliances. We’ve called them out to take care of three plumbing problems and 2 appliance replacements. Their timely responses keep the tenant happy and a good tenant is worth keeping happy IMO. Though, what the hell is going on with the plumbing??
The $75 per call out fee is steep in contrast but DIY isn’t an option for this property. I was only breaking even in the first seven months on routine costs (mortgage, property tax, and insurance). We had to get new tenants and raise the rent to bring in enough to have a little extra left over to cover the irregular expenses.
We’d need to raise the rent another $100 to have anything like “profit”. Unlike the “pay yourself first” mantra in regular employment, the leftover money each month after subtracting regular expenses goes into savings. It’s the buffer against the inevitable repairs and maintenance, not money I take out of the business. This is conservative but other than my initial down payment stake, the goal is for the unit to break even overall first. Only after costs are covered, thus preventing any need to dip into personal funds, do I consider that leftover cash mine. The long term goal is for this property to generate some rental income and appreciate in value over time.
*Part of Financially Savvy Saturdays on brokeGIRLrich, Disease Called Debt and From Cost to Coast*
March 16, 2016
The Gymnast
LB confidently climbs onto and off of furniture now, safely, and faceplanting only rarely. Except that one time onto concrete. Oops. That was sad. Ze pivots on hir face a lot. All in service of a greater cause: climbing onto furniture and making a grab for the remotes, the books, and the tissue box. Oh lordy the tissue box is the BEST. 5 seconds of silence means ze made it and is pulling fistfuls of tissues out, shaking them on the floor, taking an experimental bite out of one or the other handful. If you time it right, ze will turn and stick hir be-tissued tongue out for you to scrape out the latest indiscretion.
We <3 books
We’re constantly reading to LB, several books a day, and ze normally “listens” while cruising for the latest bruising. These days, the listening is active and participatory. Ze wants to help turn pages, really looks at the pictures, sometimes touching them, sometimes just urging us to turn pages faster. A lot of the time ze will shut the book on my hands just to be able to open it up again. Ow.
Lapbaby, lapbaby, where are you?
Today, ze picked hir plushie, pivoted, and plopped hirself into my lap! This is a new thing. Since the day ze discovered self-locomotion, we haven’t been able to get the kid to sit still. We suspect this is a by-product of fighting for attention at daycare.
They’re decently staffed, but the kids there compete for attention as kids do. When a kid crawls toward an adult, it’s a cue for the rest of them to converge on that adult. PiC said it looked like being pursued by a tiny mob of tiny zombies.
Big Brother
Ze still isn’t cuddly with us but is trying to form an alliance of affection with Seamus. When he sniffs hir face, ze leans in with an open mouth to lay a kiss on his nose. He never lets hir land the kiss, deftly dodging like a submarine dodging a calf and thus thwarted, ze will crawl to his back and lay hir face on it instead.
Independence and (un)coordination
We haven’t lost an eye to fork stabbing yet but it’s not for lack of flailing. Ze’s use of spoons and forks involves much banging on the tray, excited waving in the air, and holding both ends of the utensil while biting down on the middle. Most attempts result in half the food on the ground and half down hir front. Never mind, ze will carefully place bits of food on the utensil and try to steer it into hir mouth, oftentimes flipping the fully loaded spoon face down and getting absolutely nothing to each. That’s alright, ze carries on with determination.
The clean-up crew knows to (literally) shake hir down for food scraps after a meal.
Our Baby Pestilence, ye bringer of disease
We had some of our worst sick days yet. So many middle of the night wake ups and so many pitiful little sobs. We tended to hir and cuddled hir as best we could, sleep-fuddled and clumsy, but most of the Motrin ended up inside hir, at least. (Thanks, daycare.)
Pirate-raccoon-kitten
Most small things are unsafe around hir. Everything goes into the mouth: hair clips, binder clips, small toys. Hair ties on my wrist are pulled right off, gets clamped between hir teeth as ze pounces for a water source like a pirate of old, cultass clenched in mouth, there to … wash the object?
Yep.
Have shiny object? It will be stolen and washed for you. Possibly returned, but only after a thorough wash.
Some of our favorite things
Bright & Early Board Books: These are great. LB loves to read AND chew on them, win win.
It’s not getting a ton of use specifically as a walker, but both LB and Seamus rock out to this learning walker.
We have some great hand me down alphabet toys that LB likes to chew while we decide what “B” stands for. This combines two of LB’s favorite things: magnets and letters!
March 14, 2016
Do you have a number?
The number that means you’re safe? You can relax, you can enjoy life and kick up your heels a bit? Maybe buy the good cheese, or wine, or really splash out and get both?
This is an emotion question, not a logic one. What number would you need to hit to feel like life is alright?
In 2008, my number wasn’t about net worth; I wasn’t that advanced in my Personal Finance Nin-jit-su. It was salary. It was “do you know how much I could save if I made a $100,000 salary?”
8 years later I still can’t answer that question so now I’ve got two more years to figure it out because arbitrary and deadlines are what I’m all about.
But what’s that number?
Would I feel safe if I had $1M in the bank?
No, that wouldn’t buy a house with four walls and a roof here.
Would I feel safe if we had $2M in the bank?
See above.
Would I feel safe if we had $3M in assets and carried a spare $100 bill in all our wallets?
That’s just asking to be mugged.
Would I feel safe if we had $5M in assets?
If we had $5M, say $1.2 of that was spent on a house, bought outright. We’d need to need 0.8M for renovations since of course nothing for that much is going to be updated and we’ll find something that needs fixing. Tuck away another $1M for maintenance and taxes for at least the next decade.
No, better make it $10M. I think – I’m only speculating here, that I’d feel comfortable to relax, without having changed our basic lifestyle, other than quitting my job and managing money full time, buying a house (and don’t look! I’m just gonna slide this under the wire, adding two more dogs to the pack), if we had at least $10M in assets.
Back up – what was that?
Quitting my job is a change in lifestyle? Not exactly. It’s just redirecting my energy and time to focus on the thing I’m pretty good at. And it’s realistic. I do alright for now, with PiC’s love and support, but nothing is forever.
Specifically, my health could nosedive and force me out of the rat race at any point. The horror show that is trying to get approved for disability can’t possibly get easier as we age, that’s simply not what governments do. It took Mom six years to be approved. She would have been dead on the street in the time it took the state of California to help out with a few hundred a month, long after she’d lost much cognitive function, and the ability to feel reasonably human, if I hadn’t already been working my butt off to keep the lights on, gas in the car, and food on the table.
You’d better believe I took a dang hint from that. I’ve been planning for and saving against forced retirement, reasons of cripplement, since 21. Shoot, I’ve been planning in case of my early demise since I was 22 because when you find yourself in college supporting dependents that you didn’t birth, not even once, life gets serious in a hurry.
$10M is my Happy Place. (I think.)
What’s your Happy Place number? Also, Happy Pi Day!
*Part of Financially Savvy Saturdays on brokeGIRLrich, Disease Called Debt and DIY Jahn*
March 9, 2016
We spend a lot on food. But we also eat a lot and I don’t have FOND memories of those penny-pinching days when I’d only eat one meal a day and that was leftovers from dinner from the night before.
So we spend on food. I wondered, though, could we feed all three of us for $75? That’s what our biggest Trader Joe’s and local produce shopping trip cost.
Mostly I’m curious. I am terrible at meal planning in any sane kind of way that saves time and energy so this is an experiment in making a meal plan and sticking to it. I’ve hit a cooking rut. I typically like cooking even if I suck at coming up with vegetable side dishes, but when my cravings are for take out it’s because I’ve gotten busy and stressed or more tired than usual and can’t spare the brainpower to come up with foods we like.
What we bought, roughly, was mostly stuff for this week, but some stuff for freezing and will be used later. In turn, I’ll be using ingredients we already have but the value is generally going to balance out. This week I bought 4 pounds of ground turkey for $2.99/lb. Two weeks ago we picked up a few pounds of chicken for $1.19/lb and pork for $1.99/lb. We use more chicken or pork in a single recipe than ground turkey so it’s an even enough trade.
The menu
Caveats: Cooking really only applies to dinners. Breakfast is almost always eggs, sliced ham, toast, or a simple bowl of oatmeal.
Lunch is (PiC) ham and cheese sandwiches with chips; (LB) some combination of banana, tofu, raisins, clementines, tortillas, cheese, ham, dinner leftovers; (me) leftovers.
Sunday
3 pork chops & 1 drumstick, ginger garlic rice, mashed cauliflower.
Monday
Turkey burgers (made with ground turkey, minced zucchini, quinoa) on honey whole wheat buns served with tomatos, red onions, sprouts, mayo, ketchup. Plus tator tots.
What happened? Success! Despite a major bump in the day, we got burgers on the table.
Tuesday
Homemade pizza with tomato sauce, cheddar and mozzarella, chicken
What happened? Fail! Turns out my yeast is super expired. It didn’t even put up a token fizz. Of course I discover this at 430 pm, so instead I recklessly tried a miso-butter chicken and bok choy recipe. This is what happens, I was looking for a green bean vinagrette and get a whole new recipe instead. I cannot be trusted. (Justification: We had leftover baby bok choy that needed to be used! And it’s not every day I have miso in the pantry.) It was delicious, soooo, yay improv?
Wednesday
Hainan chicken with ginger garlic rice (cooked Sunday), served with cherry tomatoes and cucumbers
What happened? Fail! My brain shut down at 4 pm and this is where it would have been really useful to have cooked more on Sunday. But I had cooked enough rice and mashed cauliflower to go with the Trader Joe’s packaged chicken curry we had in the fridge from last week and that was served with a side of fresh green beans. I did cook ahead a pan of roasted red potatoes for tomorrow.
Thursday
Side roasted red potatoes with dabs of butter and lots of garlic. Um. A main dish of some kind.
What happened? We had turkey burgers again because I’d made 6 adult patties and 2 baby patties.
Friday
Tuna or ham and cheddar sandwiches, salad and soup
What happened? Cheese sandwiches and boxed tomato soup. I could make a good tomato soup from scratch but not all days are from-scratch cooking days.
Saturday
Unplanned
What happened? Turkey burgers again! We wanted to use up the burger buns and veggies bought specifically for this (sprouts, red onions, etc) and we did. Good thing we love our turkey burgers and enjoyed them down to the last bite!
Meal approximations are better than planning
Ironically, I did better in the three weeks after the initial challenge. Forcing myself to follow an exact menu plan, meal and day, just didn’t seem to work well. $75 was high for our perishables but our overall costs were generally in line with a $75-100/week budget. We pick up bulk staples irregularly so that’s the extra $25-40 in the weekly spend.
Some of my best dinners were…
A) Lemon baked tilapia served with brown rice and green beans
B) Mixed cavatappi and whole wheat rotini topped with a zucchini, carrot and turkey ragu sauce served with a homemade load of bread, baked bok choy and carrots
C) Crockpot lasagna
D) Tilapia fish tacos & burritos.
Warning: if you’re baking your fish with lemon slices, the rind might leave a bitter taste on parts of the fish. Also remove all the lemon slices before serving. I missed one and wondered why my fish taco was disgustingly bitter.
Ideas for future menus
Shrimp and grits with garlic, onions, and tomatoes
Poached eggs served with polenta, hash browns, veggie
Marinated Baked Pork Chops
Pork chops with caramelized onions
Lemon baked chicken with roasted potatoes and onions
Best Takeaways
I don’t mind using the occasional packaged or prepared meal anymore. First it was about the cost, then it was about the nutrition. But overall, we’re doing a lot better on both fronts just by virtue of this experiment, more so than expected, and a few conveniences are just fine by me.
Our stress over getting a meal on the table, previously disproportionate to the crime, is incredibly low now.
I did serve pasta so frequently it’s been put on the No Fly List for a while. That was predictable but oddly disappointing, nonetheless. It’s just barely fathomable that it’s possible no one can eat pasta every day for three weeks without complaint.
If you’ve got tried and true recipes that you’re willing to share, please do! I require simplicity, though.
March 7, 2016
I hate the phone. I hate talking on the phone. I hate making calls. I hate waiting on hold, all of it. But darned if I won’t get over all of that in a right hurry to save myself $515.
Here’s what happened.
I had some fillings last December and the hygienist and receptionist encouraged me to get everything done in 2015 so everything would be covered by my annual deductible. I know, I know, the dentist in December, does anything scream poor planning! louder? When I have my act together, I visit the dentist in March and again in September for twice yearly cleanings and avoid all scheduling disasters to do with holidays, school being out, high season at work, all of it. 2015 was not the year of any part of my act being in the same vicinity as any other part of itself. Thus, I found my way to the dentist’s chair, garbling away, in December.
Post-filling comes the billing ordeal.
I’m not afraid of dental treatments but I sure do hate what comes after.
The secret I learned the hard way about dental insurance and billing waaay back in ought-2: Unless your insurance pre-approves all of your expected treatments, do not pay the estimated patient owes amount before your treatment is done.
Heck, don’t even pay it immediately after treatment if they haven’t already pre-billed the insurance or gotten pre-approval. They really want you to do. Every dental office here in California that’s taken our basic Delta Dental plan has patients sign a quote agreeing to pay anything the insurance doesn’t cover. If they can get you to pay the hundreds in advance, promising to reimburse you when the insurance comes back, then you’ve adhered to the letter of that agreement, but they will not adhere to the letter of theirs and you will be out of luck.
This is what I mean
Delta Dental (DD) has negotiated rates and set percentages that they’ll pay for every service. After a visit, Dental Office (DO) sends me a bill, and bills DD. The submitted claims are reviewed, DD determines both what they’ll pay and what I should pay, then mails me their statement.
My twice yearly exams are covered 100%. Patient pays column says $0.
My xrays are covered 100%. Patient pays column, again, says $0.
My filling on surface 30 was done in the last 2 years, so DD won’t pay them for that. Patient pays column says $0. DD’s notes say:
*You’ve already been paid once in the allowed 2 year timeframe for that, so we’re not paying again.
**DO may only bill what DD lists according to their pre-established agreement.
My fillings on surfaces 20, 22, 28 were approved and paid at 80%, leaving me with the other 20% to pay.
All told, DD said my bill was $95. Meanwhile, DO is over here sending me a bill asking for $610.
Now, according to my agreement with them, disregarding all else, I was responsible for $610 because DD didn’t cover it. However, because they accepted my insurance plan with the accompanying rate plan and rules, they are first subject to billing according to those rules. My plan specifically says they cannot charge me anything that DD doesn’t agree with, even if it’s something DD will not pay. If DD says they won’t pay it but I must, then DO may bill me.
Back when I was 20 years old and didn’t know about the DD to DO agreement, I thought I had to pay up in full so I did. My poor wallet. Much older, and a little wiser now, I know better.
Somewhat reluctantly, on the principle that this is the year 2016, should we not be able to handle all our bills online without having to talk to a person yet?? I called DO and asked to speak to someone about billing.
I politely suggested that we go over the discrepancies between the bill they sent and DD’s statement. Would you believe that before I could finish pointing out the problems, the office manager was striking out charges left and right? That’s right. She knew they were trying to get around their agreement with DD by billing me the full amount and was quick to rectify this, but only after being called out.
Line by line, we fixed all the “discrepancies”, and lo, my correct remaining balance was $95, NOT $610.
Protecting our cash: all part of a good day’s work.
Does your health or dental insurance work similarly or is this a quirk of California providers? Are your dentists reasonable and not scary? Do they recommend work too often? (PiC thinks my dentist always wants to be billing. He may be right.)
Late Note: This isn’t to demonize dental providers, mind you. The same one that got me to pay over hundreds that I shouldn’t have was also the one that cut their costs to only their own costs when they were aware that I had been laid off and was paying everything in cash. So they have their good and bad, in somewhat equal measure.
*Part of Financially Savvy Saturdays on brokeGIRLrich, Disease Called Debt and Dream Beyond Debt*
March 2, 2016
Over lunch, a friend asked me if we do “Good cop, bad cop” with LB and for the life of me, I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea. Ze is one year old. Is there a point to doing a good cop / bad cop routine? For 3 minutes, I stared at her, silently pondering what that would look like for an infant.
Besides, I’m no one-note mama. I am all the cops. Sometimes the good cop, mostly the bad cop, always the tickling cop.
I’ve made some first year remarks already but as I said then, there’s a lot about parenting that you just don’t viscerally get from a babysitting or professional aunt/uncle role until you’re there in the thick of it and there are no returns.
Experience has changed my viewpoint on some, not at all on others. It’s been a lot of “ohhhh that’s what that looks like,” or “what, exactly, is happening right now?”
Discipline
Pre-kids: My sibling’s the Exhibit A of The Bad Seed or a cautionary tale for the ages. It’s hard to know which.
It’s a Pyrrhic victory to hear your parent admit that everything you’d warned them would happen if they wouldn’t listen to you did happen, after they wouldn’t listen to you. I don’t know, can’t know, if we’d still have the same end result had they listened to me, but we know it all went to hell when they didn’t.
Post-kid: LB first heard “NO” at four months and hasn’t stopped hearing it since. Ze still doesn’t care what no means but soon enough ze will understand how to use language and I want hir to know there are times that are “yes”, and times that are “no”, and NO MEANS NO. From us, from anyone else, from hir.
Ze may act clueless or disregard the first admonitions but repetition is our friend here. When we’re consistent, we see the results of that efforts months later.
We don’t enforce *discipline* (punishment) specifically at this age, ze is too young, but we enforce the boundary of No especially when it comes to hurting others (*caveat: Unless they hurt or intend to hurt you, in those cases, gut ’em), or hurting hirself.
Responsibility
As in, having it. And then teaching it.
Pre-kids: This felt like an anchor around my everything. I don’t know how to motivate a kid to care about something that’s not a fun thing. From early on, I’ve always been the intrinsically motivated kid, competing against myself, but I’m necessarily an extrinsic element to LB so how do we foster that intrinsic drive? We cheer ze on for trying things, even if ze falls down or fails a lot, because we want hir to keep trying. And ze does. But how do we avoid turning hir personal motivation into a praise-seeking situation?
Post-kid: The responsibility is still daunting. I still don’t know how we’ll teach hir everything we hope to. But I have to hope that talking to hir, honestly and carefully, and demonstrating the desirable behaviors will have an impact. Maybe I was lucky to have been the passive kid I was; Mom and Dad always seemed pretty reasonable, I never wanted to rebel even if their rules chafed a little, and by the teen years, I assumed that acting like an adult would mean they’d treat me like one, so I did, and they did. For the most part.
We have to shape LB so that ze is prepared to succeed in a world we probably won’t understand in 20 years, being the outdated geezers that we are. We have to guide hir to build character, to have compassion, to be money savvy, to work harder and smarter than those around hir. I’m not sure how we do that. And in this world today that’s full of bile and anger and horrible people, how do we protect hir? Every single day I read another horrifying story about how someone abused, killed, and hurt their spouse, child, boy/girlfriend, complete stranger that looked at them wrong or was in the wrong place at the wrong time. We can’t wrap hir up in bubble wrap forever but it’s a scary damn world out there.
I don’t have any of the answers. To some degree, you can do it all “right” and still lose your child to whatever’s out there. But today, right here and now, I’m ignoring those what-ifs and soaking up the baby goodness and trying to get it right one day at a time.
Love
Pre-kids: Everyone says “it’s totally worth it” but it always sounds like they’re trying to rationalize the choice to have kids when it was prefaced by a story of how frustrated or annoyed they are by the kid. Which I’m sure all our parents felt at one point or another.
Post-kid: I absolutely adore this kid. Even when ze is difficult or confusing or frustrating. It didn’t happen the second ze was born like it does for some people. We needed time. I needed time to heal. I will never forget my fear and despair in Months 2-3. We needed time to get to know each other. Ze needed time to be more than a baguette.
Right now, it’s easy for me to feel both love and frustration at the same time and roll my eyes at weird infantile things like licking the dog or having a meltdown over having hir ankle grabbed as ze tips over the edge: “You won’t let me sustain a concussion waaahhhh!”
It’s interesting that one of my oldest friends knew bonding could take some time but didn’t tell me until I was past the 4th trimester. A mark of how well she knows me, and respects boundaries, that she wasn’t going to dictate to me what my life experience was going to be like some people do with their “wait until you … !”
So far, it’s hard work and it’ll only get harder. I think we can make the call in 30 years whether we did a good job and if it was all worth it because it’s way too soon to tell but right here and now, I’m just glad we took the chance and aren’t regretting it.
March 1, 2016
Change from Jan 2016: 0.10% decrease
0.10% decrease from last month
ON MONEY
I use Swagbucks. Here’s a handy tutorial if you’d like to join and earn.
- By way of ebates and Swagbucks, our Side Money tally this month went up $118.
- I knocked serious money off a bill with a phone call which was good because…
- We had that lovely episode with Seamus.
- I pick the best Valentine’s gifts. I’m loving this delightfully petite broom and dust pan! When you spend half your snack time sitting on the floor picking up crumbs, tiny cleaning implements are suddenly fabulous. Well, no, that’s not true, tiny gear of any kind is always fabulous. I gave LB a demonstration of how to use it to sweep up counters and got a little chuckle. Laughing at me, laughing with me, whatever. As long as we’re laughing.
- I bought a humidifier in an attempt to not die of the latest Viral Scourge and it came with a free subscription to Better Homes & Gardens. Imagine my tiny triumph when I read the fine print and found we could refuse the subscription and get a check for $6 instead. Yes, that’s small beans. It’s half a bean. But it’ll pay for my postcard mailing habit so it’s mine mine mine.
- File under credit card churning. I picked up the Bank of America Alaska Air credit card and used it to pay for our car insurance and a couple incidentals to meet the minimum spend of $1000 in 3 months. We netted 25,000 bonus miles (one round trip ticket), a $100 statement credit, and some thousand and change purchase miles. The downside was the $100 wasn’t pure profit – they didn’t waive the first year’s annual fee like most of the cards I prefer to nab so we came out ahead $25 and 25,000 miles.
- Two really sick friends received the gift of food delivery. It was a surprise and the best I could do once I found out how sick they were because I couldn’t run over to help myself. It ran to the tune of $400. That’s coming out of our discretionary spending and I regret nothing. (There were tears, the good kind. I double regret nothing.) Then PiC sold car parts to cover half of it, so I triple regret nothing because it’s always been my instinct to make up for unexpected expenditures instead of just cashflowing it. I’m a good influence, dammit!
- I’ve been wearing holes into the only pair of jeans that fit after I sized out of the maternity jeans. After weeks of deliberation, and cajoling by PiC, $55 bought me a pair of new jeans (50% off) so of course when I wasn’t looking, I dropped the last 7 pounds to hit my pre-baby weight. DAMMIT. I’d plateaued! There was no reason to believe those lingering pounds were going anywhere. Has unanticipated weight loss ever been so annoying??
- We are so close to completing our estate plan I can taste it!
- I’m also very close to completing our tax document compilation! We’re just missing a couple of forms. But I’m maybe not so much in a hurry to file because thanks to something outside my control on PiC’s side, we’re expecting a huge tax hit. Ugh.
(more…)