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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July 10, 2015
So how did I do with my Q2 plans?
Professional:
Finish the first draft of my writing project: add 20,000-40,000 words.
No. This obviously impacts my next quarter. I was going to be down on myself about it but realized that I’ve been holding down a full time paying job and full time momming while we continue working on childcare and surviving that means it’s OK that I haven’t made a ton more progress but I will and I’m willing to buy my time back.
Set up a mailing list for anyone who’s interested in reading the book(?) project to get updates when the time comes.
No: I did decide to use Mailchimp but tootled around waiting to see if anyone wanted to send me a referral.
Got off my duff and signed up because waiting would only benefit no one or not me.
Then realized I don’t think I want to use Mailchimp right now so maybe I’ll just take names and email addresses via Google Survey.
Test 3 possible business ideas.
No: I discarded several out of hand once I realized that the proposed target audience either wouldn’t pay for the goods/services, would be a pain to work with, or wasn’t viable with my preferred business structure.
Blog at least 3x/week.
Yes: I posted about 3-4x/week depending on the week.
Personal:
Spend a weekend with at least one friend we’d like to see annually.
Yes and yes: did this twice!
Visit LB’s cousins.
Yes: Ze LOVED meeting the cousins.
Get outside to walk 5 of 7 days per week.
Maybe: Most days, but 3-4 days per week sometimes, so I’ll call this a pass. The point is to get outside most days.
July 6, 2015
Welcome to the second installment of my blogging the Write A Blog People Will Read Course!
NOTE: This is a review of how I’m learning from the course so this is just one possible experience.
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In Module Two, we’re learning not to write just for the sake of having words on the screen, but to write what matters. By that measure, at best, 5% of the early years of this blog (no, no, don’t go see, take my word for it, please) were anything but flotsam.
Most of it was meandering bits of daily jumble. Not at all compelling unless you were just wondering what I’d done or worried about that day. (No one was.)
Writing something that matters.
Much like the difference between living to eat and eating to live, there’s a vast gulf between churning out text for the sake of posting things and crafting a piece that, well, people want to read.
This lesson hits me square between the eyes. Great writing is a revel and a joy to read. The writing here doesn’t meet that standard in my not-so-humble opinion.
I don’t cookie cutter my money posts just to have something to post but does it have value to anyone else? Beyond exercising my writing muscles and keeping my money mojo going, what does my writing about money and family and so on really do for my readers? Is it informative and engaging that you know my month to month thoughts or am I just shouting into the wind?
(In)accessibility
A good friend from the blogging world, not so incidentally a successful blogger, told me once that my posts are too long and “vocabulary is far too extensive”.
I understood that to mean that I fail hard at the general rule of thumb that in order to write for the broadest audience, you ought to be clocking between a sixth and seventh grade level. This is a valid and valuable criticism. Even the NIH recommends this level of writing!
I’m not sure how not to write like I think. That means using words that taste right in my mind. What you see here is the voice I hear in my head. And like a perfect, warm apple pie with the exquisitely flaky crust, and five dashes of cinnamon, using precise words to communicate is so satisfying. Even when I sound like a nerd.
(It’s because I really AM a nerd.)
D’you suppose that’s what keeps my audience to the elite few? 🙂
Does my blathering feel inaccessible to you? (Is blathering a common word? I have the worst trouble with this.)
Killing your little darlings
Maybe this is where my efforts should most be concentrated.
I do edit most writing, truly. First drafts are painful to read. But sometimes, final rounds of edits leave me with posts that have tripled in length and I suspect that your eyes probably start glazing over by the time you scroll a third or fourth time.
Reflection
There’s a lot to digest in this second module and learning how I should apply the lessons. Good advice is only useful when you implement it, after all.
See my review of Module 1
July 3, 2015
We’re in between childcare helpers, still, so these days my schedule is a really weird non-routine routine. It’s not terrible, but it’s a really incredibly full day. I still log at least 8 hours of work, not continuously, but thank goodness my work allows this kind of flexibility.
If we’re really lucky, LB actually stays asleep after we put hir down at least til 8 hours later. Someday, I dream of this someday, maybe ze will even sleep 10 or 12 hours. In the meantime, every weekday is looking something like this:
Between 4-4:30am: get up, change diaper, feed, PiC gets up and tries to get hir back down to sleep, while I collapse in bed.
Between 7-7:30am: If I’m lucky, ze did got to sleep and is still sleeping which means I have time to brush my teeth and get to work. If not, ze probably got me up again and PiC is too beat so it’s my turn to play with hir for a couple hours til the next nap because ze is up for good.
Between 8-9am: Zip through some work before PiC leaves for the day. PiC makes me breakfast, I absentmindedly scarf that down with one hand, the other hand still working. LB lands in my lap to “help” for a while. If ze’s cooperative, ze will play with toys. If less so, ze will attempt to take over typing.
10-12pm: Try to get LB down for a nap. Wash dishes, wash bottles. Work like the wind while ze is sleeping.
If I get a 3rd hour of nap, I can do some household stuff: Pay bills, update tax filing info for 2014, get the laundry going, put food in the crockpot, follow up on weird things with billers.
1-3:30pm: feeding/diapering, play with a very awake Wiggle Worm. Read books, dangle toys. Take hir and Seamus out for a walk. Let hir “crawl” on the floor while I catch any easy to answer emails.
3:30-4pm: feeding, convince The Angry Inchworm to take another nap if ze is tired. Sometimes it’s a 30-45 minute third nap, sometimes this is the second nap of the day and lasts an hour or two. Seamus will start angling for his medications because after he takes them, he gets dinner. Whip through any dishes, knock out some more work.
Between 5:30-6:30 pm: LB will be up and at it again so I’m all hirs. Feeding, diapering, and playing again. Feed Seamus. PiC gets home at some point and takes over for an hour of daddy+baby time. Sometimes they go out for a walk with Seamus.
7 pm: I start gathering a change of clothes and we’re blasting some tunes for hir bath. We’ve got this down to a science, now. Ze was terrified by the big bathtub but with music, toys, and a super efficient routine, ze’s cool with it now.
7:30-8 pm: If we’re in good odor with the baby gods, ze is finishing up the bedtime bottle and nodding off. If not, ze demands another bottle and is wide awake.
9 pm: Adult people dinner. Talk through anything we need to discuss, if we still have brainpower. Sometimes PiC can get in a workout before dinner. Sometimes we BOTH get to take showers. Sometimes I’m still catching up on work. Other times, I’m trying to arrange travel or figure out what’s up with our commitments.
11 pm: Remember that thing called sleep and stumble to bed wondering why the hell we didn’t do this earlier.
July 2, 2015
Or that should say: Being a humane adult should NOT be so difficult.
This is the second story I’ve heard about kids and school lunches this week that’s got me wondering what is wrong with people and our system. If it’s accurate that this kitchen manager was fired solely for giving kids free hot lunch, because she didn’t think that “one slice of cheese on a hamburger bun and a small milk” was adequate nutrition, isn’t it time to really think about what on earth we’re spending money on here?
I went to look for the first story about a lunch worker taking away a kid’s hot lunch and throwing it out, but instead I find that this is an ongoing issue and an active policy.
Schools are always battling shrinking budgets but at the end of the day, shouldn’t the health of the kids be a top priority!? How can students be expected to learn when malnourished?
This just reignites all my sense of the unfairness of life for young kids whose family lives are disrupted, plagued by poverty, illness, or bad decisions.
July 1, 2015
Change from Jan 2015: 0.55% decrease
On Money
I’m working away at Swagbucks to earn Amazon money for household, Little Bean, and dog things we need. Feel free to join using my referral link if you like!
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Are you a Comcast customer? Were you hit by the West Coast outage on June 1st/2nd? Comcast is offering a $5 credit. They say you have to call but I’m not able to make phone calls during the day so I asked for help online via chat and that worked. My outage disrupted work for 2 days so I received a $10 credit.
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I won Donna’s Swagbucks giveaway! It was an amazing lift during a very difficult week.
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Dammit auto repairs! My car cost nearly $600 in maintenance. A couple thousand a year in maintenance is still loads better than a car payment. For the record, we bought our cars used, with cash, from private owners. We haven’t had any significant problems with them in the last three and five years (respectively) of owning them.
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June 29, 2015
The following blog post is part of The Road to Financial Wellness Blog Tour. Over a period of 30 days, the Phroogal team will go to 30 locations to raise awareness about financial empowerment. Today they will be in San Francisco! Our goal is to help people learn about money by starting the conversation. We understand that local conversations can help bring about national awareness.
Fifteen years ago, I had $78 stashed into my (actual) piggy bank, a $1000 scholarship for college expenses, and an optimistic plan for my life: college, post-grad education, and a career.
Reality paid us a visit and in quick succession:
My parents lost their businesses after years of toiling 18-hour days, 365 days a year.
My grandmother moved in with us for end of life care.
My mom was diagnosed with a chronically debilitating disease (terminally, as it turns out).
My sibling, always irresponsible, started on his lifelong co-dependent relationship with debt.
And I turned 18.
Today, I’m happily married to the best partner I could ask for, have a wonderful dog and hilarious baby, and am nurturing a solid nest egg for our future.
I can hear “Well BULLY FOR YOU”. Hold on a second. I’m not gloating, and there’s a point to all this.
What Happened?
This wasn’t the plan. Any of this. I had a very clear vision of buying homes, getting doctorates, and there was nothing in there about getting married or having kids.
As my family fell apart, I coped by planning to take care of them, get them on their feet, then move on with the regularly scheduled program. Five years, tops. Five years turned into six, then seven, then eight. Around year 10, it sank in. This was it. There was no magic solution. Another $5,000 wasn’t going to cure Mom, or my brother, or get Dad a job.
I had to dig in for the long term and make the best of it.
This was my journey out of debt
I’m not sharing this to say “If I can do it, anyone can!” Though I would like to believe it, that’s too simplistic. While it’s true that if *I* can learn a new skill, almost anyone could probably also learn a helpful new skill but that doesn’t mean that my road is your road is the other person’s road.
I am saying that, given the inclination and a few resources, we can usually make the improbable happen.
These are some of the key lessons I learned, maybe sharing these will help someone avoid learning the hard way.
Debt is awful.
The tens of thousands of dollars in debts incurred over years of running their small businesses, some on credit cards and some in personal loans, meant that my parents were shackled to huge monthly payments forever and ever amen. Paying the minimum every month made them the credit card company’s dream. Sure, keep on paying 1% of the principal plus 27% of pure profit, make their day.
I used my as yet unblemished credit history to shuffle high (think, 27%) interest debts over to 0% interest credit lines, $5,000 at a time, to actually start paying down principal. Rinse and repeat several times.
With each credit card down, I tucked away a little bit more cash, so that the next time an emergency happened (and it would, many times), I wasn’t just jumping back into the black hole of credit card debt.
To this day, the only recurring debt that doesn’t give me the screaming heebie-jeebies is mortgage debt and that’s only because we have to live somewhere.
Making money usually means work.
It wasn’t always fun and it definitely wasn’t pretty. But the end result of working my tuchus off was surviving college without any debt, emerging with some savings, and even better yet, seriously reducing that debt.
Scarlett O’Hara had a point
I never (ever ever ever) wanted to go back to that so I maximized savings and income. Overtime was my best friend. So were coupons, credit card bonuses, and credit card rewards. Points programs for surveys? Points programs for email clicks? I was all over them. Every penny.
Negotiating raises and promotions was awkward and nerve-wracking but I dove in, flailing like drunken monkey. It stayed awkward but I kept trying.
Being poor sucks but it doesn’t make you a bad person
There was a certain amount of luck involved. There’s been a bit of help from people that I couldn’t ever repay. This is true of most people, even if they don’t know or acknowledge it.
But throughout it all, I was ashamed. I was ashamed that I hadn’t pulled off the Rescue. I was ashamed that my family I’d been so proud of for so long was unable, or unwilling, to do what was needed to fix our problems.
It didn’t matter that going from being a schoolkid to a student supporting a whole family in a single step was probably too large a leap. It didn’t matter that I had been traveling an almost parallel course of chronically declining health, with very few answers, even as I struggled to prop my family up.
It felt like our economic status was a reflection on me and if I didn’t want to be judged, no one could know our struggle or that we were poor. It’s strange living in a country viewed by many as the land of opportunity, particularly as the first generation of immigrants born here. You’re in the unique position of having been given a gift of life in one of the best possible places (a first world country rather than second or third) and you’ve got to make the best of that gift.
It’s not wrong, but it’s not entirely right, either. I should make the best of winning the genetic lottery, yes, but the problems we faced, just because I had taken on the responsibilities, they weren’t my fault. It wasn’t my failure. That’s probably been the hardest lesson to learn.
The most painful conversation of my life was the one I had with my dad was the day before my wedding. I finally confessed that I felt unbearably responsible for Mom’s last years, for my brother’s inability to do life like a fully cognizant human being, for being unable to fix everything and everyone. The guilt I carried was worse than the heavy lifting of the work itself and I finally had to lay it down.
Taking our next steps
These days, it feels like I’m living the high life. Sure, compared to my regional neighbors (ahem, Silicon Valley), we’re pretty far down the economic food chain, but for me? We’re doing well. We can always do better and I’ll keep working at it because there is still so much I want to do. I love to help people with their finances, but on a larger scale, there’s still so many people out there that need help.
The better life gets, the more we can give back. Years ago, others who were doing well took the time to lend me a hand, to support or encourage me in some way that was small to them, but huge to me. This is a life cycle I’m proud to be a part of.
June 26, 2015
This is the toughest question.
How do you choose a guardian for your child?
Right off, my immediate family is off the list. No way I’d trust my sibling or my father with the care and raising of LB, period.
Not even if they had enough income to do so. But of course I would expect to leave our entire estate in trust with annual disbursement allowances for care and maintenance and education and I doubly wouldn’t trust either one of them not to be completely foolish or selfish. (Can you really double zero trust? Just for emphasis.)
So that’s right out. And so are just about all my extended family half of whom I wouldn’t trust farther than I could heave a tree stump with a candy bar, much less my child.
Then we have to think about what we’re looking for in substitute parents which is what guardians would ideally be.
Our criteria
Who has the same values as we do?
Who has similar, or equally valuable, life experiences that they can pass on?
Who has a good grasp of setting boundaries and enforcing discipline?
Who has some experience in parenting and therefore understands inherently that every child is different?
I have a horror of leaving LB to guardians who think children should be cookie cutter personalities, or that they have to be pushed to excel beyond their limits, or any number of unreasonable things.
And it’s not all about LB. Seamus is going to need a good home and care as well. I’d much rather they stayed together but it’s possible that could be harder.
If they can’t stay together, if the best home for LB isn’t one that can take him on, then we just need to find them best home for him, period. He is well liked by one set of friends but he hasn’t earned the place in their hearts where they ask for him to come visit for weekends and longer just because they love having him around. That was Doggle. If we had a terrible accident I always knew we had at least one friend who positively doted on Doggle and would have taken him in immediately. (Yes I am absolutely planning on leaving the dog a bequest. How could I not? He’s still our responsibility and dog cannot live on love alone.) He, and any other companion critters we might adopt, will still need homes, food and veterinary care.
At this time, I have one family member who knows me best and respects me as an adult person. That’s probably going to be my first choice for LB – this person was close to me and my mom and so would know how to substitute for me. Next best would be a couple of friends I love and respect but I’m not totally sure if I could ask them for such a big favor.
PiC is likely to nominate someone on his side.
We’ll have to pick one person to be the first choice rather than co-guardians as that could be confusing for LB and complicated as well. Either way we go, I feel like LB risks losing touch with some of hir family because our two families don’t have much to do with each other.
Ultimately, this stage of planning, unlike any other, seriously underscores how important it is that we stay alive and well.
More Estate Planning:
Estate Planning (ICE): Life insurance
Estate planning (ICE): Advance Health Care Directive
Estate planning: the In Case of Emergency kickoff