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 4, 2015
People tend to make assumptions the second they hear that you own rental property and, for those who aren’t knowledgeable, many of those are wrong.
1. You’re rich. (Correlated: You will be rich tomorrow if you just got started today.)
2. You’re always making money, usually hand over fist.
3. It’s easy money, and profitable as hell.
4. Landlords can charge anything they want.
Obviously we’re not rich. Far from it. I certainly intend to be but this is one part of a long term plan to get there, this isn’t the end all be all.
The point is to make money but it’s not easy and not an overnight get rich quick scheme.
There is a risk and a truckload of expenses involved: I took on a mortgage, with all the associated home buying costs like closing costs, realtor fees, inspection and appraisal fees, and a higher interest rate because it’s not an owner occupied property.
And whether or not we have renters (aka income), I’m still responsible for all taxes, damages, repairs, and association or other fees every month. My profit is AFTER I pay all those bills, if anything is left.
Profit margin is dependent on two main factors: fixed expenses and rent. I’d love it if I could engineer a 50% profit margin but the only “control” I have is on the expense side. It’s down to what decisions I make when buying. The price point has to be low enough with a high enough property value so that when the mortgage and all the other costs are added up, they are less than the amount of rent I can charge. And I can only charge what the market will bear. If rents in the neighborhood or region are $1200/month for a 4 bedroom, 2 bath single family home, and I’m trying to charge $1500/month for a comparable property with no distinctive features worth $300 more per month, all because my expenses are $1400/month, guess who’s got 2 thumbs and is SOL?
Or say your expenses are lower and you can still make a small profit charging market rates – if you get hit with multiple repairs, month after month, even small ones, you’re still looking into an ever deepening hole.
You’d better have some slush fund saved to keep covering your expenses during times of vacancy, and any rental income budgeting sheet worth the paper it’s printed on includes a minimum assumed vacancy percentage, because just try crying to your bank about how you can’t pay this month because the rent was paid late or your property stood vacant.
Believe me, they’re just fine and dandy taking the house along with whatever money you’ve already sunk into it if you were fool enough to believe that you didn’t need to pony up more cash out of pocket from time to time.
I didn’t get into this intending to lose money but as an investor you have to know the basic risks you’re running, and yes, losing money is absolutely a real risk.
April 30, 2015
Change from Jan 2015: 8% increase
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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Retirement: I’ve been doing lump sum contributions to my IRA at the end of each tax year, but I should really do it monthly instead. Mostly for superficial reasons: seeing $5500 come out of the savings at once is more painful than ~ $500/month. Plus I can probably cash flow that $500/month if I’m creative, rather than taking it out of savings at all! Or am I getting greedy?
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Update: screw it, I’m cashflowing that sucker. 2014 contribution, done.
2015 contributions, set up as recurring withdrawals.
2016 contributions, will automatically go forth and withdraw.
It’s like a monthly gift to myself!
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April 29, 2015
Who do you trust to make health care decisions for you?
We’re making out our advanced care directives and while we have a basic idea of how we’d take care of each other, we need to designate decision makers if both of us are out of commission.
Our criteria
Who has enough basic knowledge of medicine and the medical establishment to be an advocate?
Who would understand our wishes AND comply with them regardless of their personal feelings, philosophy or religious beliefs?
In sum: who could we trust to intelligently make health care decisions that are in our best interests as we see them?
Our candidates
It might seem like “family” is the automatic answer, but as with other issues, that’s not necessarily the case.
I have a couple relatives who work in the medical field directly or indirectly and I would trust one of them to take the time to exercise good judgment, and seek the expertise or resources necessary to make the best possible decision for us.
PiC has a couple of friends in the same position. We would trust one of them to do the same or serve as a resource to the primary decision-maker if medical complications had to be addressed.
The other considerations are location and availability.
The person/ people we designate would have to be willing to drop everything to come to us to make those decisions in the event. While we’d certainly pay for those travel expenses, there’s no doubt that would be highly disruptive to their family lives.
Aside from the actual legalities, we need to have a clear conversation with the nominees to be sure this was something they were ready and willing to do, and make sure they have all our pertinent information as well as what we want done in case of incapacitation in writing.
At the moment, I’m fairly certain I know who I’d designate as mine. We still need PiC’s decision.
:: Have you got either a designated decision-maker or do you know who you’d trust to do the honors?
April 27, 2015
How about I just don’t spend $150+ and save $150+?
Walking to the counter, arms loaded down with pump bottles, I turned and stopped in front of PiC. “We’re buying nearly $80 worth of hand soap. HAND SOAP.”
It was 50-70% off, but still. Hand soap.
A Bath and Body Works holiday sale nearly sucker-punched our wallets. After 30 minutes of sniffing and picking bottles we were walking over to the counter when reality sunk in. The soap smelled great, of course, that’s how they got us in the first place but thankfully my brain turned on. I can pay $5 for a gallon of soap that smells just fine! It’s a testament to the pull of the new scents that I was actually sad putting the bottles back on the shelf.
I’m a sucker for products that smell good, and I’m not the only one. There’s a whole science behind manipulating your senses between scent and organization to get you to stay longer and spend more.
Some scents transport me to very specific moments in time:
Softsoap: high school, childhood best friends, horseback riding, the red-brown dirt of the riding stables where I learned to “be a rider, not a passenger”, hand scrubbing my one pair of riding pants and line drying them every week.
Garnier Fructis: high school and college, couponing, youth
Incense: temple, death, grieving, parent loss, tradition, childhood Lunar New Year celebrations, grouchy old grandma, ancestors I only know through faded black and whites and stories passed down from generation to generation
Bath and Body Works brown vanilla sugar: college best friend during college, picking apples at the grocery store, Southern California sun, driving my new car to work/school/work
BBW plumeria (long discontinued but there are a few scents reminiscent of this): junior high school phys.ed., black shorts and white tees, an old friend I haven’t seen since New York, braces, REALLY terrible looking long hair, weighing less than 70 lbs and being mocked about it.
Pears/apples (artificially): being carefree, young, and silly. Life before kid, jobs, degrees, or college majors.
Coffee: five years old, learning responsibility, trusting my parents implicitly and completely, discovery
Gingerbread and fresh baked cookies: Christmas, family, holidays
“New car” smell: Age 19, negotiating my first major purchase, driving a new car in torrential rain, paying off a loan early
Scents are such a powerful trigger for memory, no wonder it’s a tool to manipulate our emotions and buying habits! I’m safer shopping online from home.
What’s your shopping weakness?
April 23, 2015
Once in a while, I send out postcards. I might have heard you were having a hard time, or you mentioned something that made me think YOU WOULD LIKE MAIL.
I love getting real mail. I also love sending it. I hear some of you feel the same.
I’d like your opinion on how you’d like to participate. And if you’re ok with it, I’d like to feature at least the front of some of your postcards here. If this goes well, maybe we’ll make this a recurring thing!
So let’s kick this off and say, submit your answers by May 8th.
Quick edits (April 24th): I am willing to send to at least one international address, and I’d like to kick off this round sooner, so I moved the response deadline to May 8th.
April 22, 2015
We recently experienced a little improvement in quality of life, and so decided to take on another challenge.
Since none of my family had met the newbie yet, and his family was ready to take another crack at it, we loaded up a rental and drove down the coast. Here’s how it went….
Night 1: we left an hour and a half behind schedule. I blame Enterprise. They botched pickup, they didn’t have the car at the location even after I confirmed with them two days in advance AND they didn’t have a clean car ready to go when PiC finally arrived at the 2nd location where the cars were allegedly ready. They threw us exactly 1.5 hours behind.
We rented a minivan because STUFF and we wanted to be safer w/Seamus and LB. I hate not being able to crate him for the drive but there is no way to fit a Seamus-sized crate in the car. A truck, sure, but I’m not a fan of popping the dog in the truck bed, exposed to the elements. And LB, of course, requires a car seat and numerous other accoutrements. We tried to minimize as much as possible and consider this a learning experience for future packing.
I haaate running out of diapers and paying full price so I packed nearly 100. For 5.5 days away. It’s called pooperation, alright? I also packed twice as many doggy poo bags as Seamus could use. Very little worse than being stuck in a shitty situation with no clean up available.
Surprise: LB still hates being strapped into the car seat and hates sitting still in the car but loves freeway driving. We prepared our souls for multiple stops and screaming, instead ze slept the whole first 4 hour leg.
Day 2: we made an extra stop on Leg 2, making it 2 of 3 stretches before we made it the Home Base and that 45 minute delay put us in the middle of hellish traffic. 2:30 and like a bloody spider, GPS showed traffic stretched out every direction from the body of LA. Of course. It was a quick tutorial in why we can never move back. Every trip would take at least 45 minutes, if not 2 hours, because our friends and family are scattered everywhere.
LB ran out of “sitting in a car seat, putting up with freeway” steam at the tail end of Leg 3 so we rode the rest of the way serenaded by hir increasingly ragged roars. We slept pretty well that night, when we slept. It was a parody of our routine at home: sleep til ze wakes, one stumbles to get the bottle and the other weaves over to the sofa with hir, both collapse while ze is fed and patted back down. Stay on the sofa the rest of the night.
Day 3: Most of the morning and afternoon was spent recovering from the long drive and then ze finally met part of my family that night. Ze was full of chatter and what we call “crab bubbles” and then crashed hard.
We got to visit with some friends briefly that evening, and wind down almost like regular people, except we had to keep checking on LB since we didn’t bring a monitor.
Day 4 was the most intense day. We had a morning to early afternoon engagement, a small reunion, and ze decided that since we had to be up at 715 anyway, why not get up at 620 and stay up?
Thanks to, again, SoCal traffic, we didn’t get home til after 3, and then it was back out again for a dinner. This dragged on far longer than was civilized for a tiny infant and ze passed out in the car. Blessedly, this was the night of the long sleep. Ze actually stayed asleep for 8 hours. Hadn’t happened before, hasn’t happened since. But boy did we need it.
Day 5 was one last hurrah gathering of family and arguably the best one. LB was whisked away by Grandma, only to be seen again when hungry, then whooshed off to a cuddle and feeding with Grandpa. Aunts and Great Grandma finished up the rounds of baby passing and ze fell asleep in PiC’s arms. I don’t see this branch of the family often enough and boy do I miss them. Ze was also surprised with a handful of amazingly timed baby gifts: all things ze needed and I hadn’t even thought to mention them to anyone. Psychic family, I tell ya.
Logistics!
Packing. We were pretty sure that we overpacked but didn’t want to take the risk that going too minimalist would be to my detriment. I can only handle so much manual stuff, before you factor in the stress of travel, disrupted routines, and the energy drain of socializing.
Turns out we didn’t need: the spare cozy blanket (we brought two heavy/cozy and one light blankets, 2 were used regularly); the baby carriers (we were too tired to wear hir); a picnic blanket. I could also have packed about 10 fewer diapers but let’s never skimp on packing diapers because I don’t want to pay full price or live with regrets.
Feeding the Bean. I planned to do combination pumping and formula for hir feeding so we could be flexible. Turned out we didn’t need most of our handy formula packets. When I didn’t have enough prepumped milk packed, I nursed hir, and most days I was able to get nearly 20 oz in just two pumping sessions. Really quite convenient.
Costs. The car rental was nearly $400, and of course we had to fill up about three times. We stayed at places with breakfast provided and packed enough food and drinks along in our cooler so that we only paid for takeout twice. The convenience of not having to cram everything into our smaller cars and risking things falling over on Seamus or fighting with squeezing stuff into every inch was so worth that outlay.
April 20, 2015
PiC took a generous holiday last year to be home with us and, despite working through most of it, I was immensely spoiled.
He was an absolute superman! He only left me the chores I wanted: laundry, cooking, correspondence and gifts, all financials, tending to work and hobbies. Everything else was taken care of.
He was all over it: furniture related acquisition/building/maintenance, Craigslisting, car maintenance and upkeep, reorganizing, dog stuff (usually my specialty but on temporary suspension), keeping the house clean (always his specialty).
Oh, and feeding me fruit. He’s excellent at feeding me fruit regularly. It was great. Very nearly the ideal split of home life, with me continuing to work and him doing stuff he wanted to get done and in a timely manner.
It got me thinking that, despite loving having my quiet time and space, this suggests that my once upon a time dream of being the breadwinner and having PiC be the SAHD and house manager isn’t so farfetched after all. I just assumed that I couldn’t bear that much time in close quarters even with my beloved spouse but it turns out we enjoy each other’s company more than I realized!
The other piece of the puzzle is that after all this time with Little Bean, I do not like giving over hir care to someone else. I want to be the one hugging, cuddling, feeding and even changing hir. Failing that, PiC should be doing it. This is an odd sense of possessiveness (MY BABY) that I never expected to feel, or at least not this strongly, and the desire to be home with my child is utterly foreign.
Mind, I do not want to be a stay at home mom, I’d be terrible at that. Physically, I’m simply not up to it. And eventually, I’d get antsy to do other things, my brain would go right to mush and my temper would fray. I’m not the full time SAHM anyone would want. (Though, when I’m hung up on an idea that won’t develop properly, the idea of just cuddling LB while I think is awfully appealing. I am pretending that ze isn’t heavier than a sack of potatoes and demanding full time attention.)
I want to be home and available to LB, to continue to work and have my family be together.
What would it would take?
1. We need enough money to cover both our salaries and the full cost of good health insurance. Health insurance has forever been a main reason I’ve worked so hard. You can’t afford to be without it when you have a chronic illness. Sure, we could live on less but a) I don’t want to, b) we support more than just ourselves and I can’t force Dad to cut costs more (YET), c) savings is not optional.
2. Potential to grow as a professional and therefore potential to grow my salary further.
3. Be location independent, saving my energy for the important stuff.
I’m not an ideas and vision sort of person, I’m a Make it Happen sort so getting started isn’t the challenge, it’s coming up with a project in the first place. I’m an excellent troubleshooter but creativity isn’t my strongest suit.
Sidebar: I both admire and envy friends who knew exactly what they wanted, whether it was to stay home and rock the Best Mama At Home thing, or to get back into the fray at six weeks and rock the Career Lady thing, and were able to execute the plan.
Since my body is a jerk, a lot, things are a bit more complicated but this has my brain ticking again.
It could be time for a major career change once I lay out the details of what we’d be willing to take on and risk, or another change altogether for the same result. Let’s see!
Are you considering any major life changes?
