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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October 15, 2014
I was doing some back end blog work, going through old drafts and deleting them to clear out the archives etc, when I ran across an old memory that had me shaking my head all over again.
*****
After a colleague snooped on my phone and read my blog emails, I’d changed this blog URL and name to prevent her from finding the content. In the process, I also removed all posts that talked about work in any detail, and this was one of them (excerpts from what feels like a lifetime ago):
I work for the world’s least professional office.
I sat down and had a nerve-wracking chat with my bosses yesterday … It’s come to my attention that while I’ve been fussing about not making enough money, I really needed to bite the bullet as my poorness was really hitting me hard, psychologically.
No, I’ve never had to go hungry. But Ma always counts her pennies because it’s such a burden on me taking care of all their bills, and for some reason, that makes me feel like I’m just not doing well enough. So, take a dash of knowing that I’m absolutely responsible (it’s a cultural thing) for their uncertain futures, especially if they never manage to earn a living wage again, add three spoons of my own stress to knowing that despite all my work I’ve not secured any sort of future for them or myself when I’m ready to get married, and I’m constantly one foot over the abyss.
I racked my brains on the most polite, professional approach and borrowed heavily from Madame X’s article on how to ask for a hefty raise based on your merit and excellent performance reviews.
For many reasons, the worst of which was that I felt if I deserved it they would have already given me my raise, I didn’t want to ask. [Ed Note: I never felt this way again.] I didn’t want to admit that I needed it. I didn’t want to admit that I was struggling even with the overtime, and I really didn’t want to admit that I didn’t want to work so dang hard just to make ends meet! No matter how true it was, I wanted (needed) this raise because I really truly deserved it, not because I was struggling with home life.
I said (almost whispered, honestly) that as much as I have wanted to stay here and continue learning and growing as an employee of this office, I had reasons to need to prioritize my salary and no longer had the luxury of choosing to trade the lower salary for the current work environment (which is the best it’s ever been.) I mentioned that I’d looked up average salary ranges for offices of our size, in our area, and with fewer responsibilities and that it was significantly higher than mine. While I didn’t expect them to meet it (as it would be doubling my salary) that’s still a huge discrepancy in what I’m sacrificing in basic salary. I left it at that because I didn’t want to admit how much the sacrifice of a higher salary was hurting me personally and professionally. I also did make it clear that leaving (right now) is the last thing I want to do (because it would be a pretty stupid move to lose my health insurance and income when I have a small e-fund and so much stress and demand at home.)
I wanted this to be a professional plea, not a personal one. After all, in what employer’s mind does your rent or bills play a role in determining your salary?
Mine, as it turns out.
The boss wanted to know what the REAL reason was for this. He said that if I were happy in this environment why was I looking? Unless I was looking for a reason to jump ship, or else it had to be pressures at home that prompted this. He demanded to know the truth behind the matter, he feels like I’m too private which he hates because he wants this to be a family environment. If I have a need, I have to come right out and tell them what’s bothering me rather than hiding it.
Never mind that this is a place of business, not my personal therapist’s office… Since I didn’t want this to be a complete disaster I had to ‘fess up to the fact that yes, I’m experiencing a great deal of pressure at home and although I’ve been trying really hard to make it work, I’ve been fighting a losing battle for years.
Only in MY office does the illogical, personal crybaby approach work best. How am I supposed to learn good professional habits here??
Years later, I’m still shaking my head over that laughably bad recollection.
In that place, without a regular, formal evaluation process, there was no clear mechanism to ask for raises. That wasn’t my first job but it was the first non-retail job; asking for a raise in a unprofessional professional environment was that much more stressful.
Color me ever so grateful that I’m well out of a place where emotion trumps logic and professionalism. I was young and naive, that’s for darn sure, but even then I recognized that whole situation stank.
I’ve had my fair share of experience with terrible workplaces and bad managers over the years but this particular chapter was special. And, as is so often the case, this is only one of the many incidents (spanning sexual harassment, employment discrimination, verbal abusive and unacceptable in the workplace behaviors) that I either experienced or witnessed with terrible people. But this is one that directly pertains to money. 😉
After several years of freedom, it’s easy to look back and laugh at just how awful they were as colleagues and as people; in fact, it was huge motivation not just to get the hell out of there but to grow my career so I’d never be so dependent on or forced to stay in close proximity to awful people again.
:: I know I’m not the only one with a horror story or two, what’s your best/worst?
October 14, 2014
I don’t know about you, but 2 am insomnia feels pretty grim. I know how not to be an insomniac but doing isn’t always as easy as knowing.
If I were smart I’d be asleep right now.
If I were smart, I’d actually have stopped working at 930, and gone to bed then.
My body is stressed and it is showing in gross and sundry ways. You’d think this would teach me a lesson but instead I ponder what other new blogs I might read because I’m not going to sleep.
Willful insomnia, that completely makes sense. Especially when you consider that I’m going to be up in the morning to work again so it’s not like I’m under the impression that it’s a weekend.
I started reading Kieron Gillian’s Journey into Mystery and it’s good enough that if I pick up another volume I’ll probably not sleep at all tonight.
I consider an old Mercedes Lackey compilation, The Free Bards, because it is an old familiar friend and immediately crave cheese. Because it is firmly embedded in my mind that Rune gets cheese, bread and a carrot early on and I’m always receptive to the idea of getting a slice of cheese to have with my book’s character. Unlike John Scalzi who detests the mention of stew in these books, mentions of a traveler stopping at an inn for a slice of bread and stew just makes me want to make a thick loaf of crusty Irish bread and a pot of potatoey tomatoey stew.
PiC snores away and Seamus won’t even come into the bedroom at night anymore, preferring his living room bed (it is awfully comfortable) to the bedroom set up because my being up late keeps him up late.
I’m doing all the things you’re not supposed to: keeping the light on, looking at my phone, reading in bed at long stretches.
But sometimes you just have a hankering for your quiet alone time. I have alone time during the day but those aren’t MY hours. Those hours are for work and housework, thinking and doing. There’s so little time for puttering, pondering and just being. And maybe that’s just what my brain, and soul, want right now. While it can still get it, before an infant shatters the peace forever.
Or, more likely, I’m just not smart enough to be trusted to put myself to bed.
At least I get here. But LB is both of us at once: a night owl and a morning glory so I get the movements all night and as soon as I wake, sometimes before. I haven’t really been alone for months and LB is quick to remind me of that.
The dogs haven’t given me real privacy in years, I suppose that’s been good training for having an infant/toddler underfoot.
Everything aches from tip to tail. The counselor asked me today how the pregnancy has affected the fibro and I don’t know how to answer that exactly. My pain doesn’t come neatly categorized: these parts hurt because of the pregnancy and those parts because well, they’re just broken. This never ending backache, is it because of the new weight I’m carrying or is it just the backache I would have had anyway? And that odd hitch in my breathing and pain in my chest? Well that could be because of either.
Because everything hurts, with fibro and many things are weird as hell with the pregnancy, so how do you know? And I guess, what does it matter really? Pain is, like money, fungible. Applicable anywhere.
I don’t know if the counselor was reassured or not by my shruggy answer.
Still less, I don’t know if she actually believed me that I don’t recall the last time I had a drink because I rarely drink recreationally. I’m both too cheap to pay for alcohol at restaurants and don’t really care that much about it, is that really so unusual?
Little Bean proceeded to wake me every hour with gymnastics. That’s not a huge surprise.
October 13, 2014
Food was a problem.
PiC is the saint of making food happen, though. He offered me meal option after meal option, my revulsion scratching things off the menu faster than he could finish the words. I was so hungry I could have cried; it felt like I was going to starve every day because Little Bean only let me eat and keep down one meal a day. Couldn’t repeat meals either so leftovers were right out. Fun game.
My blood, the traitor, revealed my glucose to be a touch on the high side; diabetes is a worry because it’s in the family history too (I have a crap family medical history). You know what’s super fun? A 3 hour glucose test. That means: Drink 100 ml of artificially sweetened clear liquid in less than 5 minutes. Gag. Desperately try not to gag because next is retching and next is throwing up which means starting the test all the hell over.
Get jabbed in the arm, blood draw 1.
Wait an hour. Get jabbed in the arm, blood draw 2. Be stupid and choose to use the same arm which hasn’t fully healed yet so get alcohol swabbed on an open wound. FRAK.
Wait an hour. Try to work, give up three times because thinking, breathing and moving are all vomit-inducing. The front desk says don’t throw up, you’ll have to start over. Switch frakking arms, blood draw 3.
Wait an hour. Nap a while taking up a whole row of chairs not giving a damn who looks at me sideways. Try to walk off the nausea. Switch arms again, last blood draw! Get the hell out of there.
I’ve been told very sternly by about seven people NO SUSHI as if I had Sushi Fiend written across my forehead. (It is. I’ve been craving sushi with clawing madness for weeks. Being told “no” helps exactly zero.)
I’m also constantly being told not to gain more than 25 pounds, about one third of that per trimester, during the whole term. First, I barely eat for one, forget for two. Second, why do people who know me think I’d be trying to gain more than I have to? It’s a weird thing.
Theme: “If YOU want to survive, you have to let ME survive.” Turns out that eating, sleeping more than a couple hours, and breathing are all difficult. This is completely counterintuitive and inefficient!
I’d been warned years ago about fatigue. In some ways, the fibro fatigue prepared me for the feeling of utter uselessness when I can’t even lift a limb. Doesn’t make it easier, nor does it make leaning on PiC so heavily easier, but at least it wasn’t a shock.
Having wavered between having to watch my words with everyone and being pretty nervous that this would all come to tears, I find myself wishing to fast forward a few months so I’d know what happens and so that I could actually TELL someone.
October 8, 2014
Planning soothes my soul, even if we’re not ready to really share this with family and friends offline, so I’ve retreated into making lists, plotting and planning.
My initial conclusion: This is going to be $$$.
The truth is, we know we’re going to have to throw money at the problem(s); it’s a matter of figuring out which problems can be creatively solved and which require money. I used to tough everything out to save money; that’s not a viable solution anymore. I’ve used up my allotment of tough and now it’s going to have to be accommodations and thinking ahead. I’d already been thinking along these lines when we were just becoming a dual-dog household, it’s even more important now!
Childcare: We know that we’ll need a lot of help around here, my health isn’t awesome, ever, and a little one will require care no matter how good (or not) I feel. The cost of childcare, even just to help during the day, is rather daunting from my initial research. We don’t have good family and friends nearby to rely on in a pinch, it’s all on us.
Unfortunately we aren’t close to any colleges so we can’t really steal a page from Nicole & Maggie’s book of hiring college age mother’s helpers but I will still look for any such possibilities.
Housekeeping: I only clean when my body isn’t too pained AND when I have energy. Those two rarely coincide, I’m sorry to say. I do bits and pieces of cleaning as and when. We’re not terribly picky but I do like a reasonably clean house so I’ve been thinking more and more about that robot vacuum. PiC is skeptical I have $100 saved for this extra expense so far. $400ish more to go! Or, we could use that money for semi-regular housecleaning, I’ve gotten a couple of quotes that are nearly reasonable.
Housing: We’ve enjoyed having an extra room but since we’re nowhere near being able to afford a bigger place in the Bay Area, we’re going to have to give up that luxury. I’m also eyeballing things for The Purge and we’ll likely start to Tetris for maximum utility.
Transportation: To date, our cars have been all about the Doggle. He was our first baby. We never anticipated getting anything that didn’t also have his comfort and safety in mind so we hit the research into minivans that we both like (safe, roomy enough for the family, automated enough for my level of use) and it was a bit scary. Good gravy but they are expensive.
I’m not yet prepared to sell one of our current cars and pony up something on the order of $30K for a new to us vehicle. And now that Doggle’s not around, sadly, it’s just Seamus and Little Bean to consider so it’s less pressing to move forward with the bigger family size option.
Healthcare: For now, we are lucky enough to have solid healthcare providers but they are job dependent. Neither of us are particularly worried at the moment about job loss but you know me: never assume you’re safe.
I’m not in love with some of our end-game options (y’know, actual childbirthy related things) but overall everything routine (checkups, labwork, radiology related stuff) is covered by our insurance for now at no extra cost. I still need to see what adding LB to the insurance as a full human will cost monthly and for actual visits.
October 6, 2014
This month was mostly uneventful.
The rent came in late, which racked up a minimal late fee. Since I rely on the rent to cover the mortgage, I wondered if it’d be worth bumping up the late fee a bit to motivate the renters to pay on time more often. Perhaps on the next lease. Nothing punitive but something more annoying than the equivalent of a monetary flea bite.
They also managed to run afoul of the HOA so that was a fun bit of paperwork to get in the mail. It seemed to be a minor thing so as long as they toe the line, we should be fine there. This reminded me, of course, why I prefer to have the management company deal with the day to day: I just had to send off an email and ask for them to deal with it.
***
Just for kicks, I ran a projection of income and expenses for the rest of the year; I was curious to see what result we could expect after a partial year of rent with regard to cash flow.
Barring any interruptions of rent payment, assuming we retain the same renter this year, and any repair costs that might come up (most will be covered by the supplementary insurance): ~$300
Note: This excluded the actual cost of the purchase (the down payment, the fees and the closing costs) since I assume, for the moment, that will be recouped if and when I sell. Otherwise it’ll likely take about thirty years to break even by rent alone.
Whoever said this rental property thing was a sure moneymaker can bite me. 😉 But I wasn’t looking to get rich overnight – if there was a great way to do that I think we’d all be there – so patience is the name of this game.
September 29, 2014
Mint.com: A review
For most of the early money blogging years, right around the time I started using credit cards in earnest for the rewards, Yodlee was my account aggregator of choice.
It was unsophisticated but did the job: kept me apprised of all my banking and credit card transactions in addition to the manual tracking I’d do and keep me honest and firmly atop bill paying. When it started running into all kinds of updating problems because of added security at the banking end, I had to give it up.
There were a few attempts to get into other software since but they were halfhearted at best, and I retreated into the relatively safe haven of spreadsheets. It just doesn’t work for us together, though, we maintain our own legacy spreadsheets and they don’t merge well, they don’t let us do aggregated reporting well, and it’s hugely time consuming. We won’t have the luxury of spending three hours at a time recording transactions soon.. heck, we don’t really have that time now!
Once, long ago, I’d started working with Mint in its early days but since Yodlee was still working for me, I quit. Now it’s time to venture back and see how it might work for us.
Our requirements: It has to be both dead simple and require very little time or brain power to set up and maintain. As much as I love spending time with my money, this has to be the low-maintenance solution.
We both need easy access to it.
It should automatically pull transactions for us.
We should be able to add manual (cash) transactions.
We need to be able to reconcile and categorize spending.
Early observations: the interface
We get weekly updates that might tell us we’re overspending in a particular category, versus how much we normally spend, or that we have upcoming bills.
Good: This is a great way to keep us both on the same page.
Bad: I wish that they’d send up both all the notes. Because we don’t have joint everything accounts, I’d have to sign in to see what’s been charged on his card, whilst he would get the email notifications, and vice versa. We recently had an incident where a merchant charged a purchase as a cash advance and were dinged with a $10 fee. Only he got the notification for that.
We can access the interface as long as we have an internet connection; we don’t have to share files manually.
Good: Being in one system is great, and so is not having manually shift files and cells and whatever else about.
Bad: If you don’t have internet, you’re out of luck.
Early observations: hiccups
I’ve had the worst trouble signing in, sometimes, it wouldn’t even let me past the log on page for a few days, once and their Help folks took about seven emails to understand that. They still didn’t fix anything, it just actually started working again. I do NOT like that.
Accounts are constantly requiring my attention – there’s always one or more banks that require me to re-enter the password or what have you, even though nothing has changed in the last five days. Occasionally, it’s for a legitimate reason like it’d like to confirm that I want to close an account.
I know some of you are Mint.com users: any tips or suggestions for making the most of it?
September 22, 2014
Change from August: 2% increase
Change from January: 272% 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!
***
Bill creep: Our cell phone discount was eliminated, so that went up $10/month. Our internet promotion (though I was lied to by the CSR who told me it was a bundle price, NOT a promotion) expired so that bill jumped 20%. The sewer/water bill went up another $8 bimonthly.
I’ve made calls to bring down the cost of what I could but in the end, the total is still up from three months ago which is frustrating.
***
Mortgage thoughts: Congratulations to SP on the purchase of their new house!
This made me curious. We’ve been working away at the mortgage, which we couldn’t refinance for reasons that still irritate me, and putting a lump sum toward principal each year. It’s made a difference! In spite of the high interest rate, compared to what we could have gotten in a refi, we’re down to 80% of the original mortgage or 60% of the total cost left.
That’s not huge but it is a significant amount and gives me hope that if we batter away at this a bit more, we’ll free up cash flow sooner than I had hoped. The mortgage payoff calculator suggests that if we paid an additional $500/month, we’d pay this sucker off in 15 years from now, shaving off nearly a third of the full term. Since we do a lump sum towards principal once a year, I wonder how much of a difference that makes.
Anyway, this is mostly idle curiosity since my brain immediately demands to know what I want to do with this place: make it a rental? Stick it out? Sell it? And I don’t have those answers.
***
Mortgage, continued: We had a payment snafu where the mortgage payment didn’t process. PiC was positive he’d paid it and he’s never been late or missed one, but the bank’s immediate reaction was to ding us with a $100 fee and tell us about mortgage modification. He had to call and chat with them, and the fee was removed, but that was PITA.
I’ve since set up an automated payment for that to come out of our joint checking account which tells us when they’re going to send and when they have sent payments.
***
We are so close to getting 2013 taxes done I can nearly taste it! Working with a new CPA, however, does require a bit more due diligence and legwork on my part. I’ve reviewed the draft filing and sent back a long list of corrections and questions. If this goes well, we’ll dive into 2014 preparations because our first quarter of 2015 is going to be pretty hectic between home and work life; I don’t have time for hand-holding.
On Life
Not a heck of a lot to say here: we had a lot of change and it’s been hard.
