- The private school that DC1 went to for K-4 went out of business. Luckily DC2 seems to be enjoying dual language in the public schools. I switched my amazon smile account over to the Planned Parenthood in the nearest city. I’m not sure what DH will be switching his over to (I suggested ACLU).
- I got some summer money so now our emergency fund has been completely refilled.
- DH has gotten into the idea of buying a new mattress and has been investing more time in it than I would, which for now means I’m not immediately rage buying one online. Last week during a lunch break he went to a local mattress store and tried a bunch of mattresses (he likes tempurapedic memory foam) and wrote down how firm he thought they were. Next he went online and tried to find firmness levels for those specific mattresses. He’s hoping to be able to use that information should we decide to buy a bed in a box online. [update: it did not help because mattresses sold in stores exist nowhere else, apparently]
- I was talking to a finance professor at a conference this summer and he told me that upper-middle-class people such as myself should be invested in 100% stocks until age 45 or so because the variation between stocks and jobloss isn’t close enough to make it worthwhile to invest in bonds. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but something worth thinking about. I should probably purge my retirement accounts of bonds and shift any bond over to taxable, if I’m going to have bonds. But I will probably put all of this off.
- In the end we decided to take the king bed plunge and went with Loom and Leaf. Sadly they didn’t have a platform bed option (and the place we got our last platform bed no longer sells them!) So we ended up getting a Best Price Mattress Model E from Amazon. There is some concern that Amazon may send the wrong item, but Walmart was out of king-size and Target doesn’t carry this brand. We went with Overstock.com for new sheets and mattress pads. We haven’t actually *gotten* the mattress yet because we need a two week window in which we can guarantee one of us will be home to let them in to take away our old mattress and box springs. But we did order the bed and sheets…
- DH’s employer bought everyone new laptops, and the result is equivalent to his four-year old desktop for the same price (except for a better monitor and graphics card). The price was the same. So the price of portability is about 4 years of technological progress.
What do you have your amazon smile account linked to?
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
August 20, 2018 at 8:57 am
Mine is ASPCA.
August 20, 2018 at 9:23 am
That’s a good one! There are also a lot of smaller local animal causes with smile accounts.
August 21, 2018 at 6:23 am
Those become part of my 24-days of charitable giving in lieu of an advent calendar.
August 21, 2018 at 7:16 am
Nice! What a great idea!
August 20, 2018 at 9:09 am
Yay, king size bed! This is still my happiest purchase of the year.
Mattress stores intentionally make the model numbers / names different so you can’t price compare. Such a racket. I hope they realize why online mattresses are so popular these days.
August 20, 2018 at 9:23 am
Woo! Remind me what kind you got?
August 20, 2018 at 10:55 am
Lessa. But I can’t speak to the reasons why, my husband did the research and picking for this.
August 20, 2018 at 12:38 pm
I came to leave this comment :) and also to note that often, initial letters of the same mattress model-name are consistent across stores even though the complete names are not.
August 20, 2018 at 12:41 pm
interesting
August 20, 2018 at 9:17 am
I haven’t been using a smile account, I kind of knee-jerk assumed it was BS. Can you elaborate a bit more on it?
August 20, 2018 at 9:28 am
It just gives a tiny fraction of every purchase to whatever charity you’ve put in whenever you remember to buy from smile.amazon.com instead of amazon.com. Charities do better (like 10x better) if they’re affiliates (like we are though we’re not a charity) and get people to purchase from their direct links. (When we were in paradise, DC1’s school had an affiliate account.)
I don’t use my amazon account as much as DH and I often forget to do smile when I use it (mostly I just buy kindle books and the occasional present). So I think in the end I sent maybe $15 to DC1’s school over a multi-year period. DH had sent more though.
August 20, 2018 at 9:40 am
I actually just last week wrote to my charity of choice to ask them to confirm they really do get money from Amazon through the smile program and they confirmed that yes, they do! I assume it’s in their best interest to tell me the truth unless there’s some weird Amazon rule that prevents them from saying anything negative about them, so I’ll assume it’s true.
August 20, 2018 at 9:49 am
Thanks for the info!
August 20, 2018 at 10:12 am
Mine is set to go to our PTO right now, but the amount it puts into the PTO budget is small. You can see on Amazon smile how much your specific charity has received if you want. Still, I like it better than boxtops so I don’t complain.
Mine used to go to doctors without borders.
August 20, 2018 at 11:59 am
Yeah, boxtops give 10 cents per top MINUS the cost of shipping. When DC1 was in Paradise they asked to make sure to cut the squares very carefully so as not to increase the cost with unnecessary weight.
August 20, 2018 at 9:43 am
I don’t bother with Amazon Smile as it is not worth the bother of setting up—all my Amazon purchases in 2017 would have resulted in a donation of $2.75 at the standard rate of 0.5%. Amazon affiliate links provide 0–10% commissions, depending on what is purchased.
The only purchase benefitting charity that I make is get gift cards for the grocery store we use through the parent club of the homeschool umbrella that my son used to use—they get 5% at no cost to me. Because we spend far more on groceries than on Amazon, the 5% results in a significant donation to the parent club. Using the gift card is easier than using a bank debit card.
August 20, 2018 at 9:48 am
It literally takes less time to set-up than it took to write this comment!
My problem is actually remembering to use it. Which, whatever.
August 20, 2018 at 9:51 am
My Smile charity is the Women’s Health and Family Planning Association of Texas!
August 20, 2018 at 9:59 am
I had not heard of them! How did you find out about them?
August 20, 2018 at 10:09 am
I remember reading an article about organizations that are struggling to provide to provide reproductive health care for low income and uninsured women, men, and adolescents and you know I couldn’t pass up a chance to help them a bit. I didn’t have extra funds at the time I read the article so I found that setting them up as my Smile recipient was better than forgetting about them with regrets.
August 20, 2018 at 10:01 am
“because the variation between stocks and jobloss isn’t close enough to make it worthwhile to invest in bonds.”
Maybe it’s just because it’s Monday and/or I didn’t eat breakfast but I’m not sure I’m following this line of reasoning. Actually, I know I’m not.
August 20, 2018 at 10:07 am
The idea about having bonds is that when the economy turns, you lose your job and stocks fall, so it’s better to have bonds to sell (which keep their value). He’s saying that you’re probably not going to lose your job and have deep enough stock drops to make it worthwhile to invest in bonds while you’re still young enough to not be worrying about retirement risk. When you’re over 45, you also have to worry about long-term unemployment leading to premature retirement savings eating. So the extra gains from stocks are more worth it even if the economy takes a dive. (You still want your cash equivalent emergency fund though, and he didn’t say, but I imagine you also want to make sure you can cut expenses or increase other earnings as with All Your Worth in the event of a jobloss.)
I do not have any citations on this and he said that he learned it when teaching an MBA finance class. I’m also not sure how I feel about it, but also I guess it doesn’t really affect me that much?
August 20, 2018 at 10:11 am
Thank you for the longer explanation! Now I follow. Something for me to chew on. I’m pretty sure we’re UMC but I have to actively remind myself to think and plan like such because my instinct is to think and plan like a poor person who temporarily has money.
August 20, 2018 at 10:19 am
UMC?
August 20, 2018 at 11:03 am
Upper middle class! I was rushing :)
August 20, 2018 at 11:08 am
Ah!
August 20, 2018 at 9:55 am
Good luck with the mattress. Don’t hesitate to return it if it doesn’t work. We got a latex mattress from sleeponlatex and it didn’t work out. It felt good when I lie down on it, but it gave me back pain in the morning. I returned it and got a memory foam mattress from Stumptown mattress. (Actually, they just donated it.) I’m sad the latex mattress didn’t work out, but life goes on.
August 20, 2018 at 9:59 am
Good point– I am worried that I’ll be bad at returning things. Thankfully, DH has fewer compunctions than I do. Back pain is no good and we’ll have to do something if one of us ends up with pain.
August 20, 2018 at 4:34 pm
My Amazon Smile link is Planned Parenthood of the Central Coast. :-)
Good luck with the bed! Hope y’all have fun in it! ;-)
August 20, 2018 at 6:02 pm
I am following your mattress saga with interest because we also need a king size memory foam one or we are never sleeping on the same bed again. (There was one in a hotel in Sydney, so we’ve tried it!) It’s my project for the winter.
August 21, 2018 at 8:22 am
My Amazon Smile link is Amnesty International USA, Inc but it’s only donated about $13 so far.