RBOC

• I like having nice things.  I’m still not used to having nice things.  But I drove my car to the city (not just the airport in the city, but a conference in the city) and it was SO NICE having google maps on apple carplay.  Getting home through a zillion different highways and city streets was stressful, but it would have been insanely stressful without up to the moment instructions telling me which lane to be in with plenty of warning, especially without me having to look down to see my phone.
• I just realized that I haven’t even noticed that I haven’t gotten annoyed by water pooling behind the sink since we got the kitchen redone.  (This was one of my major annoyances with the kitchen prior to redoing the sink and countertops and something we definitely wanted to fix.)  So much of being well-off is being able to throw money at annoyances to make them go away.  And then sometimes I don’t even appreciate them, but also I’m no longer being regularly annoyed by them.  So let me pause for a second to get a little burst of appreciation.  I should probably do a whole obnoxious post about removing annoyances as an update to our previous frugal version, except I just wrote a similar post about the loveliness of the reduced mental load of being well off and there’s only so much obnoxiousness a readership can handle.  So maybe this bullet point is enough.
• DC1 auditioned for, and then unexpectedly got into regional orchestra.  After that was announced, the orchestra director moved hir from second violins to first violins.  Yay DC1!  (How I found out about the promotion:  me:  That sounds like a… melody?  DC1:  Yeah, I got moved up to first violin after she announced regional results last week.)
• Whoever decided that queso and Thai red curry needed to be mixed together is a swearwording genius.  Seriously.  I had it recently while traveling and am itching to try it at home– I’m thinking about using the velveeta recipe with coconut milk instead of cow and adding some prepared thai red curry sauce (unfortunately TJ’s has yeast extract in it now which gives me headaches, but maybe you don’t have that problem?)  The closest recipe I could find online was for mac and cheese.
• The other weekend we had a hankering to go into the city, but my sister had to spend all Saturday cooking for having her book club over that night.  So DH and I offered to menu plan and cook for her while she took care of our kids.  That turned out to be surprisingly nice.  Since our favorite couple moved to jobs at a top university, we haven’t been entertaining at all (not counting DC1’s friends who just play video/board games and DC2’s friends who always have playdates at park or pool), and I find I enjoy the planning and cooking more than the actual socializing.  (In case you’re wondering, the book was Auntie Mame and we went with fancy appetizers.  My sister made champagne cocktails to go with them.)
• I recently saw a talk from an economist (prominent) who used to comment on our blog (but hasn’t been around for years) which was so weird since this blog is anonymous and zie has no idea who I am.  I did not make things awkward by telling hir I know about hir laundry situation from several years ago (I, in fact, did not say anything at all, remaining an anonymous face in a crowd).  The only other time I met a reader, it turned out she’d asked the blog for the same advice she was asking me in person so I was like… that question sounds really familiar!  (She took the advice and is doing really great now ;)  )
• Property taxes this year:  $8,261.12.  Have to pay that out of savings (i.e. where my paycheck deposits to), which means we really aren’t living on DH’s paycheck alone.

Why we didn’t open a Chase bank account to get a $1K bonus

IF YOU CAN EARLY VOTE:  GO DO IT!  (Don’t forget regular voting day is Tuesday, Nov 5th!)

Somehow the fact that DH and I are high income has been made known to credit card and bank companies.

Chase banking has been trying to get us to open an account for a couple/few years now.  Usually they’ve offered something like a $200 or maybe $300 bonus offer which we don’t even look at because it’s not worth the hassle to us.  But most recently, they sent a $1,000 welcome bonus offer.

1.  Open a new Chase Sapphire bank account by mid-November
2. Transfer $75K NEW money to checking/saving/J.P. Morgan investments (but not cds or retirement or 529 accounts) and hold it for 90 days

We’re not going to be switching our investments to J.P. Morgan when there’s Vanguard and plenty of other lower-cost brokers out there.

If the balance drops below $75,000, a $25/month fee will be assessed each month.

So, ideally we would drop $75K in and then remove it and close the account after the $1K deposit on day 100 or 101 (they say the deposit will occur after 90 days).  This sounds like a hassle, but for $1K we could probably deal with that hassle in a way that we wouldn’t for a mere $200.

But is it really $1K?  No– we have to be aware of the opportunity cost of money.  $75K is a lot of money and it has to come from somewhere.  Unless we’re saving for an unpaid leave, I don’t keep that much in cash (I try to keep a slush fund of $30K in my primary emergency fund which covers the summer even with slow reimbursements or potential DH job-loss).  Selling stocks would trigger tax implications in addition to requiring too much thinking (though I could theoretically undrip dividends– though those are generally quarterly so I may have missed my chance).  I can probably get $75K by temporarily moving our primary credit union emergency fund (we don’t really need that money until summer), moving money from our online high interest secondary emergency fund, closing out our Wells Fargo account (it’s useful for ATMs when traveling and for checks), and then using my next two paychecks, overdue reimbursements, and overdue summer salary.

Ok, let’s then assume that I have gathered all 75K and instead of putting it into the stock market, I decide to go with the risk free alternate option to put it in my Capital One online savings account that pays 1.90% APY (which we opened up because they gave a $200 bonus AND had a good interest rate AND we already had a capitol one credit card).  Holding onto that in my already existing Capitol One account for three months provides total interest of $356.81 according to this online calculator.  Of course, I would actually need to hold it a little longer to make a direct comparison (it takes time to transfer money, time to get the Chase match, time to close an account etc.), though probably not a full additional month (another month in that savings account would bring in $476.13 total), so it will be more than that, say $400 (which is about a third the difference between 4 months and 3 months added to 3 months).  If I were instead to look for the best online rate out there, there’s a 2.75 rate (that may or may not be real) on one of those bank rates websites.  Three months of that would provide $516.18.

How much does the Chase savings account that they want me to put $75K in earn?  .01% APY.  Which is practically nothing.  That’s even less than our Wells Fargo account.  Three months of that is $1.88.  Four months is $2.50.

And, of course, we have to pay taxes on that $1K, minimum 15%, so at least $150, making it really only $850 of free money (though any other method of earning interest will also be subject to tax).

So, yes, there’s a big one-time cash infusion for opening up one of these Chase bank accounts, but it has to be with the strategy of closing it as soon as possible because the interest rates are so extremely low and the minimum required balance to avoid fees is so high.  And it is not worth even $600 to gather together money from all those different sources (while hoping an actual emergency that can’t be cash-flowed doesn’t occur), open a bank account, deal with the paperwork and hassle and so on, then remember to close the account and deal with all the attendant hassle of doing that, and then figure out where to place the money after.  Heck, I might pay $600 to avoid all that potential stress.

Now, I’m not planning on actually putting all those reimbursements and incoming checks into a savings account, not even a fancy higher interest online savings account.  I probably should sit down sometime and figure out a long-term strategy for our money now that we’re doing all the obvious things, but I’m not sure it’s going to be any better than putting money into a broad-based index fund of one kind or another every couple months (is it time to look into munis?  Maybe?).  So until I actually figure out what we’re going to do, that’s what we’ll be doing– keeping our emergency funds full and shoveling any excess money into Vanguard taxable.  Doing so does have higher risk than a Chase savings account, even at .01% APY, but we can chance it.

How much would a bank have to give you as a bonus to make you willing to switch?

Link Love

“AP: Children are kidnapped and trafficked for US adoption by Bethany Christian Services, an adoption agency strongly supported by the DeVos family, after migrant parents are illegally denied asylum and then deported”

There. Fixed it for you.

https://t.co/EHWN9uTPWd

— Shannon Dingle (@ShannonDingle) October 19, 2019

Someone at the NYTimes is seriously a bad person.

Red states are working hard to suppress college student voting.

✅Men apply for jobs when they’re 60% qualified, women when 100%.

🚫Women should be more confident and apply when 60%.

✅We don’t apply when 60% because we’re tried and been lectured to prove ourselves first.

I know this is true because I’ve applied as both a man and a woman.

— Liz Lilly X⌬X⌬ (@GuildingLilly) October 18, 2019

Ernst and Young’s sexist women’s training.

Thread on why the SCIF thing this week was so dangerous.  I have to wonder the real motive.

This week had a number of public finance posts that I think are better read in conjunction with each other. It seems like a lot of people are having thoughts about earning, saving, and feeling or not feeling rich. I’ve got one or two of these myself in drafts waiting for their respective Mondays, though we’re insanely well-off right now rather than in anything that could be thought of as an in-between place. TBH, I read the below posts and think, yeah, when I was in that situation I was also anxious about money. I’m not anxious about money right now only because we have no debt, have high incomes (mine can’t be taken away), we’re maxing out retirement, and we have a lot of money saved. When any one of these was not true I was anxious, though my anxiety decreased (and spending increased) as my income and savings increased. I have always been a good saver (and I grew up in a household where savings was paramount), but being a high earner has made my life so much better.

I Pick Up Pennies talks about how even though she’s got a nice income, she doesn’t feel rich (unlike Bitches Get Riches’ post last week). A Gai Shan Life talks about how she is worried about money even though they’re doing pretty well. Done by Forty lists all the money he and his wife have made and talks about how his higher income has made him more secure. The Frugal Girl asks if you had to choose would you rather be high earning or a good saver (my comment brought a surprising amount of ire from people who I can only think have super poor reading comprehension skills because they thought the post was about something else? Or maybe they just hate women who work. Anyway, check out the comments for unintentional drama that I did not go out of my way to prevent.) I think I’ll do a full post on this idea in the future because the more I think about it, the more I doubt that anybody but the most environmentalist (without dependents that they care about) would choose uncertain saving over certain earnings, even the women bashing me in the comments.

Why the 1985 version of Anne of Green Gables was so transformative to my generation.

🐥🐥 pic.twitter.com/QaadE8CXdX

— TwoSet Violin (@TwoSetViolin) September 3, 2019

Ask the grumpies: How much to save for different long-term priorities

Ali asks:

How much to save for college vs retirement vs other savings, etc.  Basically, tell me what to do.

The vast majority of our readers should max out their retirement savings prior to saving for kids’ college.  The reason for this is that you can get loans for college, but you can’t get loans for retirement AND US colleges don’t include retirement savings in their financial aid calculations.   That means every dollar that you hide in retirement is a dollar the universities don’t take into account for their financial aid calculations.  If worse comes to worse (ex. student loan rates are high), you can contribute less to retirement while the kids are in college (because you already have so much saved up) and cashflow some of those college expenses with what you would have contributed to retirement.

Disclaimer:  This is not what we did.  Originally I paid a lot of attention to the “recommended” savings percentages in various books and made sure we were putting away 20% of our income for retirement (recommended is 10-20%, we were on the “went to graduate school and need to save extra to make up for low savings years” track).  Then some extra money went into 529s (tax advantaged college saving) for our kids and then the stock market went crazy in a bad way (remember 2008?) and we started prepaying our mortgage as well.  It wasn’t until later that we started contributing to a 457 plan, even though that would have made more sense than contributing to the 529s.

The following assumes you have no debt other than a low interest mortgage.

1. Save an emergency fund that will get you through a missing paycheck or late reimbursement or small emergency.
2. Put money into retirement up to any employer match.
3. Save an emergency fund that will get you through a reasonable job loss or other large expense.  (A Roth IRA is a good place to stash this when you’re just starting out since you can tap the principal without penalty and it can go to retirement if you don’t have a major emergency.)
4. Save 10-20% of your gross income for retirement (or the max if are a high earner).  Play with retirement calculators to get more specific on the percent.
5. Start putting money away in a 529 plan based on how much you’re planning to contribute and what schools your kid is considering.  We have more details here, and also more generally with other 529 posts.  The short is you’ll want to play with some college savings calculators AND the financial aid calculators at individual schools that you’re looking at.  (You might want to pay down your house at this step instead because colleges don’t use most housing wealth in their calculations for financial aid, but play with those different assumptions with the calculators.)

I DO think it is important to have a 529 for relatives to put monetary gifts in if you have relatives who are likely to think that’s a good idea, and don’t just have one for the oldest boy even though the money is fungible across kids.  That’s not how gifts work– people want to give to both kids, not just one.

So… I guess that’s the basic advice.  There are exceptions to the above– people who have access to a backdoor 401k at work but don’t have high incomes might never be able to max out their retirement, for example.

Grumpy Nation:  What advice would you give?  How do you decide how much to save where?

What are we reading?

Lady Derring Takes a Lover by Julie Anne Long was very good!  The title is a bit misleading… I mean, yes, eventually she does, but the book is really about character growth, perfidy, and catching smugglers.  cw:  There is an attempted rape and rescue that seemed like a lazy way of moving the romance forward.  I still recommend.  The Perils of Pleasure was ok.  The Legend of Lyon Redmond was fine, though it is one in which if they would just talk to each other the book would be even shorter than it actually was… I skipped large chunks of it.  The rest of the books in the Penny Royale Green series have been mixed, some more worth reading than others.

I finished all the Metzgers that the city library had available on kindle.  My Lady Innkeeper was ok, not great.  The Diamond Key was silly but fun.  Snowdrops and Scandalbroth was also silly and pretty good (if you can suspend disbelief and don’t need truly 3-d characters), and another Inspector Dimm, though less from his viewpoint this time around.

I also finished all the Jayne Anne Krentz books that our local library system has.  Sweet Starfire was an extremely good sci fi romance written in the 1980s, but Crystal Flame was TERRIBLE… or rather, it started out as a really great fantasy novel and I really wanted to know what happened… but then the hero raped the heroine and it just went downhill from there.  Deep Waters was ok– a little rough here and there.  A decent library read.

I think I would have loved Kill the Farm Boy some 20-odd years ago when I was devouring funny pun-packed Ace paperbacks edited by Ginjer Buchanan.  But I just could not get into it.

The Hidden Power of F*cking Up was a good read.  I think it’s mostly aimed at teens and twenty somethings, but it was still an enjoyable and easy read.  I’m glad I was able to get it from the library rather than buying it though.  I might be willing to listen to it on audible for the sound effects, but I don’t think I’d want to read it again.

Read a couple of fun newish Cat Sebastians– I enjoyed both A Duke in Disguise and A Little Light Mischief

Tried a couple of Victoria Thompsons, but they were both too depressing and hardcore and violence against womeny.  SIGH.  I need more escapism in my life, not less.

Lady Osbaldestone’s Christmas Goose was a LOVELY form of escapism.  Interfering matchmaking grandmother and her grandkids right all the silliness in her town AND find the missing Christmas geese.  I am hoping to get the next two in the series for Christmas!

The Viscount in Her Bedroom by Gayle Callen was ok (the hero was not sweet as some of the reviews promised, at least not until he found out the heroine was a “lady” — I like my heroes to treat all women with respect, not just the gentry and not just virgins), but I could have done without the other two books I tried.

A Minor Inconvenience by Sarah Granger has been ok, but it reads very much like an early work– it could use heavy editing AND it’s a bit cringy here and there in terms of consent and other things.  It did get better as it went along though.

I don’t know why I just haven’t been able to enjoy the last few Sarah MacLeans.  Skipped large chunks of Brazen and the Beast.  Which I think I also did with Wicked and the Wallflower.  I still like rereading a couple of her other series.  Thank you library for allowing me to try before I decide whether or not to buy.

DNF Too wicked to kiss by Erica Ridley.  Just so rapey.

Deleted the free Unmasking Miss Appleby by Emily Larkin which had a really great premise and would have been wonderful if say, KJ Charles had gone with that plot and added a little bit of fantasy, or even an earlier Sarah MacLean, but the hero was a godawful transphobe homophobe and not that great in terms of his beliefs about women (though those do get corrected).  I skipped big chunks, read the bit in which the hero figured out the heroine’s secret, and then just did not care enough to finish.  What a horrible jerk.  The author had to make him an abolitionist to make him have any redeeming quality.  Oh, and there’s rape and incest in there too (though I didn’t read those bits) and UGH.

Which is bizarre because I liked Primrose and the Dreadful Duke by Emily Larkin enough to buy myself a copy after checking it out from the library.  This book has some slow bits but no unnecessary drama and is light and happy and just a full pleasure to read.  The hero is great (not at all dreadful), and he and the heroine patch up any misunderstandings early on and focus on trying to protect the heroine’s brother from a murderer.  Same universe but doesn’t even seem like the same author.  I wish our library had more of her books so I could try before I buy, but alas, it has just the one.

Rereading the delightful Cold Comfort Farm (also, this paperback version is super cute, though your library likely has a hardback … do make sure you don’t get an abridged version– see the one star comments for which ones to avoid).  I had forgotten how horrid Flora is (this doesn’t quite come out in the movie but is quite clear in the book!)

The Rat Catcher’s Daughter (Lilywhite Boys novella/short story/novelette) by K J Charles was short but lovely!  Can’t wait to get Gilded Cage!  I love how she’s both such a wonderful author AND so prolific.  :D

Men can sew too

DC1 brought home hir new orchestra uniform from school and the pants needed hemming.

My first thought was that I hate hemming pants and I was never very good at it, though my last experience was probably over 20 years ago.

So DH suggested we get them altered professionally.

But a quick search showed that all the alteration places in town had 2/5 stars and complaints about not following simple instructions and about losing orders and holding clothing longer than promised.

We know DC1 is going to grow this year, so those pants hems are probably going to need to be let out sometime this year, which means that cutting off the extra fabric, something a professional is likely to do (see “not following simple instructions”) is not a great idea.  The first concert was also only a couple of weeks away, which meant that losing the pants and holding onto them for a couple weeks was not viable.

I resigned myself to having to hem, but then DH said he’d give it a go.  There are plenty of youtube videos and guides.  I recommended the catch stitch to him since that’s the way I was taught.  (It might not have been the best recommendation since I hate hemming pants and I’m not great at it, but I’m sure if I hadn’t recommended something DH would have spent a few hours trying to figure out the best stitch.)  And then DH did it and did a good job and it took a little over an hour, far less time than going to one of the alteration places and returning to pick it up.

So… that probably saved $20-$40 in money, but also quite a bit more in potential aggravation, AND later this year we’ll know we’ll be able to let the hem down.  (It was pretty obvious from the fabric creases that last year’s kid had also had to let the hem back down, though that family had a sewing machine.)

Link love

Police officer fatally shoots black women in her own home

Trump tax documents show major inconsistencies

Facebook blocks car dealership from posting tree planting ads as too political (while allowing Republicans to post anti-Biden ads that include known lies)

How dual income couples find balance

Nightmarathon raising money for pediatric cancer research  (Breaking Cat News has donated some prizes)

[-$10,000] The Last Milestone

Why Bitches get Riches feels rich

Can younger students be taught to engage in deliberate practice?

I almost wish we had a staircase so I could get these.

This unusual anti-Collins ad ran in the @PressHerald today pic.twitter.com/1mi6XkI3o3

— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) October 13, 2019

Ask the grumpies: When is the movie better than the book?

Leah asks:

When is the movie better than the book?

Rarely.  Bad books aren’t usually made into movies!

#2 Didn’t like the book version of the Princess Bride as much as the movie, but #1 liked the book version more.

I guess there are several versions of Brewster’s Millions that are better than the original source material.  There’s a lot of Gutenberg material out there that has extremely cringey racial/ethnic stereotypes which don’t make it into the movie versions (or at least not into the movie remakes).

Peter Pan is a much better movie– terrifying book.  Similarly Pinocchio.  Fox and the Hound.  That era of Disney picked some pretty awful source material.  Even Mary Poppins is dramatically different (though one can argue which version is better).

We’ve heard that 50 Shades of Grey was a better movie than book, but we’ve got no desire to watch either one(!)

Grumpy Nation, help Leah out, have you seen movies that were better than their books?

Halloween costumes of years past

Before I make friends with any white people I need to see all your Halloween costumes from 1988-2017.

— MonsterKing (@CerromeRussell) September 19, 2019

So, I was thinking of my Halloween costumes years past…
Here’s what I can remember:
1. Angel (I vaguely remember my mom ordering wings from Sears and them almost not coming in on time)
2. Flapper (I did not look like a flapper– I did wear one of my mom’s old 1970s style dresses. No fringe, but I did have a bob)
3. Beethoven (poet shirt, black pants, teased hair)
4. Witch
5. Witch (same costume)
6. Martha Washington (my mom got married in 1976; this was her wedding dress which was also her bridesmaids dress for her sister’s more opulent wedding that year)

… That’s all I can remember. There may have been a few more witches in there. And I KNOW that at some point I wore one of those cheap plastic pinny costumes with a cheap plastic mask once our town got a Walmart, which was a huge relief to my mom, but I cannot for the life of me remember what– maybe Wonder Woman? I’m pretty sure there were no black-face or Roma or Ninja costumes in my past.

One of the things about being rich is that on the years that my MIL doesn’t just send Halloween costumes, we can go to Target or to a Halloween supply store (last year DC1 needed a costume zie could play violin in Target was out of non-offensive things in hir size that allowed violin playing) and spend $30 and get a costume that will last long enough to be passed down.  No need for creativity or effort!  DC2 is going as a Ravenclaw this year (DC1 is 12 and maybe shouldn’t be trick-or-treating, but if zie does, zie will reuse hir grim reaper costume).

What Halloween costumes do you remember from your youth?

So… how to donate to DC2’s classrooms this year?

In Kindergarten and First Grade, we donated $1K anonymously to DC2’s classroom teachers for “differentiation, independent learning, and/or enrichment”.  We would like to do that again this year.

The problem is that DC2 skipped second grade.  And DC2 is the *only* kid who skipped second grade.  If the third grade teachers get the same gift cards that the K and 1st grade teachers got last year and the second grade teachers don’t, it will be pretty obvious who the anonymous donor is.  And we really don’t want to seem like we’re buying favors from the school.

So here’s my crazy thought.

Give the second grade teachers the same gift cards for “differentiation, independent learning, and/or enrichment”, and give the third grade teachers slightly different cards (or maybe just one card to share) with no such restrictions.  After all, DC2 is more on-level this year and they’re doing a pretty good job with differentiation in math (though there’s a very real chance that they will run out of packets for DC2 sometime after winter break, even assuming a slow-down in the rate zie is going).

Then next year, only give the unrestricted donation to the fourth grade teachers.

DH was initially confused by this idea– DC2 isn’t in the second grade class.  Why donate?  But then he decided he didn’t like the idea of it seeming like we’re bribing them for DC2 skipping a grade and has warmed up to the idea.

The alternative is to not give at all.  Or to give something less useful than cash gift cards.

What do you think?