I was chatting with my brother-in-law last week. He just earned himself a nice promotion that is several steps above his current job and arguably above his current credentials (because he’s awesome like that). I asked him how he made that happen. He said: “You can’t ask for a raise or promotion. You have to set yourself up for one so they have no choice.” Of course, I inquired a bit more. Mr. T and I are not good at things like getting ourselves raises. We want to just be given them (ha! amiright?). So this whole concept intrigued me. Here is what he told me:
Mrs. Frugalwoods recently admitted that she’s nervous about becoming a mom, but she’s learning to accept we’re all flawed. This kind of thing strikes a chord with me and I had to talk about it. First off, let me just say:
No one should EVER say “It’s so great. Enjoy every minute” to someone with children.
Don’t stop reading if you don’t have kids. This post is for you too. I want to talk about the logistics of having children. As a stay-at-home mom, I am a “professional” in the field. So please listen up.
Why Kids Are the Worst:
No one likes to feel regret. (“What? Maggie, I think you’ve sufficiently covered regret. You’ve covered both common life regrets and common business regrets and used research to tell us how to experience less regret.”) But sometimes, regret can be good. No, I’m not saying you have to experience regret. You just have to PLAN to experience regret? (“huh?”) Let me explain…
Yesterday was PFD DAY! YAY! Unfortunately, this is a September update, so these numbers are true through September 30 and do not include that extra $10,000+ we just got… but tune in next month to see that money added to the numbers… (at least we can count on our mortgage numbers to improve… the market may be a different story).
September is fall around here (sick of moose-in-fall leaves headers?). The leaves are entirely orange and red and all over. The belugas migrated through and we got to sit on a rock and watch them swim around on Labor Day. The sun is much lower in the sky and the ground is kissed with frost in the mornings. We got our first snow this week. The darkness has returned, which means we’ve had some great Northern Lights shows out our window. We did not attend FinCon this year, but we participated from afar. This is also my birthday month. We celebrated with Mr. T making a three-layer fudge chunk cake with chocolate mousse in between layers and drenched in chocolate ganache on top. Oh, and homemade vanilla ice cream. It was absolutely divine and better than any purchase he could have made. Overall, it’s been a lovely month.
Tonight, I’ll go to bed as I usually do, and when I wake up, I will be $10,000 richer. The secret? Live in Alaska. Okay, so the title was clickbait. But it’s true. Tomorrow every eligible Alaskan will be $2,072 richer than they are today because the Permanent Fund Dividend will land in bank accounts and be mailed out to others. (To celebrate, it decided to snow last night!) With five of us, that makes us $10,360 richer tomorrow.
It’s been awhile since I’ve updated on our Alaska Energy Rebate Program progress. We’re nearing completion. While we hoped to have it all done in time to get our rebate check around the same time as the PFD, we’re now aiming to finish up by the end of the year (with the check arriving 8-12 weeks into the new year).
Last week, J. Money over at Budgets Are Sexy mentioned in a post about becoming a mad scientist with your money that he makes sure he never misses a blog post. At the beginning, he was anal about it because he didn’t want to “accidentally quit.” He mentioned that as an aside, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it. How many things have I accidentally quit? The answer is: a lot. Then, another J in the blogosphere over at Hey, It’s Just Money, had a realization: “I don’t need to have monthly goals because I actually want to accomplish pretty much the same things every month.” And I thought: “Me too! I’ve had the exact same goals forever! So why do I fail?” Both of these posts snapped me into action. I’ve already declared that my own failure is my own fault, but I didn’t make an action plan for anything but my finances (which are going just fine). Let’s look at what works for me:
During my obsessive consumption of social media coming out of #FinCon15, I caught pictures of the full faces of two of my favorite anonymous bloggers: The Frugalwoods and J. Money. Neither of them looked anything like I’d imagined (which is surprising because I’ve seen a lot of profiles, partial faces, etc). But instead of being disappointed, I thought “how refreshing!” The financial blogger world (and especially the early retirement world) is such an interesting microcosm because people talk about real money. People share their net worth. People share how much they spend, down to the penny. Savings and Debt payoff are celebrated! Financial Independence days are a thing! But we don’t know or care about job titles, home sizes, or even what these people look like!
If you missed our initial coverage of FinCon15, you’ll need to know that we are not actually in Charlotte. We’re enjoying the fall up in Alaska. But don’t worry. We’re pretty sure we’ve gotten the entire story from FinCon15 based entirely on #FinCon15 posts on Twitter. We’ll fill you in on what you may have missed:
Disclaimer: I am not at FinCon this year. But I can tell you what’s happening based entirely on the #FinCon15 hastag on Twitter. Yeah. The real story. From a 3 hour segment yesterday. So, let’s start with the basics:
FinCon is in Charlotte. And the weather is lovely.
