Background
Each month I will post an update on my finances to both give you, the reader, some insight into my situation and to give me markers of my progress on my financial journey. My updates include both spending and net worth.
- Spending is divided into joint and individual spending. My husband gets $600 a month and I get $450 a month for our own individual spending as an “allowance.”
- I don’t include charitable contributions in our numbers below, but we allocate 10% of our post-tax income to this each year.
- Our net worth goal tracked using undisclosed units of money. Our goal is to hit “Financial Equilibrium”, based on Thomas J. Anderson’s book The Value of Debt in Building Wealth. This is fairly close to our FIRE number.
Spending

Net Worth

Monthly Update
My appetite came back in a big way this month, which is my excuse for the embarrassing level of food spending. About half of this is groceries (we have very little/no food waste, have basically stopped eating meat, don’t get toiletries from the store, buy no prepared meals, and shop and middle-of-the-road places like Stop & Shop, so I don’t know what’s going on here) and the other half is delivery (which, uh, it’s very clear what’s going on here). I feel like food is a perpetual ”omg we should spend less here” thing for us, but man I’m tired and want the food that I want.
Pregnancy wise things are somewhat better— food aversions and nausea are 90% gone and I can make it through most of the day again without needing seventeen naps. But after a couple months of having nausea instead of hunger pangs, the level of deep gnawing hunger I feel nearly all the time is semi-alarming. I’m eating more calories, so I’m hoping my body figures it out and things level out soon.
Meanwhile, I’m all over the place mood-wise. I’ve cried maybe every other day over the past few weeks. Sometimes about the state of the world this baby’s coming into (climate change), sometimes because my brain imagines terrible things happening to baby (miscarriage or worse), and sometimes because it’s Tuesday and I just need a good cry.
We got our NT scan/NIPT results this month— all clear. We were waiting on those to announce to our families, which also ended up going well.
Work kind of sucks right now for a variety of reasons. My plan at the moment is to just muddle through until this baby is done cooking, take my paid maternity leave, and look for another job towards the tail end of that. My resume is in my eyes looking pretty job hopper-y (by the time I start applying, in order of jobs, tenure will roughly be: 6 years, 1 year, 1.75 years, 2 years). But, whatever. It’s tech. Nobody sticks around long enough because companies don’t pay market rate unless you jump ship. It’s a vicious cycle, really.
How was your July?