Financial Update – July 2022

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?

Financial Update – June 2022

Background

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

I’ll be honest, I’m more or less ignoring the money front right now. Our net worth has declined by roughly a third since November (at the high) and while slightly painful when I do these monthly updates, it really hasn’t had any material effect on our day to day. The decline is to be expected: the market’s down and as one of my colleagues pointed out this week in a comment which was either totally clueless or expertly deadpan ”we had a plan for this year, but then we had to change things around because of this whole ’recession thing.’”

On the bright side, the back half of the year should be pretty good for us monetarily. I’ll be hitting my one year cliff (August), ESPP will execute (August), will qualify for half a retention bonus (October), then quarterly vesting (November), and finally end of year bonus (December). Then, of course maternity leave (January) which, while I’ll certainly be busy, at least I won’t be as mired in work. So, it’s a good time for money to be coming in while assets are relatively “cheap.” This is all assuming, of course, our company doesn’t go belly up by end of year— an unlikely but certainly possible outcome.

On the personal front, most of my thoughts have been around pregnancy. At our latest ultrasound the midwife spent a few minutes making concerned noises while looking for the heartbeat. She eventually found it after the baby wiggled around (was just looking at the wrong angle) but that freaked me out a bit. My mind went straight to ”there’s no way I can mentally handle pregnancy again if we lose this child.” That was probably just dramatic brain talking. But symptoms have been rough (particularly food aversion, nausea, and fatigue) and the idea of doing first trimester all over again— plus having to deal with fertility stuff again— I don’t know. I’m pretty sure I do not want a second bio-child at this point. I just can’t imagine being this out of my own body with a toddler running around, let alone when we get to the actual baby part.

We’re starting to tell our friends, but waiting until our NIPT/cell-free DNA screening results come in to tell our families who are, uh, less likely to be great comfort to us in case something goes wrong.

And then there’s all the stuff with SCOTUS and Roe. I was always pro-choice but being pregnant has really emphasized for me how incredibly dumb, cruel, and completely out of touch with women’s health anti-choice folks are. My pregnancy was so wanted and on the spectrum of pregnancies we’re low risk, but still it’s impossible to romanticize it as anything other than a pretty severe medical condition. I am so thankful Massachusetts is on the right side of this issue— god forbid something happened and I needed a D&C and couldn’t get access to medical care. We threw a chunk of our DAF money at a bunch of regional abortion funds, but it feels like a drop in the bucket. Why does this country hate women so much? Ugh.

How was your June?

Financial Update – May 2022

Background

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

Just got back from traveling, so my financial update is just a smidge late this month. Not much to report except our big news: I’m eight weeks pregnant! Nausea, food avoidance, and fatigue have been rough, but obviously we’re super happy and excited to (fingers crossed) be parents soon!

How was your May?