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?
Yet Another PF Blog 
So glad to hear that the food aversions and nausea have improved by so much! And what a relief for the NT and NIPT results to come back low-risk, I definitely felt a huge weight off my shoulders once those came in. I also find that my emotional regulation has been all over the place (I was extremely irritable and prone to rage rising to an irrational extent for most of first trimester, though I mostly kept it together and I’m glad that seems over; I’ve occasionally been prone to crying for no real reason off and on, which still happens sometimes). Overall, though, I’m much less anxious and likely to worry about things than pre-pregnancy, which is kind of nice, especially with all the work stress this year.
Food costs, though we’ve continued to cook many of our meals at home, are pretty high for us too. We’re super-privileged that we don’t need to keep a super close eye on grocery spending, so I don’t have a great sense of exactly how much more our typical groceries cost than they used to, though I occasionally notice wacky details like how 20 lb bags of Jasmine rice cost 10+ dollars more than they used to in early 2021.
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Yeah, it’s weird with the emotions. I also have felt less anxious about work stuff (to an almost problematic degree as I no longer have the “drive” to keep going with things) but then I’ll imagine a random hypothetical scenario where future-baby gets hurt and I’ll just be bawling.
My husband does the grocery shopping so I don’t really know how much of it is price inflation. Though since I do the budget roundups I know that our per-therm/per-watt gas/electric charges have basically doubled in the past year. Luckily since we overbuilt on solar so we’re more or less doubling how much we get paid in net metering credits, but still it’s shocking and I imagine some amount of that rise in energy costs is flowing over to food?
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Awesome to see the breakdown of your family’s spending. I run a family of four (two kids and my wife) in Singapore, and we are at about 9-10,000 USD living costs per month.. ouch.. I don’t work since 2017 and have been doing okay as I built up several streams of passive income. Since mid 2020 I have been working on building a All-Weather-Portfolio of the world’s best buy-and-hold forever stocks. It’s currently at about 500k, and I plan to add another 500k in the coming 12-18 months. Let’s see. Inspiring to see you have been doing this for many years! Keep it up – you are an inspiration to many others (especially ladies who are often not interested in investing)! Cheers from Singapore, Noah
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