I remember back in my Facebook days, friends frequently talked about goals. They were setting goals and touting their bullet journals and planners. Having goals is great, but when I tried all of that, the planning and journaling was too time consuming. I spent more time planning than carrying out those plans, and keeping up on tracking my progress prevented me from making much progress. Also, life has a way of presenting obstacles that make some goals difficult if not impossible to accomplish. I think I’ve said this before, but my life has a way of steering me toward specific goals when it’s time for me to take action.
When I met my ex I was working at a grocery store full time and on the side, fixing people’s computers for a $40 fee. I learned how to build PCs and was getting really into it. He said, “You’re good at this and seem to enjoy it. Have you ever thought about going to school for it?” When I moved to Portland with him, one of the first things I did after we settled in was enroll at Portland Community College and start taking classes. I had transferred to a store there and had a tyrant for a manager, so I became further motivated to do well in school just to get the fuck out of there.
I plugged away at my higher education, at first two classes at a time; then three, and eventually full time when Grocery Store Manager became unbearable and my ex said, “You’re miserable. Quit you job and I’ll cover your half of the rent until you graduate (from PCC).” At that time I also pursued photography to make a few extra dollars here and there. Eventually I dual enrolled at PCC and Oregon Tech. Then I graduated from PCC with an A.A.S. in Computer Information Systems and went to Oregon Tech full time. Three years later, I graduated with a B.S. in Information Technology. That was never my plan just a decade earlier.
Going to college was never a goal of mine.
In 2015 I heard rumors that the apartment complex I was living in was going to drastically increase rent. It just so happened it had been five years since I quit the grocery job and was coming into my ESOP. I had to make a decision: roll it over into a retirement account, or cash it out. I made a quick decision to cash it out and buy a house. At that time the real estate market was on fire and undoubtedly a seller’s market. It took two realtors and two months to find me a place I could afford, and I got incredibly lucky with this one. Sure, it’s a condo with an HOA; not exactly ideal. But it’s 1.5 miles from work, everything I need is either within walking distance or a short drive north, and my son and I love it here. It’s modest, but it’s all I need and my long-term plan when I was in Boise was to move to Oregon.
Buying a home was never a goal of mine.
In early 2016 when I was moving in here and assembling the new desk I’d purchased, I herniated two discs in my lower back. That required emergency surgery and was my wake-up call to lose weight. I started exercising more and more… and more. I logged every calorie I ate and managed to lose 80 pounds in two years and within three years, finished a full marathon in five hours and 48 minutes. Since then I’ve had some moderately challenging health issues both physical and mental, so I’ve gained back most of the weight and can no longer run long distances. But I’m still in better shape than I was prior to the back injury and so far I’ve lost 10 pounds since the first of this year.
Losing 80 pounds and running a marathon was never a goal of mine.
After my grandparents passed away last year, my mom gave me some of their money. At first it was $10,000 of my grandpa’s money. Then she added me as a co-signer on his checking account which was $19,000, and said, “Use this for whatever you want.” Then at Thanksgiving, after she had sold some of the property they owned, she handed me a check for $35,000. I promptly paid off my student loans. Then I thought… I don’t have much saved for retirement. In fact, the thought of what’s going to happen once I reach retirement age worries me. I only started my 401(k) in 2016, so right now there’s a measly $23,000 in it.
So I did some thinking and some research and decided to start investing. I cut some fat from my budget– lowered my homeowner’s and auto insurance premiums a bit by tweaking the policies and deductibles (they’re still very reasonable with more than enough coverage); got rid of all the extra hospital/critical illness insurance (I still have medical, dental, and vision) during open enrollment now that we have Covid vaccines; increased my 401(k) contribution to 5% (we do have employer matching), and put my newfound wealth to work. It’s not much, but having grown up in abject poverty and single parenting for so many years, to me it was a fortune.
Then I started listening to a podcast I found on Spotify called “Financial Feminist” by a woman who gives financial advice to women. It’s quite empowering. I’m reading her book now. She calls out all the bullshit of the patriarchy and especially the fact that talking about money is taboo. It shouldn’t be. No woman should ever go blindly into a long-term relationship not knowing if the guy she might marry someday will sap her dry and leave her with a bad credit score. Fun fact: my FICO score is currently as high as one can possibly get. I don’t make a lot of money. I don’t have a six-figure salary. I simply live within my means and don’t spend more than I can afford. I use credit cards to pay for everything so I can reap the rewards from them and increase my credit score, but I pay them off every two weeks to avoid paying interest.
I’ve spent the last several weekends on the Internet researching investment strategies and learning all about retirement accounts, CDs, high yield savings (HYS) accounts, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, money market funds, asset allocation funds, and target date retirement funds. Boy what a rabbit hole all of that is! I have only scratched the surface, but I have learned that you take 100 (some say 110) minus your age, and that’s about the maximum you should have as a percentage of stocks and the rest bonds. The whole point is that when you’re younger, you can tolerate more risk (risk and reward generally have a positive correlation). Then as you get older, lean more toward bonds to reduce the amount of risk so as not to lose what you’ve gained. But that’s not all. I’ve also read that within stocks, you should diversify and have about 60% domestic and 40% international. Also, have short-term, intermediate, and long-term bonds. Diversification is key because when one goes up, the other goes down. Right now stocks are doing great; bonds, not so much. Bonds will do better once interest rates go down, but low interest rates aren’t so great for CDs and HYS accounts.
So I essentially have all of my eggs, so to speak, in several different baskets. I put grandpa’s money in CDs and HYS because really, I don’t want to gamble with my late grandpa’s money and, for now, interest rates are nice and high. I have a 13-month CD and a 7-month CD. (I learned about CD ladders and CD barbells, too.) The HYS account is my emergency fund now. I transferred most of my credit union savings into that so as to have some liquidity but also have it earning interest. Then I signed up with Fidelity and got a Roth IRA and brokerage account. I’m keeping the brokerage account minimal because it currently is invested with a whopping 80% stocks/20% bonds (too heavy on stocks for me, but I’m rolling with it). The Roth IRA has a good mix of all the things I mentioned above and is a tiny bit risky for my age, but I have catching up to do. I’ll never have enough to retire on, anyway. Right now I have about $62,000 and I’m just hoping that one day I’ll see $100,000. And yes, I did set up automatic transfers to the Roth IRA and HYS. I’m also throwing an extra $200/month at my mortgage so as to have it paid off in 2041 (the year I turn 67).
Having two retirement accounts, two CDs, and a stock portfolio was never a goal of mine.
Setting goals is fucking pointless.
Just live your life. Whatever you need to do… whatever I need to do… will present itself when the time is right. When it does, tackle that shit head on, accomplish what you need to, and move on with your life.
Other Stuff
This week I suffered another diverticulitis flare-up that required antibiotics. I’m currently on a combination of Cipro and Flagyl which is pretty fucking intense. There’s loss of appetite, nausea, and a few other side effects. I have two daily windows of five hours in which I can’t eat dairy or anything high in iron. I can’t consume any alcohol for two weeks, nor polyethylene glycol. Even the effect of caffeine is intensified. I tried tea this morning and was so jittery I won’t be doing that again. No THC, either. And as soon as I realized what was going on I immediately switched to a clear liquid diet, so I had a massive headache for three days straight. Oh, no NSAIDs either. Those can cause bleeding in the infected part of the colon. So I was nauseated, feverish, and in a lot of pain in both my head and colon for three days.
Treating the symptoms of diverticulitis is very similar to colonoscopy prep. Clear liquids, laxatives, and lots of water. This condition is the fucking worst. However, switching to a clear liquid diet greatly shortened the duration of the intense pain that comes with an infection in your sigmoid colon. And because I got to see my regular doctor, I wasn’t forced to go to the ER and spend $2,000 to have a doctor tell me what I already fucking know.
The irony, of course, is that I feel my best when my colon is completely empty. It’s glorious.
I’m going to the Fall Out Boy concert later this month! I’m excited about that but nervous about driving to Portland, finding parking, and navigating the way to my seat in the Moda Center.
I’m also meeting my dad and stepmom at the Spectrum Mine in July for sunstone mining! We’ve already agreed on which days to go and I requested PTO and had it approved. (I did budget the trip as well.)
Things at work are really ramping up and it’s going well, but we are very busy. I work in the building materials industry in the midst of a housing shortage, so we should be busier than we are. However, with the shitty weather and high interest rates, sales have been flat. The reason my team is so busy is because we are working to be able to sell more and more of our products on our software application– and I am working with a certain big box home improvement retailer to be able to sell more of our products on their software application(s) plural, because they have three now.
Still not dating. Fuck a bunch of that right now.
You know what, this week I read an article on CNN that specifically addressed the issue of men simply treating women poorly. It was about dating apps, but yeah, in general, men are shitty. It’s gotten so much worse since the pandemic. In fact, the author of the article used the exact word I’ve been using for a while now: “entitled.” They feel entitled to sex, among other things.
Lately I’ve been moving more toward dressing nicer. My Old Navy rewards piled up over and over because I use that card for groceries. I got all new pants for work and a few dressy shirts as opposed to the cardigans I usually wear and two blazers, all for about $2. I’ve also been wearing make-up to work more often and wear my sunstone jewelry and the gold nugget my dad gave me. I even own a few dresses now. I have a pretty long flowery sun dress, another one that’s shorter and black with straps, and from Amazon I got a beautiful purple cocktail dress and some black Mary Jane shoes. I also got some black, white, and nude colored tights. I’m actually excited about dressing up for the Fall Out Boy concert and whatever else I’ll be doing this summer. 🙂
A few weekends ago a coworker, his daughter, and I went snowshoeing. It was so much fun. We went to Trillium Lake and the snow was so deep, we have photos of us standing beside the stop sign with the octagon at our feet. We want to go hiking again soon, but right now I’m dealing with my colon and he’s dealing with his 90-year-old father who recently had a nasty fall. But we will go again! I plan on going swimming again soon as well. I’m also going to get back to the gym now that (hopefully) the worst of respiratory illness season is behind us.
I do still want to write the memoir. That is something I’m never going to give up on, even if I have to wait until retirement. But I was thinking it might be more feasible for me to use voice dictation and drop it into ChatGPT for editing just to see what it comes up with. Of course I’d make sure it was all factual, and I’d direct it to use “light” editing or even edit only for grammar and spelling. Either way, I’m not writing a book to make money, so it doesn’t matter if it’s not 100% my own words. As long as it’s factual, that’s all that matters. I do, however, want to continue with the outline manually. Then I could print out the outline and go to the park or for long walks or whatever and dictate my life story.
Speaking of ChatGPT, we’ve been using it at work and for me it’s been great. I use to to optimize my SQL queries. I’m on the Volunteer Committee too, and we are trying to recruit new members because we need five and we’re down to two. So I asked ChatGPT to write a solicitation for new members and it came up with something amazing. It gave me an idea to hold an “information session,” so then I had it give me an outline for that. It comes up with what I need in seconds. I spend about 10 minutes editing it, and it’s done.
My son is doing well. He got a promotion of sorts. He’s now the forklift driver in the millwork department in the warehouse. He’s forklift certified and on the Safety Committee. He’s been working about 50 hours a week and still living here with me, so he’s been doubling up on his car payments and paying $400/month on his student loans despite his income-based repayment amount being $0.
He told me he had $16,000 sitting in his credit union savings, so I decided to schedule monthly personal finance lessons with him. One Friday night a month for about four months we will sit down with takeout for dinner and work on his finances with a holistic approach. A couple of weeks ago we re-balanced his 401(k), increased his contribution to 5%, and set him up with a HYS account and a Roth IRA and brokerage account. I also had him set up automatic contributions to both and buy shares of a Fidelity 2065 target date retirement fund. He already has beneficiaries named on all of his accounts, so next month I’m going to teach him how to access his credit reports and freeze them. In April I think the topic will be FICO scores and how to play the game to increase them.
I recently got a new credit card that does travel rewards, so I’m looking forward to rotating through my three cards to get all the rewards. Right now I’m working toward the requirement to earn the introductory bonus points on the new one. Microsoft is going to force Windows 11 on all of us next year and my PCs are both 12 years old (no TPM chips), so this morning I ordered a new laptop. Yes, I know there is a way to bypass that requirement by editing the registry, but my computers are both 12 years old. Besides, it gives me an excuse to rebuild my desktop PC and I’d never turn down an opportunity to play with hardware.
That’s about all I have for now. There’s been a lot going on in my life and I’ve been pretty busy. Overall everything is going spectacularly, even if most days I don’t feel like it is. Winter is rough. I’m really looking forward to more daylight and nicer weather. I have this gigantic list of “unique date ideas” I’ve been working on, but really, I’ll probably do most things solo or with a friend, coworker, or maybe even invite my son and his girlfriend. Last year was the Year of Trying New Things and this year I’d love to continue that trend. Last year was awesome. I might do a little dating later on just to meet new people and have someone to hang out with, but I am going to be very up front about who I am and what I want and expect. My standards are pretty fucking high and my tolerance for bullshit is pretty fucking low.