"It Just Doesn't Seem Attainable."

 For as long as I've been writing this blog (yikes, I never commemorated its 20th anniversary last month!), I've tried to counter a certain negativity about "making it in New York." New York City has always been a very expensive place to live, and has always had a culture where rich people and their predilections kind of set the scene-- old money, greed-is-good Wall Streeters, all the arts and design and fashion and media people. New York is the subject of so many books and movies and TV shows that some people feel like they aren't living the dream unless it looks like an episode of Sex and the City. It can seem like an expensive lifestyle is just what's normal, so if you can't afford that lifestyle, you might feel like you haven't "made it." Or you're so busy spending money on some aspects of that lifestyle that you can't afford basic things like owning a home or saving for retirement. Some people kind of give up, just deciding that they might as well live paycheck to paycheck and get into debt since they won't be able to attain those long term goals no matter what. 

I've tried to counter that attitude-- my years in NYC were tight financially at the beginning, but I found a balance that allowed me to save money, buy homes and build wealth. I allowed myself some treats, but I also set limitations and adjusted my expectations about what was reasonable and possible. I was willing to make some sacrifices, but not some others. And things ended up working out for me-- I feel like I "made it" in the sense that I had a decent life, and could have continued to have a decent life in NYC if I'd stayed. And my attitude on this blog has always been "you can make it too," at least to some extent. I can't claim that someone making minimum wage is going to be able to buy a home and retire in comfort in NYC, or anywhere else for that matter-- that's a different issue.  My point was always more that all the college-educated middle class professionals needed to stop being crybabies about not being able to make ends meet in NYC.

But I'm not sure I can really say that anymore. 

I recently had dinner with some young women who are living in Brooklyn, not too far from where I lived in the late 1990s, when I was about their age. We talked a lot about how the area had changed and how expensive things are, and I reminisced about the neighborhood during my time there, which was the first time I became a home owner. One of the young women looked at me with a somewhat wistful expression and said "that just doesn't seem like it will ever attainable for me." I wanted to say "no, have faith, you'll start making more and if you just watch your spending, you can do it!" But when I did some math in my head, the comparisons were striking.

That first apartment I bought (with a partner) was about $135,000 in the late '90s, and that same apartment sold in 2019 for about $1,300,000. My partner's and my combined salaries to afford that apartment in the 1990s were maybe $90,000 or so, maybe even less. I think the mortgage and maintenance payments came out to maybe $1,500 a month, maybe a little more, so we were spending maybe 25% of our combined income on owning a home. (You'd think I would know all this for sure, but my record-keeping was different back then, and the spreadsheets I could find didn't mention housing costs for some reason!) The interest rates would have been lower in 2019, but the monthly cost (assuming a 10% down payment, which is what we did in the '90s) would probably have been almost $7500. So you'd need a salary of about $360,000 for that to be 25% of your income. I'm not sure what percentage of New Yorkers earned that much in 2019, but the median income today for NYC for a single person household is about $113k, and for a 2 person household, it's about $145k. 

Even if you take overall inflation into account, and adjust for how the desirability of that neighborhood has changed over the years, there's no question that it is just so much harder to afford to buy a place now. The equivalent of the $90,000-ish we were making might be around $130,000 today. 25% of that would give a budget of about $2700 a month. Depending on the maintenance, that might cover the payments on a $350,000 home. According to Zillow, there are only about 39 2-bedroom homes in that price range on the market in the NYC area right now-- and whoa, one is in Manhattan, right near Central Park! And it's actually only $189,000! But it looks like the walls might be covered with mold, and it needs a gut renovation. And the maintenance is $3500, plus an assessment of almost $1000, so it's actually not in the budget after all. The rest of the 39 possibilities are all in the furthest out neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx, and even then, they're often over budget when you see the maintenance costs. The pickings are slim for anything that might be affordable, and the commute would be a lot longer. I don't mean to sound snobby about the idea of living outside the most desirable areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn-- there are lots of great neighborhoods around the five boroughs that are safe, close to public transit, full of amazing restaurants and parks and interesting sights. But ALL the neighborhoods are expensive now, with affordability being limited to a smaller and smaller set of high-income people. 

The young women in this story are currently paying $4500 in rent for a very small 2-bedroom apartment. One is making somewhere over $100k working for a tech company, and the other is a grad student. Their neighborhood is great-- Brownstone Brooklyn charm with shops and restaurants galore. (In my day, the brownstones there had the potential to be charming but were mostly grungy, and there was one "nice" restaurant and maybe a fried chicken place on their block, while the neighborhood I lived in nearby was already more gentrified.) The average rent for a 2-bedroom in that neighborhood is about $6000 so their apartment seems like kind of a bargain. They are splitting the rent unequally given their different financial circumstances at the moment-- a generous move on the part of the tech worker, but they are old friends and she knows the value of having a roommate you can trust. The tech worker also has access to some money from her family, but happily, she seems quite focused on saving that for later and living within her means now. The grad student's family is less well-off, but I don't know more than that. I'm not sure what the salary prospects will be in her field but it at least seems like something that won't be replaced by AI.

Whatever happens, I'm sure these young women will be fine. They will have a roof over their heads and they won't starve. They've benefited from stable childhoods and good educational opportunities and have had advantages some people can only dream of, even more so than I had. People like them (and me) have always been part of the gentrification that makes cities get more expensive in the first place, but when I first moved to New York, there was still more diversity in the income levels and employment types of people who could afford to live in the city. Now it seems like all the working class and middle class people have fled, to be replaced by finance bros and homogeneous hordes of young people whose parents are willing to subsidize their life style. (See this very sad New York Magazine article: It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl.) 

Maybe my young friends will stay in New York and maybe they won't. But "making it in NYC" will look very different for them than it did for people my age.

Always Striving to go Above and Beyond...

 ... Above and beyond any previous record set for length of time between posts. It's been more than a year but I'm still here! Keeping my head above water, keeping on trucking, keeping on keeping on, and keeping track of my money.

Whoo boy, how about that stock market? How about this tariff shitshow? How about all the death and destruction and disaster in the world? Where does one even begin?

There is too much to even try to cover so I'll stick to a few brief personal updates.

I continue to work part time. I like feeling productive and getting health coverage, to say nothing of having income, though my salary can seem almost insignificant vs. the affect of my investments on my net worth. But the great thing is that my after-tax take-home pay more than covers all my expenses, not counting a few little extras that Sweetie pays for.

My mom's financial situation has stabilized now that I manage most of her money in trusts. She rents rather than owns a home, so she can't go nuts renovating things. She still wastes some money on things like ordering shoes and clothes and then missing the deadline to return them, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the crisis we were approaching 10 years ago. Sadly, a lot of the reason she's spending less is just that she's getting old. She doesn't get out much, and she has some health issues. She's also getting forgetful. I'm starting to think about how we'll use her money to maybe hire an aide for her, or at some point maybe move her to some kind of assisted living. If we had more money, I would probably just want to move her to an independent living facility so she'd have more social opportunities and wouldn't have to cook-- Sweetie's mom was in one for a little while, and it would be just what my mom needs, but I'm not sure she's totally comfortable with the idea yet. Also, unfortunately, there aren't great options near where my mom lives, and it is of course breathtakingly expensive. I don't think we could afford the costs for 10-15 years she may have left, which could end up involving the even higher costs of nursing home care. 

This is a really sad and hard calculation to be making-- how am I supposed to know how long she has left? If she died in the next couple of years, I would feel bad that we hadn't splurged on giving her the most comfortable life possible. But if we ran through all her money too fast and she lived much longer, that would be a massive drain on my sister and me. My sister's kids are in college and will probably have big debts when they graduate. I sometimes feel like it's selfish of me to worry about preserving my own resources when I am pretty well off, but I have no kids of my own and don't want to burden my sister's kids if I can't take care of myself in the future.

But aside from my mom's living situation, my more immediate concern lately has been making sure she doesn't fall for scams! She is very gullible in a lot of ways-- she's always clicking spammy ads on Facebook and getting pop-ups that claim her phone has been hacked. Even worse, she recently asked my sister to help her set up Telegram-- when my sister asked why on earth she'd need it, it turned out that she had been exchanging messages with someone pretending to be Bradley Cooper, who suggested they take their conversation to someplace more private. Like so many other seniors who get scammed, my mom really struggled to believe it was not Bradley Cooper she was chatting with semi-flirtatiously. I'm not sure if she just keeps forgetting everything we've told her about how these scams work, or if she just wanted to believe it was really him because he's cute and she's lonely. She didn't send him any money but I could see her easily falling into giving out details that could lead to identity theft or who knows what else. We may get to the point where we have to get her one of those stripped down phones, but in the meantime, I don't want to cut her off from her Facebook connections to her family and friends. So I set myself up to get copied on all her security alerts for Facebook, Gmail, etc, and got myself logged into her Facebook account on my own computer. I check it daily to block all the fake Bradley Cooper profiles that try to message her. She had even given "Brad" her email address but I think I've managed to send his messages to spam before she's seen any of them. It feels a little sneaky but Meta obviously has zero interest in doing anything to protect people from these scams, which are rampant. There's plenty of focus on protecting kids online, but no one seems to have any solutions for elderly adults who enjoy the internet but may be losing the ability to make wise judgments about how to use it.

What other quickies can I give you? Sweetie and I had combined non-tax expenses last year of about $105k, which included some fun travel. Our budget has been pretty consistent, and we're allowing for increasing our travel budget over the next few years while still staying comfortably on track with our retirement projections-- though the last few months make it seem like you can't count on anything anymore. My net worth got slightly over $2.7 million at one point, though it's now at about $2.65 million after having dropped below $2.4 million a couple of months ago. I have a list of lots of other money-related topics I've been musing about but will save them for another day, hopefully less than a year from now.

As always, it is heart-warming to see comments and know that there are still some loyal readers who keep tabs on this site. Sorry I don't have more regular updates for you, but I hope you are all doing well and making the best of your own financial and family issues. Thank you for sticking with me.

The FIRE is Still Burning

Reading the retirement issue of the New York Times Magazine this weekend reminded me that I still have things to say on these topics, despite the lack of posting! The "FIRE" acronym has been around for years, but now, beyond just "Financial Independence Retire Early," there are subgroups like Fat-FIRE for people who retire early and have luxurious lifestyles, and Lean-FIRE for people who are managing their early retirement by being extremely frugal. Coast-FIRE means you save a lot early on so you can kick back later. Barista-FIRE means you are sort of retired but working part time in some sort of job to get health insurance.

Now I feel like I'm at the supermarket looking at all the different types of yogurt. I guess it wouldn't be America if we didn't figure out a way to expand every concept into a million different flavors!

I guess my FIRE flavor is a bit of a smorgasbord. I'm probably least aligned with the Lean people. While I have always valued fragility and spent many years trying to live well below my means, I've never felt really hard core about that approach, as I allowed myself plenty of little splurges. Coast sounds a lot like me: I wouldn't be in my current financial position if I hadn't saved big chunks of my earnings starting in my 20s and 30s. Barista doesn't seem like quite the right word for my current work status, but I do feel like I'm off the career track, working rather lightly so I can feel productive and get benefits. 

How about Fat? I've never felt particularly fat. But now there's that pandemic and perimenopausal weight gain that has forced me to buy more new clothes than usual in the last few years. I'm NOT enjoying THAT kind of fat. But I'm feeling a little chubby in the other way too, in terms of living well. In the last couple of years, I've felt secure enough to start spending more money. Some of those new clothes were at price ranges I never would have even imagined before. If I told my 35-year old self I'd someday spend $350 on a scarf, she'd have been horrified. But I did, and it's a gorgeous and unique scarf that goes with everything and elevates any outfit and I wear it a lot and feel like it's worth every penny for how happy it makes me. Maybe it even makes me look thinner??? 

And Sweetie and I have decided that when we do our next big trip, hopefully to Asia sometime next year, we're going to stop torturing our bodies and fly business class. We're also going to upgrade one of our cars sometime soon-- not to a Maserati or anything, but something with more comfortable, power-adjustable seats for both driver and passenger. It's shocking how hard it is to find a sub-compact SUV with a power-adjustable passenger seat-- many brands just don't offer it, even in the top-level models. So it looks like an Audi, BMW, Lexus or Volvo is in our future, for probably somewhere between $40,000-50,000. This feels so splurgy to me, but then I found out that my sister and her husband have two new (bigger) cars that have each cost more than that, all while they have two kids in college who will be graduating with some big debts, it sounds like. Auntie X will try to reserve some funds to help the kiddos out, of course, but I'm prioritizing my spinal health for the moment! Being able to do this feels like true luxury to me. But I don't think I'll ever quite fit in with the true Fat-FIRE adherents, as they seem to mainly be Silicon Valley entrepreneur types who cash out of a start-up and have more extreme lifestyle goals. (Or else, as one person in the NY Times article points out, they are people who are raising kids in expensive places like San Francisco, and therefore have huge budgets for lifestyles that might seem not that fancy elsewhere.) I still have a lot of Lean moments of watching for what's on sale in the supermarket, using coupons, and picking up coins whenever I spot them!

Anyway, that is my little flicker of FIRE for today! I haven't posted in forever but life is good! I continually resolve to dump all my money thoughts in this blog where they belong, so maybe one of these days I'll start posting more again. Thank you to those of you who still stop by and leave comments!

Duplicated Securities in Quicken

When I was working on reporting my net worth to you the other day, I was surprised to see that it was about $3.3 million! I immediately knew I shouldn't get too excited, though. It wasn't the first time I'd had Quicken duplicate the securities in my 401k account, thereby artificially inflating my account value.

It's a very annoying problem to have-- Quicken has a "merge securities" feature that lets you combine the assorted versions of a security that have been downloaded under different names. But sometimes the problem is that you still end up with the wrong number of shares for each security-- usually double what you really have. I did a little online searching for solutions but didn't find much. I tried just deleting one version of a security, but Quicken wouldn't let me do that, since both versions were active. I probably should have just removed all the shares for the duplicate securities, but from what little I did see online, it looked like merging the securities would be the best way to go.

Merging the securities was a little complicated. The securities in Quicken don't all have 5-letter symbols, and even ones that did have those symbols had been downloaded under various names, so my security list was looking rather cluttered. A few others seemed to have changed ticker symbols.(The downside to just letting Quicken add all these transactions automatically is that I don't pay as much attention to what's going on. But my old method of entering them manually was a big drag.)

As I was merging the securities, I noticed that it might be duplicating the number of shares, but I figured I'd just have to adjust that afterwards. Once the security list was cleaned up, I went through my 401k statement to check the true number of shares vs. what was showing in Quicken, and then entered some "remove shares" transactions to correct the balance. And voila, I'm back to being $1.5 million poorer! 

The really annoying thing was that the inflated numbers somehow populated my past years' net worths in Quicken. I'd never really played around with restoring from a backup in this version of Quicken, but I decided to try it and see if I might be able to correct the past years. To make a long story short, I ended up restoring an older backup, having more problems, then going back to the more recent version I'd fixed, then having doubts, then installing a Quicken update, and doing a couple more rounds of adjusting transactions, merging securities, etc. What a mess. At this point, I do have the past years fixed and my current share counts are pretty accurate, but my most recent 401k contribution seems to be missing 3 mutual fund purchases, so something still isn't working right. UGH! I'm going to sit on it for a bit and see what happens when my next contribution goes through and whether my balances and share counts match my next statement.

The main thing that came out of this is that I'm going to be more vigilant about recording my net worth at the end of every year in a separate spreadsheet, and probably on paper somewhere too! Just in case.

2022 Income and Year-End Net Worth

In a previous post, I gave a run-down on all my 2022 expenses, in the form of a total for Sweetie and me. It's a more accurate way to do it, otherwise it might look like my food budget was shockingly high, or some other expense shockingly low because Sweetie paid for it.

As for income, I don't have all Sweetie's numbers handy, so you're going to have to settle for just mine!

I earned $82,660 in gross salary from my job. I also got $4,058 in 401k matching contributions.

I earned $575 from website stuff. (Amazon affiliate commissions and Google Ads)

I received cash gifts of $400. ($200 for my birthday and $200 for Christmas, from my mom.)

I earned $317 in interest on cash in bank accounts.

And I received $77,204 in assorted dividends and capital gains in my various investment accounts, including retirement and non-retirement accounts.

So that's a total of $165,217.

I'm always kind of amazed at how the investment income has become so large-- almost half the total this year. In 2021, it was even larger! About $150,560 vs. $80,116 for all the other income. But that was an extraordinary year.

Either way, it shows the power of all those early years of saving and investing. That snowball effect is really happening now, especially when the markets are doing well. Though it also looks more significant because my salary is less than half of what it was before I retired, down-shifted, took a sabbatical, or whatever you want to call it. With all the craziness of the past 3 years, I have to say I'm really glad I'm working again. I feel more secure knowing I have income covering my expenses, and decent healthcare coverage.

As for my net worth:

This was a bit annoying to figure out. I've just had some annoying Quicken problems where various securities were duplicated, and even though I've now fixed everything, the errors somehow are going backwards and throwing off my net worth for year-end 2022, and even back through earlier years as well. Luckily, I did post on this site that my 2021 year-end my net worth was $2,232,684. 

Unfortunately, 2022 was not kind to my investments. I ended the year at $1,779,292, which is the biggest net worth decline I've ever had in one year. In percentage terms, it's even worse than I did back in 2008 during the financial crisis. But I have a lot more money in the markets now, and I had some pretty big gains in 2021 and 2020. With my lower salary, I also can't save as much as I used to, which would have helped offset some investment losses. But luckily, I'm still ahead of where I was at the beginning of 2020.

It's a bit weird to realize that I'm basically saying "Yeah, I lost half a million dollars in a year, but no big whoop!" Part of me is really freaked out by that! But this is what investing is all about, risk and return, ups and downs. I will take a look at all my investments a bit more closely to make sure I still feel comfortable with how they're allocated and whether I should maybe be a little more conservative since I'm getting closer to traditional retirement age. I'll keep controlling what I can control, like spending, and try not to freak out about the rest. 

My net worth is at $1,857,838 as of this writing, so I'm riding some pretty big waves. I still feel good about where I am, especially given that I had a couple years when I had to spend down some savings while I had no income from a job. As shown in my last post, my expenses aren't exactly bare bones frugality, but I'm living within my means, and my shared means with Sweetie. But 2023 isn't looking all that promising, so I don't even know how to guess at a goal for the end of the year. Let's say $2 million. We'll see...

2022 Expenses

The commenters have been clamoring! I know I've been delinquent, I keep meaning to post here more often and for some reason always put it off. But yes, I'm still alive and still earning and spending money! So let's talk about that. 

This year I thought I'd share the total household expenses that Sweetie and I share. Throughout the year one or the other of us will always pay for certain things, but at the end of the year, I do a reconciliation of all our expenses, break out what is truly individual vs. shared, and then make sure the shared expenses are shared equally. Usually it works out pretty well, but if not, we'll pay each other back as needed.

Here's the combined breakdown. 

Category	TOTAL 2021	TOTAL 2022	var %
Auto	-$3,634	-$4,958	36%
Bank Charge	-$395	-$633	60%
Charity	-$1,837	-$1,033	-44%
Clothing	-$2,803	-$1,843	-34%
Dining	-$16,030	-$17,637	10%
Education	-$4,007	-$4,482	12%
Entertainment	-$1,652	-$1,864	13%
Gifts Given	-$3,897	-$5,686	46%
Gym & Fitness	-$1,380	-$1,248	-10%
Hair and Personal care	-$2,136	-$2,260	6%
Household & Garden	-$11,354	-$4,994	-56%
Housing	-$8,873	-$8,103	-9%
Medical	-$8,869	-$8,372	-6%
Misc	-$1,934	-$6,141	218%
Subscriptions	-$1,250	-$1,376	10%
Taxes	-$1,861	-$18,976	920%
Travel	-$449	-$6,618	1374%
Telephone	-$1,444	-$1,615	12%
Cable TV & Internet	-$1,704	-$1,672	-2%
Electricity	-$800	-$955	19%
Propane Gas	-$1,560	-$1,900	22%
TOTAL	-$77,869	-$102,366	31%

• Auto: we have 2 cars, both fully paid off, so this is just gas and maintenance. 
• Charity: I don't know why our charitable giving went down so much-- oversight, I guess, or maybe some things that were last minute and ended up in 2023 on our credit cards.
• Clothing: I've been buying my favorite jeans on eBay, and investing in foot comfort with some expensive Hoka sneakers. But otherwise, working from home makes me so much less concerned about my wardrobe.
• Dining: we don't eat in restaurants very often, and order takeout even less frequently now that we're not in the city. This line includes all meals, groceries and liquor. We do enjoy our wine, but have been cutting back in recent months.
• Entertainment: this includes books, Netflix, and things like museums and concerts.
• Gifts: this was high due to one of our nieces graduating from high school.
• Household: in 2021 we still had some "settling in" expenses of furniture, etc. This line includes getting the gutters cleaned, some small tools, cleaning supplies (at least any that don't end up combined with a grocery bill), gardening supplies, and a new electric lawn mower that Sweetie just loves! I've been growing a nice little crop of herbs and tomatoes each summer, and invested in a raised planter so as not to have to do as much weeding down on my knees.
• Housing: we have no mortgage, just property taxes and HOA fee.
• Medical: we're both covered under insurance from my job, so this reflects those premiums and a few co-pays. I'm surprised it wasn't higher in 2022 as I was doing physical therapy for several months due to back problems.
• Misc: this is very high for 2022 due to a few one-off things like a new iPhone for Sweetie, and a painting that I fell in love with, which cost just under $2,000. I've never spent that kind of money on art before! But the painting makes me really happy. I actually had been interested in a different piece by that artist that turned out to be priced at $20,000! It would not have made me ten times happier, so I'm glad I chose what I did.
• Subscriptions: I still love getting a physical newspaper but I cut back to 4 days a week delivery. I also subscribe to several magazines.
• Taxes: neither of us was working in 2020, so we owed very little in taxes at the beginning of 2021. But then 2021 was such a huge year for the stock market, we both had some significant capital gains taxes, and I was also paying estimated quarterly taxes.
• Travel: we finally got on a plane for our first real vacation since COVID! Now we're itching to do more traveling again.

Everything else basically reflects our existence as creatures of habit living in a world with some inflation.

I'll share more details in another post soon!

2021 Year-End Update

What a year... as I write this, I'm on the mend from my own mild case of COVID, having been finally been hit by Omicron despite being vaccinated and boosted. (I got it from extended indoor, unmasked contact with a family member who turned out to have been not as "careful" as they thought they had been.) I know a lot of people are in the same boat. It is disheartening to have such a huge spike in cases after feeling optimistic over the summer, but I am trying to focus on the lower hospitalization and death rates. If vaccinations mean COVID becomes something that has less serious long-term health risks, like the regular flu, that is good news.

I've been using this low-energy post-holiday time to start getting year-end accounting in order. A few facts and figures:

The investments I manage for my mother had returns of about 20% this year.

My year-end net worth was $2,232,684.

My income from investments was approximately $145,000, while my income from work was approximately $72,000.

My spending on "Arts," a new category I started breaking out last year for museums and concerts, was up from about $100 in 2020 to over $1,000 in 2021 because I was so excited to enjoy live music with the reopening of local venues. (Most of the concerts I went to were outdoors, but a couple were indoors, with masks required.)

Sweetie and I had let our gym membership expire during the height of the pandemic, but we re-joined this fall, at a cost of about $1,100 for a year. I also spent about $250 on some apps and equipment to try to get myself to exercise more at home.

My travel expenses were an all-time (or all recent memory, anyway) low of $356 in 2021. All we did was visit family using our own car. 2020 would have been almost as low but for an international trip for a wedding early in the year, before the pandemic blew up.

I spend about $1,800 on clothes in 2021, vs a little over $800 in 2020. I bought a couple of expensive fleeces from Patagonia and expensive Hoka One One sneakers since they are the only shoes I can really walk in anymore, but otherwise much of my spending was on very inexpensive jeans and shirts on eBay, some of which were for Sweetie. I love working from home and being able to prioritize comfort!

When I did my 2020 taxes with my accountant and she heard I was working again, she suggested that I not do pre-tax 401k contributions anymore. She did a quick calculation of how my savings might be likely to grow over the next 15 or so years and said "you're going to have a lot of money when you retire! Your tax bracket is likely to be higher then, so you should probably focus on Roth IRA contributions now." So I immediately switched to doing Roth 401k contributions in my employer's plan.

I'm still enjoying working again. During the summer, I did find myself missing the freedom I had the last couple of years, and Sweetie is itching to travel again when the pandemic subsides. I'm hoping there will be an opportunity to scale back my hours. Occasionally it has crossed my mind that I could get a better-paying job that would still allow me to work from home, now that my entire industry has become more flexible about remote work and is likely to stay that way. But I'm not feeling greedy about the money. My current salary has more than stabilized my cash flow. I could cut back my hours somewhat and still get benefits, so that is a plan that is in the back of my mind for whenever it makes sense.

Thank you to anyone who still checks back in and reads these posts. I wish you all a very happy and healthy New Year! Onwards and upwards in 2022 (as long as we're not talking about COVID hospitalization rates!)