... 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.
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