Educating the Wheelers

I can’t tell you how many posts I’ve discarded or saved or just plain abandoned in the last week.  As I’m down the homestretch in this pregnancy  [today is actually my due date, but there’s nothing going on yet, that’s for sure], it’s been lots of hormones and crazy emotions.  For instance, I wrote a post about the different feelings that men and women have about bringing debt into a marriage and quickly realized that would bring nothing but stinkbombs into my Inbox, just in time for post-partum depression.  Yeah, let’s postpone that one.  I read an article about "push presents" [a horrible term for this stupid idea that your husband should buy you jewelry because you went through labor, I’m not even going to find the link], and you can imagine how quickly I decided to ditch that post, too.  I feel like I’m in a holding pattern until little guy makes his big entrance.

The stereotypical "nesting" instinct has kicked in for me, big time, not always in completely rational ways. 

Filling the freezer of heat-n-eat foods for after the wee one is born, that makes sense.  Getting plenty of diapers and wipes and cream and milk freezer bags and whatnot, okay, those make sense, too.  Cleaning out the "nursery" and crib and stuff, even though we never even used them for our first child … well, okay.  Sure.

Some of the other things I’m feeling driven to do?  Not quite so much sense.

Now, even when I’m not pregnant, I’m somewhat apocalyptically minded and make sure we have 2 weeks worth of water and at least a month or so’s worth of food and other household provisions stored up.   [I’m not Mormon — which is obvious, otherwise I’d have a year’s worth! — but  I do think they have some good ideas on self-reliance in emergencies.]   Lately, though, our pantries have been looking a wee bit little crazier than normal.  I’m sure the National Soy Sauce Council salutes me, but perhaps we don’t need quite so many bottles in the closet…?

There’s good survival-reasoning in wanting to have everything stockpiled before the new one comes, so I’m not going to knock it.  It would be totally just my luck to have an otherwise very unlikely avian flu outbreak occur right around the end of April/beginning of May.

But maybe we wouldn’t need quite so much mustard to get through it

Now that we’re in the waning days of this pregnancy, it’s been harder and harder to do anything more strenuous than sitting down with my feet up.  [Not that I can even tell where my feet end anymore, I lost my ankles last weekend.]  I am figuring out real quick which frugal habits are well-ingrained and not going anywhere, and which ones will be jettisoned at the first speedbump.  [Well, the ninth-month speedbump.]

I’m still hanging up all the laundry rather than just tossing it in the dryer.  I made some homemade biscuits and gingerbread from scratch this week, but instead of filling the freezer with homemade heat and eat meals for post-birth, I just picked up some pre-made meals from Sam’s Club.

And blogging has gone straight out the window.  Heh.

I haven’t posted much recently because I’m pretty solidly in “pregnant and crazy” mode. If you’ve ever been pregnant — or more likely, if you’ve ever been married to someone pregnant — you know what I’m talking about. I’m overly emotional, my moods are flying and I’m totally irrational.

What does this have to do with money? Two main things, as of late. The first is that right now we’re in crunch mode on our finances — as I mentioned previously, we’re currently living on a little over 25% of our salary as we readjust to some new and possibly overeager savings plans. So how am I responding to this? By totally capsizing. It’s been awhile since I’ve felt so … driven to want to spend money. My Amazon shopping cart is full of all sorts of crazy stuff, and it’s only by sheer force of will that I haven’t actually purchased any of it. And so on.

The second prong of this fork is that something totally bizarre has happened to my taste buds. I am just not tasting things the way that I used to. I made some homemade mac and cheese the other night that I thought tasted great, and poor Andrew was totally repulsed. [Note to self: don’t make any recipes any time soon that call to add ingredients “to taste.”] I went totally overboard in the adding dry English mustard department … because I couldn’t taste it! I still can’t taste it in the leftovers, so it wasn’t a one night thing. Andrew could taste nothing but the overwhelming horseradishy mustardness.

And today I made a potato/carrot/lentil curry stew which looked awesome on the page — and I must brag, one of my Super Powers is a keen eye for what recipes will taste good when made — and I tried some, and it tastes horrible rotgut to me. All I taste is overwhelming clove/cinnamon — which aren’t even in the recipe, though are a small part of the curry powder — and nothing else. And the dinner I made previous to these two had a similar issue.

What am I getting at? It’s hard to save money when you’re throwing out food that you make instead of eating it.

It’s been a frustrating week.

We got our first direct deposit of the year, and I was in a for a minor panic. It was about 30% less than I was expecting. I knew that the new benefits enrollment kicked in on this paycheck, so I went to log in to the site and see what was up. I mean, I didn’t recall things being that different…

The benefits site was not exactly intuitive to figure things out. In fact, it gave the impression that we had unenrolled from 401k! Well, if that was the case … wouldn’t we have more money coming in than less?

One crazy-pregnant-lady-panicked phone call to my husband later and with some work, he was able to dig out the details. [I miss getting paper statements. They were straightforward.]

As it turns out, last year our new ESPP deduction kicked in at exactly the same time as our 401k maxxed out, and they are for very similar amounts. And starting this paycheck, they were both in effect for the new year.

Mystery solved.

Though I’m beginning to wonder if we’re now being way too aggressive on our savings. I just did the calculation, and our actual take-home into-the-checking account amount is less than 28% of our pre-tax salary. So, taxes, 401k, ESPP, benefits, % that goes directly to Vanguard and % that goes directly to Emigrant now account for a little over 72% of our income. That doesn’t include extra for paying down mortgage. Hmm. Now, I can squeeze blood out of a rock, but can I squeeze that much blood out of our rock? I’m not sure yet. That’s my task for this weekend, to see if we can live on this, or if we’re going to have to scale back.

Today is Audrey’s 2nd birthday! We had two of her play buddies over this morning, and that was a hoot — 3 toddlers is enough to fill a house, that’s for sure!

We also had our ultrasound yesterday, and everything seems to be in its right place and all that, which is always a relief. I’m not exactly getting too old for this stuff, as they say, yet — but I’m creeping up there in age, and you begin to worry about this kind of thing.

Oh, and it’s a boy!