fribble
1d ago
These seem in contradiction to me. How can you consider separately whether to cover things if it's all "your" [combined] money?
I meant in terms of skills. We didn't need to pay for classes. We already had the knowledge in-house.
in the event of divorce.
This says to me there are other things going on.
In terms of money, most of our retirement and investments are from "my" money/efforts. (I say this because we could have had a lot more money if he hadn't spent as much as he did.) Yet, it was his retirement we were planning. If I had been planning for a divorce no way could we (I) have made these choices. I don't think I would have been willing to pay for the retirement of someone I might divorce. But I would happily do it for someone I loved.
I'd be concerned about the travel example. What are your plans for when you retire? If you're planning to travel then, why not front load some of those costs rather than saving enough money to do it all later? If you're not planning to travel, marrying someone who wants to might be a sticking point.
fribble
1d ago
It can also be a tool for people who are bad with money. One of my plans was to buy an annuity that would cover taxes/utilities just in case I predeceased my husband. Sometimes his ADHD would be his worst enemy so it would have made me feel better to know he would have some basics taken care of without needing to think about them. (Generally annuities aren't a good bet, imo.)
fribble
1d ago
We didn't have an income gap but that would have been irrelevant because it was all our money.
We were mostly on the same page with child costs. I am the cheap one but I wasn't going to deny my kid art or music lessons when she wanted them even though my husband could have covered the art and I could have covered the music. My husband would have let her redo her wardrobe at every whim through teenage years but was fine when I said no, she needed to make do and augment. Or get a job.
We were not on the same page with saving until we had several years of marriage under our belts. My husband would joke when we got married we both thought we were broke. Me because I only had a few thousand in savings (had sped run through paying off student loans) and him because he couldn't get the last few cents from his bank acct through the ATM (anything he could get out he spent on Magic cards or computer games). So for every "frivolous" thing he wanted we would save an equal amount. Did that until he realized saving was beneficial, and there was enough stashed to feel like "real money" to him. It helped that we held off on kids for the first decade of marriage, so even though I am a tightwad the dink life is pretty sweet.
Why are you thinking about income asymmetry? Do you keep separate finances?
fribble
1d ago
Once I get my first shipment (est. Monday) I can report in on the variety and what I might try to make with them.
fribble
1d ago
Too goofy, huh? Supposedly the quality and variety is excellent. I will be interested to see if I can tell a difference.
fribble
1d ago
Thanks for the pointer. It's going to take me a while to get this figured out. I have an incredibly well stocked spice cabinet which should allow for plenty of experimenting. How are carrots considered an aromatic??
fribble
2d ago
I finally got off the Rancho Gordo bean club wait list. I joined the wait list when I had a husband who was a brilliant cook. I am not a good cook. My daughter is an excellent cook, but she eats beans only occasionally and isn't as willing to cater to my whims as my husband was.
This means I am going to have to try really hard to cook beans without ruining them. It is too ridiculous to belong to a bougie bean club, so I have to at least try!
fribble
13d ago
I grew up with a ~20 yr old classroom set of Brittanica and it was awesome. The volumes were large and full of pictures and easy explanations. My family would randomly look things up. And it was useful even when out of date - e.g. my folks would have us look up the names of the continents at the library and we could discuss why knowledge changes over time.
Yesterday my daughter asked if we really needed a dead tree dictionary, and if I insisted we did did we really need both a Websters and an Oxford English dictionary. (In her defense, dyslexia makes using dictionaries particularly challenging.)
fribble
19d ago
Not implying anything. It's just anecdata. I may filter my acquaintances for more men/fewer women like this, if you want to try to make some broader conclusion. If I ever decide to interact with people again I can ask them if they have different anecdata to share. Probably at least a few years away.
fribble
24d ago
I know several men who share that experience. I think I know one woman who shares it. Just anecdata but I find it interesting.
fribble
25d ago
My husband sais he knew immediately. I knew when he proposed (after a few weeks - he said that was the soonest he felt he could and the longest he could make himself wait) and I accidentally said yes. I never intended to get married and I had successfully declined a few proposals prior to his. When I realized I had said yes I needed to have a conversation with myself. We married a few weeks later.
Our last anniversary was our 30th. We don't get any more, but he will always be my husband.
fribble
28d ago
We each invested our own work based retirement accounts. I handled our finances beyond that. I do pretty standard Boglehead, my husband was more aggressive. He was a spender, I am a saver. But we pool money so as long as our emergency fund was full & our retirement numbers were being met I tried not to get too antsy when he was freer with money than I would have been.
We agreed generally on giving money to others. He was more generous but he was also open to my "enough." Money didn't mean anything to him, so giving it away wasn't a big deal. I am pretty financially conservative (my standard rule was we lived on one of our incomes and the other was for saving/investing). We mostly met in the middle, more towards my side early in our marriage when we were struggling and more towards his side as we funded our emergency and retirement accounts.
It took us about 5 years of marriage to get on the same financial page.
Our kid is a good blend of the two of us. She seems to have a pretty healthy relationship with money. Save enough for tomorrow, spend enough to enjoy today, share with people you love.
fribble
29d ago
My husband needed around 5k in assorted denominations. I need around 1k in bills no larger than 20s, and $100 in quarters. Neither of us had a convincing argument for why our way was correct.
fribble
1mo ago
I am 20 years older than you and would increase my standard of living by reducing current saving vs pulling from investments. Before I did that I would ask myself if we were entering a decade where I saw no increase in net worth would I still feel my investments were sufficient for my plans at the end of that decade.
If I lost my job now I would be fine for the rest of my life and likely be in a position where growth in investments exceeds my living costs. & I only need to consider another 40 years of life. I would still be cautious about increasing my living costs because once you do buy really nice yarn it can be hard to go back to the affordable stuff. But you can be perfectly happy if you never stop limiting yourself to the affordable stuff. OTOH while I also like nice tea, it's something I only indulge in on rare occasions and I am fine with the cheap stuff on the daily. If we entered a lost decade I would mourn my yarn and not think twice about my tea. (I do buy nice yarn - out of current income. I might pull from savings for a once in a lifetime experience but I would prefer to save up for it out of current income if I had the time to do so.)
So... What do you want that would require you to supplement from savings rather than current income? If you lost your job how much of a runway do you have? If your investments had no growth for a decade could/would/should you stop pulling from them during that time? If you needed to drop back to your current living standard how hard would it be? Could you do an experiment without locking yourself into a dependency? You have 60-70 years of remaining life to play with it. It's a tough balance.
fribble
1mo ago
I need to get back to the gym. I have almost all of the "critical" list knocked out and I told myself getting back to the gym was the last item on that list. I have my systems in place. I have my bribes in place. (Exercise does not make me feel good. It just makes me tired and sweaty. I think endorphins are a lie. But I would prefer to retain some strength into my old age.)
I have a bunch of reasons why I am failing at this but ultimately they don't matter. It's been just shy of 3 months since my husband died. Almost 4 months since I have been in the gym. I have a small handful of excuses left and they're quickly running out. Even if all I do is step foot in the door and turn around and leave I have got to get back to the gym.
fribble
2mo ago
Make regular ice cream. I make protein powder garbage but my daughter makes small batch ice cream. Get a chocolate and a vanilla base you like (the recipe book should have a starting point) and go to town. It's great because she can experiment with a bunch of different flavors.
fribble
2mo ago
You are not. I took a class before I gave birth that included a lot of guided meditation and I told my husband if I had to imagine myself in a field it came with a load of chiggers and I wasn't going to play along. Fortunately one of the classes was infant and child CPR so it wasn't a complete waste of time.
fribble
2mo ago
Thanks for these tips. It turns out it was the power supply. I got a replacement (someone on ebay lost their motherboard & was parting out their old bits, serendipity!), popped it in the case, and am mid-backup now.
I had taken it down a minimalist system and it was still exhibiting the behavior & I was going to swap out memory if the psu didn't fix the issue. I really appreciate the additional trouble shooting steps. They let me do things while I was waiting for the power supply to come, and it helped to think I might make progress. Maybe I'll bury the old power supply in the back yard since his computer apparently got broken heart syndrome.
fribble
2mo ago
I have tried to catch it in a boot to get to the bios, so far no luck. I found an external enclosure and the drive didn't mount/wasn't recognized. I'll find another and then check a different drive, too.
I think the system was working previously, but it's a guess. He'd been feeling a bit under the weather before things got bad, so it had possibly been late November since he touched the computer. He asked me to turn it off once he went into the hospital, which was late December, and then it was late January/early February when I first tried to get a backup of it and at that point it didn't boot successfully. The UPS it was on also died sometime during this time period, which is probably also influencing my desire to blame the power supply. Even though all other electronics in the house are fine so I don't think we got hit with a power surge, which even if we did, the UPS should have absorbed it. I'll run through the things I can do, then see if there's a repair company that can do something other than what I've done. And based on the input I've gotten here, I'll consider that good enough.
fribble
2mo ago
Thank you for the input. As not-a-gamer it's really hard to tell how far babying the gaming rig goes. Y'all spend hours with these things! And care deeply about even peripherals like the perfect mouse and keyboard.
It is a nice keyboard. It's got a nice thunk to it, like the old IBM keyboard. Modern keyboards are garbage.
fribble
2mo ago
It was his primary windows system, so it has art and photos on it. We're talking ~15TB if not in a raid. A lot of that would also be dev work, games, and just junk, which I don't need to save, but I want every bit of his photos and art I can save. His first retirement project was going to be making more prints of his favorite digital art & photos, and I expect over time my daughter and I will do just that.
Thanks for the data point. I'm keeping memory in mind, too. If it's the motherboard and the drives are in a raid, I'm SOL for this system. I've gotten backups of all the NAS and external raids, and I've got the SD cards for his cameras. I think without the drives on his computer I'll mostly be losing his newest artwork, which is most likely in an unfinished state. And maybe I'm just making myself feel better.
fribble
2mo ago
I am fortunately not having to worry about money. We'd been planning for his retirement so we were already financially set up to not need his salary, and I have always intended to work until they cart me out of the building kicking and screaming. But everyone should plan for these eventualities. I won't qualify for the social security widows benefit until I'm 60, several years from now. If we'd been a single income household (or if I'd only had a pin money job) and not planned for a potential early death (our daughter's over 20, so if we'd done a 20 year term life insurance policy on him when we had her, it'd be done by now), things could be rough right now. And tough even were I 60, bluntly. If you take it at 60 you're cutting your monthly pay by something like 28% and if you needed to take it at 60 the odds of you having a better benefit to swap to once you're at FRA are pretty low.
Thank you for mentioning the built in raid - that's a feature on his system. I was thinking of a repair company, mostly because we're old enough that most of us who played with hardware haven't in ages beyond bespoke gaming rigs, and we've all been down sizing which means our piles of spares have been whittled away. But since asking anyone else (friends or repair service) to work on the system comes with the non-zero possibility that it gets hosed, I want to do every (non-destructive) thing I can think of first.
fribble
2mo ago
Not at all worried about anything I might find. I was married to him for 30 years. I know everything important about him and there's nothing I would or could find that would diminish my love and respect for him.
FWIW, I appreciate that my husband named his directories rationally so I just have to delete "porn" and won't be accidentally running into it when I'm trying to save family photos from loss.
Don't just think, run the numbers. Trying to plan on vibes would make me itchy. Forecasting out your current budget and adding health insurance costs and your other known early retirement expenses would give you good numbers to work with. Talking about exactly how many years of work are needed to pay for exactly what kind of lifestyle is really helpful.
Your partner may agree that 10 more years of work to pay for a country club membership every year isn't a good trade off. You may agree that 5 more years of work for a yearly trip to do a walking tour in Ireland is a good trade off.
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