Equality or Equity?

We Americans, it seems, are at the end of our pandemic ropes. Whatever collective actions we were going to take to whip this virus, it sure looks like we've already taken them.

We are tired, tired of all of this, and we want to return to some sort of normalcy. Return the kids to school because we're told we have to return to the office. We want to return to our favorite restaurants and vacation spots. To sports. To campus. To the way it was before.

Safely, of course. With masks and distancing. We don't want anyone to get sick. We are good and caring people, but we can't stay inside forever. Life must go on.

One Year Out: Are We On Track for Financial Independence?

I turned forty last week. It felt weird.

But my birthdays always do. I've never been a big fan of the day. The attention, the singing, the taking stock of the past that is supposed to happen: all of it feels odd to me. I appreciate the sentiment that I am loved and that people care enough to let me know it. But the bad feelings tend to outweigh the good. I'd just as soon pretend it was a normal Wednesday, have a beer or two, and call it a night.

To add to the pressure, there's this whole financial independence goal that thirty-two year old Brian thought would be a good idea to write about, you know, before actually doing any math to see if it was possible. As the date gets closer, my pessimism grows. And the goal is public, which just adds to my anxiety.

We're a year out from the deadline. Will we be financially independent by then? And even if we are, will we feel confident enough to leave work by then?

Let's take a peek at the numbers and see what's what.

What Number Is It?

Sometime this past week, our kitchen sink started draining really slowly. None of our usual tricks, like plunging the sink, or running the garbage disposal or dishwasher to try to push through the clog, had any real effect. If anything, they made things worse.

By Thursday, the water wasn't receding at all. I resorted to scooping the water I could out of the sink with a big mason jar into a bucket and dumping that into the backyard. 

I disconnected the pipes under the sink to get the rest of the water out, and tried to snake the drain with a little manual snake from Amazon. The thing kinked up and turned on itself (behold my DIY skills) so after an hour of that, I did what I hate doing: admitting I can't fix something myself and calling a professional.

Your Tax Dollars, Hard at Work

Like a lot of you, I'm dealing with emotions right now. Anger, and sadness, and frustration at the terrible violence Black people have been suffering at the hands of police, and the continued violence the police and national guard dole out to citizens who dare to protest that violence.

I am dealing with these things as someone who is not Black, which is to say, I am dealing with a tiny portion of the issue, and in an easy, superficial way. A way that raises my awareness just a bit, but I can put the whole thing away whenever I like. I can feel bad for a week or two, donate some money, and then put the issue on the shelf if I want and go about my day.

It's a convenient way of dealing with it all. 

In This Together

Sorry for staying away so long, friends. I've always found it weird when bloggers apologize for not writing, but I do feel a kind of guilt for being away for two months. I wish I had a better excuse other than the fact that I've been busier than I've ever been, either at work or at home. Now I'm experiencing both, so something has to give and that something is writing.

My category space at work is collaboration: the software and related hardware necessary for collaborative apps, video conferencing, whiteboarding, instant messaging, soft phones, virtual conferences, and the like. The increase in work in this space is completely unprecedented. It has me working some nights throughout the week. Even headsets, the supposedly easy commodity in my space, are eating up a lot of time, as we work through a global shortage.

It's Been a Minute

I've been sick, dear readers. For the past two plus weeks, I've had something that feels a lot like the flu. Though I was tested for the flu and it came back negative so I guess that means it was something...other than the flu. But the only test available was the flu test, so that's all I really know.

Mrs. Done by Forty and Baby AF had it, too, but got better quicker than I did. After the second week, I got a nasty (viral?) rash all over [photograph redacted], and that's what finally got me in to the doctor. 

They took a biopsy of a piece of skin on my left arm, I got my very first stitch, and we're still awaiting the results. I'm on a steroid and some sort of antihistamine pill, and, thankfully, as of today I'm feeling mostly better. I just have a bunch of weird tiny scars all over me.

A Little Past Financial Independence

Before we dive in to this week's post, I wanted to mention that I was a guest on one of my favorite podcasts last week: Jamila Souffrant's Journey to Launch.

I've been listening to Jamila's podcast for while and it was such a cool, surreal experience to get to chat with her. (Though like everyone else, I hate the sound of my voice, so I had to listen to the episode in five minute chunks before hitting pause and berating myself for sounding the way I do, and for letting inane thoughts fall out of my piehole.)

Jamila and I talk about financial independence (what else?), specifically digging in to whether financial independence is possible for everyone and anyone, education, debt, and a lot more.

Here is the link to the episode. And if you're not listening to Jamila's show yet, go ahead and add it to your podcast rotation. You won't be sorry.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Maybe We Won’t Retire Just Yet?

Mrs. Done by Forty and I have always been planners. Early on in our relationship, we created a New Year's Day tradition of going to The Olive Garden and planning out the upcoming year over salad and breadsticks.

The restaurant has changed but the routine is the same: we both bring our notebooks, we ask for a booth, we eat too much, and just talk about everything that we think would be cool to do with this one big life we’re making together. By the end of the meal, we have a few pages of things we both will try to make happen: travel, work goals, money goals, family goals, all of it.

Middle Class Wealth - 2020 Update

When I saw CBS's video on how America's wealth was divided between quintiles, the five groupings that each hold 20% of all households, I remembered that it had been over five years since I'd written a post outlining how much wealth each quintile had.

How had things changed?

Unfortunately, the Census Bureau stopped providing wealth data in a quintile format right after I'd written that post in 2015.

So without access to the raw data for future years (and let's be honest, I'm no data scientist so I'm not sure what good I could do even if I had those figures) I just was not going to be able to provide the same breakdown from the Census Bureau's data.