Family money

I have achieved two awesome milestones: (1) I know what our family assets and debts are (what we have, and what we owe). (2) I know our family's monthly/yearly income and expenses (where our money comes from, where it goes, and how much comes and goes each month/year). This is the first time I have ever known these things, which is embarrassing, but never mind that. I am incredibly satisfied that I know these things now!

I started this process because I inherited some money from my father, and I had some hopes and some fears associated with this inheritance. My hope was that we could afford to make some exciting new purchases: a rental property, or a new car, or solar panels, or... well, we had various fantasies. My fear was that we would spend all the money unintentionally, not even knowing where it went, and then it would be gone, and it would be saying goodbye to my father in yet another painful way. I felt very out of control of our money – I didn't know what we had or where it was going – and therefore I didn't know what to do. I didn't even really know what questions to ask.

I decided I wanted to consider hiring a financial advisor. I have friends who have a financial advisor and feel they have gotten great benefit from that, and other friends who feel it's a waste of money. I got some good recommendations and set up a free consultation. And what do you know: preparation for this consultation included documenting what we have. This was a fair amount of work, because it turns out our accounts are sort of all over the place – we have various checking and savings accounts, multiple retirement accounts, a bunch of insurance policies, and so on. But the financial advisor provided a checklist and a questionnaire, and that enabled me to get it all together. In the process, I found some money I didn't know I had! so that was rewarding. Most of the reward, though, was just the great feeling of knowing what and where it all is.

We did have an initial consultation with a financial advisor, and that was a hour very well spent in my opinion (especially because it was free). Without even doing an analysis he conveyed that we are nowhere near buying a rental property. He said, "What I see here is a wonderful opportunity to save," which I thought was hilariously diplomatic.

I learned that as part of his working with us, if he worked with us, he would be asking us to track our expenses to learn our monthly household cash flow. So after the meeting, I decided to just start on that on my own, and see how far I could get. I realized that if I knew our monthly expenses, I could designate an emergency fund containing six months' expenses, which would be a relief; then I'd know what we had "left," i.e., whether we have a pile of "other money" that we could spend on solar panels or whatever without jeopardizing our basic financial security. Also, if I knew our monthly expenses I could calculate the (monthly/yearly) gap between our income and expenses, which would address my biggest fear (that we are currently losing money without even knowing it).

I've tried to calculate our monthly/yearly expenses before and failed completely, because our expenses are so variable. Every month there's some one-time thing, and some expenses are seasonal (like summer camp), and it all just seemed practically unknowable. But I was energized by my good experience documenting what we have, and I decided I was not going to let this lick me.

The first step was to come up with expense categories relevant to our family. I started with some generic lists I found online, then spent weeks combing through our household transactions, adding and deleting and combining categories until it seemed like I had what I needed. It was important in our case to look at our paychecks, our bank statements, and our credit card statements (for multiple months), because different expenses show up in different places. And now I have it! I have about 12 major categories (such as food and education) and about 50 more detailed categories that facilitate tracking (e.g., groceries/restaurants, tuition for school 1/tuition for school 2/boychoir tuition/etc). This felt like a great achievement in itself.

The next step was to determine the amounts associated with each of these categories. Some were known exactly (tuition is the same every month), so that was easy. Some were variable but easy to average (the electric bill has accessible history). Many, however, were totally unknown to me. Groceries, for example, and entertainment activities, and vacations, and charitable donations, and after school care: I really had no idea of those amounts. So, courageously, I arranged to track these expenses continually and consistently over multiple months. I did this by systematically imposing my expense categories in Mint (all the stuff I need to track shows up there) and documenting the total in each category month by month, in a separate Excel spreadsheet. I did five months of this to begin with (from May to September). That's enough to see some patterns, like groceries. It's not enough for some seasonal categories, so the data is still noisy, but I'll just keep tracking and it will get better over time.

For the Big Moment, to see what everything adds up to, Dale and I sat down together and summed things up. It was exciting! My questions are answered! (With the above caveat about the data still being noisy.) How I love it when questions get answered. Avoiding reporting specific numbers (seriously none of your business), I can cheerfully report the following:

1. Our current expenses are a bit less than our income. Hooray for that!
2. We have enough cash on hand to designate an appropriate emergency fund. Yahoo!
3. There is not enough "other money" for any fantasy expenses. Oh well.
4. We are almost certainly not saving enough for retirement, though this needs more research. College is kind of okay.
5. Overall, our expenses reflect our values very well. We spend a lot of money on the things that we care about a lot. And we agree on those things, which is huge. Our values are perhaps a bit outside our budget, especially given the retirement situation, but it could be worse.

6. I do not currently feel a need for a financial advisor. I think I know what I need to know.

I am very curious to keep this up and see how things evolve as my data gets better!

Bread

I decided to try and make an everyday whole wheat sandwich bread. I used to do this in a bread machine, but my machine wore out, and I don't want to spend $300 on a new one, especially since the bread involved was not perfect (bread machines tend to make hard crusts). I make the best challah I know of, if I do say so myself; there's no machine involved and it's very easy. Five minutes in the morning, no kneading, let it rise in the fridge all day while I'm at work, braid it when I get home and bake for half an hour. Done. The long slow rise in the fridge substitutes for, and is better than, kneading. I would love to have something so straightforward for everyday sandwich bread.

I'm thinking maybe "kneading" in the food processor is a good start; Mark Bittman recommends it. I started with a King Arthur Flour recipe, but instead of the whole room-temperature rising-punching-rising-shaping-rising thing (which I cannot do while I am at work), I let it rise all day in the fridge. Sadly, this loaf did not rise one bit. The dough was approximately the texture of a sandbag. I rolled it out thin and baked it as flatbread instead. Could be worse.

I decided that part of my mistake had been following the recipe. Flours act differently according to the brand, the weather that day, etc. I know what bread dough should look like, and I should have known that that dough was too dry. My poor little yeasts had nothing to drink, and also they just could not blow up their little balloons in such a dense environment. So a few days later I decided to try again, still using the food processor but only adding flour until the dough was nice and shaggy wet like I know it needs to be. I happened to have a day at home (supervising kids who were off school), so I did the room-temperature rising routine. This bread rose eagerly (I probably let it rise too long while I was in a phone meeting) and stuck to the pan something awful. But it made great french toast.

Next I was ready to try the same recipe but (1) letting it rise in the fridge and (2) lining the loaf pan with parchment paper. This loaf was decent, both breadlike and tasty, but still too dense. See that craggy top? Those wrinkles should have risen into a smooth dome. Not making the grade for an easy everyday bread that outcompetes the one from the store.

I'm not sure what to try next. Maybe I should let it rise even longer in the fridge, like 24 hours instead of 12. Maybe I should let it rise in the kitchen after the fridge, and bake it when the kids go to bed, since I don't need it to be ready for dinner. Maybe I need a different recipe; some say a 100% whole wheat bread needs a sourdough starter. Or maybe I should borrow my friend's bread machine. 

My son the emotion Jedi

Me: I'm feeling kind of sad and nervous. I'm not sure why.
Jordan: I think I know what it is.
Me: Really? What?
Jordan: You're not smiling. Smiling actually makes you feel better. Try it, it really works.

He's right of course. And I could not help but smile every time I looked at him for the rest of that day.

Police

In the car on the way home from school yesterday, at a confusing intersection, a police officer pleasantly waved for us to go in front of him.

Jordan: Police officers are really nice. You think about them chasing criminals or whatever but whenever I see one, I am really glad they are there. I feel safe. I feel secure.
Rachel: I love that you feel that way. That’s how it should be, because police officers should be some of the most important helpers, and they can do the best job being helpers if we trust them and they trust us. But I want to tell you that part of the reason you feel safe and secure with police officers is an unfair reason.
Jordan: What is that?
Rachel: It’s because you are white.
Jordan: That is horribly unfair.
Rachel: I know. It’s terrible. And the fact is that there have been a lot of very bad things that have happened, where police officers have hurt or even killed Black people who they thought were doing something wrong, only the police were mistaken. Sometimes the police were unfairly suspicious of someone because of their prejudices. Sometimes they shot someone instead of only arresting them. Terrible things have happened.
Aaron: Like that guy that was a woodcarver and the police said he was attacking them with a knife but really it was his woodcarving knife and he was just walking across the street. And they shot him and they killed him for basically no reason.
Rachel: Right. Like that. That was incredibly sad, and completely unfair. And that man was Native American.
Jordan: That should not happen.
Rachel: I know. And I am really sorry to tell you that it happens, not just one or two times but over and over. I bet you can imagine that if you were a Black person, knowing about these terrible things, you might not feel safe or secure with the police.
Jordan: I think the police should protect everyone and be fair to everyone.
Rachel: I would like our family to try and help with the way things are so that that could come true.

I am not very hopeful that conversations like this make a lot of difference; there is so much that is wrong, and talk is cheap, and I am very far from being any kind of effective activist against police brutality. But talking about it has got to be better than not talking about it. I am trying to keep taking advantage of moments that come up, like when this picture understandably caught the kids' attention.

The protester Ieshia Evans being detained in Baton Rouge, La., on July 9, 2016.
Photo by Jonathan Bachman.

And of course the more I learn, the more I see the awful effects of racism (and other systems of unfairness) everywhere, so there are more opportunities to talk.

Camp Kesher haikus

I never blog about Camp Kesher, our annual Jewish family camp over Labor Day weekend, because it is the most unplugged weekend of my year and I love it that way. We rarely even take any photos. We just hang out. It is held at Camp Sealth, on the south shore of Vashon Island, which feels about a thousand miles away from our Seattle life even though it hardly takes any time to get there (half an hour drive to the ferry, half an hour ferry ride, and half an hour drive on the other side). It is quite rustic: the cabins are old and drafty and spidery, the bathrooms are smelly and mildewed. But there is a special magic there. Part of the magic is being close to nature all day every day. Part of the magic is being in a thoroughly yet undogmatically Jewish environment. Part of the magic is an entire long weekend of no driving, no cooking, and no fussing about the kids because they spend most of the day in kids' camp. Part of the magic is long stretches of unstructured time... to chat with new friends or old, to attend an interesting lecture by the scholar-in-residence, to sit in a camp chair and read a book, to play an instrument, to contribute to a community art project. Part of the magic is staying up late singing around a campfire, then staying up later playing board games with grownups and laughing ourselves silly. This year, there was a veritable parade of wildlife passing before us on the beach, woods, and water: deer, otters, seals, eagles, and orcas, just doing their thing while you sit in your chair on the sand and take it in. In the past we have seen whales and dolphins. It is a precious few days.

In the fine tradition of summer camp there is an annual talent show, and between acts, we read haikus inspired by camp experiences. Dale and I came up with a few. Green Circle, Rounds Hall, and Orchard Grass are locations at the camp. There are various other inside references.

Reading in my chair
There goes an otter family.
Where is my child?

Mah jongg, Green Circle*
What are they doing out there?

So many tiles.

Game night in Rounds Hall
Cards Against Humanity --
Did you just say that??

Mud pit, Orchard Grass:
Sunk in up to my ankle.
Wet shoes all weekend.

Old friends didn't come.
It's really too bad for them;
Now I have new friends.

Fifth cup of cocoa:
Who took my favorite mug?
Guess I'll use this one.**

Where is your name tag?

What have you done with your shoes?
I ask my children.

Birkat hamazon
Come on up, all you rabbis.
Are we in Brooklyn?***

Freddy and Suzy
I need to use the bathroom.
What time is it now?****

* There is always a contingent of folks that play mah jongg for the entire weekend, near the outdoor amphitheater called the Green Circle.

** First of all, there is a magical machine at Kesher that supplies hot cocoa anytime with the touch of a button; the children are at it like moths at a flame. Second of all, you are encouraged to BYO mug and use it all weekend; there is a table for you to keep your own clean mug handy; but people are always using someone else's mug.

*** There are usually somewhere between three and ten rabbis at Kesher, and we say the blessing after meals after every meal. The rabbis only lead it once, but still, it's a lot of rabbis.

**** Some of the bathrooms are communal, and there is a rule limiting access to men in the first half of every hour and women in the second half of every hour; this is especially helpful for the showers. One bathroom features a sign on the door declaring "Freddy" during the men's time and "Suzy" during the women's time.

Northwest Montana Fair

Even though Kalispell is as close to Glacier as it gets, we got a little tired of driving for hours every day, and were delighted when Dale discovered that the Northwest Montana Fair & Rodeo would be in town while we were there. The parade passed just a couple blocks from our house.

Much candy was tossed by the paraders, and Jordan and Aaron racked up quite a haul (pictured here back at the house, after they had sorted and counted it all).

We were pleased to cheer for Flathead County's democrats. 

At the fair, we saw a domestic yak, which is raised for its fur.

Jordan, Aaron, and Deena all tried archery. It's harder than it looks. The instructors were kids who took it all very seriously. 

Deena and Jordan and I bought wristbands for the carnival, but we could only stomach three rides (and frankly that was one too many). I'll remember that for next time. No pictures, just vivid memories of my queasy stomach and aching neck.

The grand finale of the fair (and indeed the trip) was the rodeo. I've seen rodeos before, but I never pictured myself attending one with my very urban aunts. We all had a blast. The rodeo clown did his schtick, supposedly claiming to be able to inflate a chicken to preposterous size, but instead turning it into a dog.

The bucking broncos are fairly frightening, especially when they almost stomp on the cowboy. Dale had fun getting action shots.

This rodeo featured an event I've never seen before, the Indian Relay Race, which was incredibly exhilarating/impressive/chaotic. The first set of riders gallops pell-mell once around the track; then each rider jumps off the first horse and onto a fresh one (that's the relay), while their team's handlers catch the first horse. This is totally nuts because you have something like fifteen horses in the same area, with riders jumping off one and climbing off another and handlers trying to control the other horses. And it's all bareback. One team failed to catch a horse after the rider jumped off it, and the horse just kept running like hell the whole way around the track again with no rider on it. Sheesh.

This is a barrel-racer. I wonder why barrel-racers are all women. Tradition, I suppose.

And finally the bulls. They are just scary to me. They attack people. But in the end the rodeo clown triumphs.

Glacier: Lodging

We enjoyed excellent accommodations on our Glacier trip. We stayed in a vacation rental home in Kalispell, a nicely updated place in Old Town, about half an hour from the park entrance. 

For a family like ours, a house is so much better than a hotel. Okay, you have to hang up your own towels, but in return you get a living room and a kitchen and a deck with a barbecue. In the evenings we plunked down on the long comfy couches and watched the Olympics together. In the mornings we enjoyed breakfast in pajamas. 

One night we camped over on the east side of the park for better access to the Many Glacier area. We stayed at a commercial campground outside the park that had great campsites, very comfortable cabins, resident horses, and intruding cows. It also had a terrific restaurant, Johnson's Cafe, where delicious country food is served family-style. We wish we could have eaten about four more meals there.

We did not stay at any of the beautiful historic lodges, but we enjoyed visiting them. This is Lake McDonald Lodge. I missed Dad here more than almost anywhere else; he loved these old places.