u/No-Chicken-1067

Inherited a solar PPA when we bought our house a few years ago. We were in year 11 of a 20 year lease. Worked great for the first year and a half. Usually electric bills were only about $20/mo. Got one for $100 during a particularly hot month. The PPA is $250/mo so not bad in a 2500sqft house. Then the bills started creeping up. After year 2 we got a reimbursement check because the panels underproduced by a decent amount. One month we got a $600 electric bill and we contacted the solar company and the electric company. The electric company came out and confirmed everything is connected correctly and they are getting correct information from the panels. Tesla refused to come check and said the box we had wasn’t working, even though we could see the production amounts on the app. They took 3 months to send us a new one, and then gave us the same spiel. We didn’t have it connected correctly so they couldn’t see production information, but we could see it on the app. We asked again for them to come out and check. They refused and sent us instructions on how to connect the box.

We have contacted them multiple times over the year with them refusing to do anything every time. 3 years ago I informed them I would no longer be paying for the panels because they aren’t working and they are refusing to come look at them. We check in every so often and get the same thing, box isn’t working. It is, the app gives us production information. The past 3 years the production has not even been half of the contracted amount. They haven’t reimbursed us for it at all (or at least credited it to our past due balance). I calculated based on the lease agreement and they owe us $6000 for the past 3 years of underproduction. They now refuse to talk to us because of the past due balance. The app sent me a message about a critical error. The inverter has an error message saying riso low and the app says some or all of our panels are not working. Tesla is refusing to do anything about it. I asked them to come remove the panels because they are doing nothing. Last month they produced 20kwh and my electric bill was almost $600. Are with stuck with this or is there any way to get out of this? They are refusing to perform maintenance and the panels aren’t even working.

My spouse and I bought our house 6 years ago. It was a major fixer upper, not updated since the 80’s. We’ve been slowly updating it all on our own. We learn as we go and do things as we can afford them. We are starting to plan the kitchen now. We plan to remove a wall and switch the kitchen and dining room for a better flow. The kitchen is currently in the middle of the house with a doorway on all 4 walls. A few of our neighbors with the same model did this and it just flows better.

I started calling out some contractors because we will need someone to move utilities, shorten a window to fit counters under it, and we hate finishing drywall so want to hire it out. We plan to demo and do everything else on our own. My stepfather was a contractor many years ago so he will help us with everything. I’ve had 3 contractors out so far and it’s just been a disaster. They only want to do the full reno. One guy came in and started criticizing my first DIY project, which was board and batten. It’s not great, but I’ve left it since it will be ripped out in the Reno. Convinced me to get a quote on the whole kitchen and then told me what I want to do probably isn’t possible but he would quote it anyways, and then ghosted me. Another guy had me cut a hole in the soffits after he left and email him a picture so he could make sure there was nothing in there. I sent it, and he ghosted me too. The last one told me what we wanted to do wasn’t possible, when I showed him pictures of my neighbors homes he said he would look into it and let me know. I never heard from him again. Is this normal behavior? I usually hire out things like difficult electrical and pluming and have never had issues with anyone ghosting me or arguing with me about what I want to do. Is a contractor not who I should be contacting for these things? We could probably do it all on our own, and we have a window guy and an electrician/plumber. We just hate drywalling and kind of suck at it so would rather hire someone else to do it.

I got a new puppy a month and a half ago. I completely forgot to add him to our pet insurance policy. We went away for a long weekend and the insurance emailed me a reminder to finish signing up before we left Thursday. There is a 14 day waiting period. We got home from our trip yesterday. He slept most of the day and played with our other dogs for a few minutes then laid down to chew on a toy and is now limping on and off. One of my other dogs was always tweaking her leg and got rest and anti inflammatories so I’m hoping that’s what this is. He has his next vet visit on Thursday, but if I ask the vet about the limping is this going to be a pre existing condition that can’t be covered? I’m not worried if they just prescribe rest and meds, but I’m worried if it’s more than that later. I’m not in a position to be able to afford the care without the insurance reimbursement right now. I’m kicking my ADHD self for not remembering to do this sooner.

I have a 4 month old Staffy mix. She was resting on the floor earlier and when we got her up to eat dinner we noticed she started limping and holding her back leg up. She hasn’t done anything too crazy today that’s I’ve seen. She played a bit with our senior dog but that was hours before this. She mostly spent the day resting after coming home from vacation. The limping isn’t constant and she seems to be in good spirits. It seems worse if she’s been sitting a while and didn’t seem to be bothered when we were examining her leg. I took her out to go to the bathroom and she started zooming around, and I had to stop her because I was worried she would injure herself. My senior used to injure her legs constantly when she was younger and it was usually a wait and rest situation. I feel like it possibly looks worse to me on my puppy because her back end is so much more wiggly/floppy than my senior. She has her last vaccine appointment next week, and we just got her pet insurance on Friday which has a 14 day wait period. Is this something we can wait and watch or could it be serious?

My spouse and I are making a decent amount of money, but I just can’t seem to get a handle on keeping a budget. I make one, and then things end up being more expensive than they used to be or something breaks and it blows the budget. I feel like making the amount of money we are now that we should be much better off than we are. We have worked our way up here from nothing. 15 years ago we were sharing a car and making minimum wage, 10 years ago we were skipping meals because it was rent or eating, and even 5 years ago we had to apply for utility assistance because we couldn’t afford our bills and were considering bankruptcy because we couldn’t afford our student loan payments. This income level is pretty new to us. I want to start putting more money in retirement, but it seems impossible to do that and still be able to pay down our debt and afford things we need like clothes and kids activities. I will say my spouse is also pretty terrible with spending too so that is an issue.

We make 200k, we take home about 11,500 monthly. After bills we have about 3100 left over. $1000 goes to general savings and then another $500 is split between eating out, kids activities savings, and clothes. We then have 1600 left. I am trying to pay down debt though. We have a disgusting amount in student loans, 2 car payments one car has 12k left on the loan and the other has 20k, and about $2k in credit card bills. I’ve been trying to pay down debt with extra money. This large salary is new btw. We both started new jobs in the last 10 months and have doubled our income. We weren’t really able to save before so I’m trying to build up our savings for emergencies. I do plan to lower the amount I put in savings once we have one month of income in savings and then lower the amount im saving monthly. I’m just not sure how to split the 1600 extra between retirement, saving for the kids college, saving for any big purchases and paying down debt.

My spouse and I have recently gotten huge raises and are starting to pay off debt. We have about 200k in debt (not including mortgage) which is a majority student loans. After all our bills are paid and money budgeted for fun/kids stuff/ extras, we have $3800 a month left. We usually send $1k of that to savings and then another $500 as an extra payment to one of our cars (which will be fully paid off beginning of next year) and then another extra $500-1000 to the highest interest student loan (we are snowballing those). I am also 5 years into PSLF so I just make minimum payments on those which account for like 60k of that debt. We usually have an extra $1800-1300 left over every month that we just allocate to our savings or retirement accounts.

We both work remotely now and are considering moving to a neighboring state that has a lower cost of living in the next 2 years. Our house is a fixer upper and we hadn’t been able to make much movement on renovating because inflation kind of killed us. We have 250k in equity in our home and are looking to do a HELOC. We need to renovate kitchen and bathrooms that are stuck in the 80’s and replace all flooring. We got some quotes and decided to have someone else take care of demo and things like drywall repair and other things we cannot do ourselves. We estimated everything and we will probably need about 30-40k to do these things. Nothing too crazy. We are going pretty basic with everything for the most part. We don’t have that saved and will need to get a loan. We’ve got a quote for our mortgage company on a HELOC and would be looking at a payment of $300 a month which we would obviously pay more on. We’ve been living paycheck to paycheck for so long that this feels super irresponsible to take on another payment while also trying to pay off debt. However we also cannot sell our house in the state it is in now.

I need all the tips for introducing my reactive dog to our new 3 month old puppy. Our cat recently passed and they had been together my dogs whole life, 11 years. She has been really sad and down since, trying to leave out the door with us and crying everytime we leave. We have been considering a second dog for many years and decided to go with it.

My dog is reactive mostly based on anxiety. She used to play with other dogs regularly. Then was attacked once and run up on once by unfriendly, off leash dogs. She’s been super nervous about people and dogs since. She’s never actually bitten anyone or any dogs, but she does growl and snap. We tried adopting a shelter dog a few years ago and the shelter gave us bad guidance. The other dog was also reactive and resource guarding us and ended up attacking and injuring my dog. My dog just let the attack happen and didn’t fight back. Our trainer and vet told us to just give the adopted dog back. We worked for 3 months and weren’t able to change the behavior and my dog was seriously injured. We had just completed the foster to adopt the week prior. The advice we recieved was either another male or a puppy.

We waited 3 years and signed up with a rescue this time. We had extensive conversations and they matched us with a puppy. The meet went fine, but my dog was also anxious in a new place. We went through with it. My dog did a lot of sniffing on the ride home, but wasn’t aggressive at all. We let my dog outside as soon as we got home. Let her do her thing and then fed both dinner separately. Then took both outside and let them sniff. My reactive dog was very aggressively sniffing the new puppy, but no growling or anything. We had to separate them a bit because I think she was upsetting the puppy. Then we brought them in, and gave them both treats and put the puppy in her pen. Reactive dog then circled the pen multiple times sniffing and growling till she tired herself out and laid on the couch. Took the puppy up to my room so she could run around and stretch her legs. Then crated her for bed time. Reactive dog sniffed around the crate very concerned that the puppy was crying and then retreated to her hiding spot.

It seems like things went well so far. I know I probably got us in to such a big responsibility, but I also think our dog needed the companionship. I’m just so nervous it won’t work out and we can’t give another dog back, I need this to work.

I ruminate over every decision I make and I wanted to get others opinions on this. I have been getting assigned work by my PM that another coworkers keeps claiming they have no time to do. That’s fine. I have no problem helping out to make sure things get done when they need to. I’ve never done this coworkers work before and it was not explained well to me by the PM. So I’m having to search for hours to figure out how to do it. I also have a ton of my own work that I’m trying to get done. Coworker who claims to have no time sent me a teams message to brag that they are all caught up on their work and have nothing to do so they are excited to have chill time. I was not happy about this. Especially because when I reached out to this person for clarification on their work they were away for 2 hours and when they came back, still didn’t help. Coworker is already problematic in other ways and I have reached my breaking point with them.

Coworker 2 reached out to me to get help with something and we got to talking and I found out they also willingly took over some of our other coworkers work. Coworker 2 gave the work back to the other person. I was considering complaining about it to my manager and coworker 2 agreed I should do it.

I reached out to manager about the PM assigning me work that another coworker didn’t have time to do, but the other coworker is now bragging to me about having no work to do. Meanwhile I’m getting more of my own work thrown at me I’m trying to keep up with AND doing the work of someone who supposedly had no time to do it. I let my manager know I absolutely have no problem taking on extra work and learning new things, but during crunch time in a project is not the time for that. It makes no sense for me to be assigned this work and have to research how to do it if they have nothing to do. My manager agreed and is going to do something about it.

My DH told me I may sound like I am complaining about having to do extra work and now I am feeling like I made a bad choice. I’m absolutely not complaining about doing extra work. I never mind helping out. I’m upset and already lazy coworker who I constantly pick up slack for already is bragging about having nothing to do while I’m drowning. Did I make the right call bringing this issue up? I’ve never had an issue with a coworker before and this is my first time complaining.