u/lmg080293

Even in Flex Budget, I really can't stand the subcategories, I'll be honest. It's just not how my brain functions when thinking about our money. I don't want to set a number for how much I'll spend on clothes, movies, restaurants, etc. each month because our drive for each of those things is so variable. Some months we'll be really drawn to going the movies, others not. Some we'll really be into going out to dinner, some we won't. Some months I'll buy clothes, sometimes I won't.

I care more about knowing whether our money is going toward essentials or non-essentials. Are we being frivolous with our non-essential spending? Do we need to rein that in? Or is life (our essentials) just getting more expensive, and if so, where can we cut back or negotiate on some of those things?

Anything we don't spend, I want going to savings. I don't have a set goal for that either. I want as much as possible. We max out our Roths, we have our emergency fund, but we still want to keep building that cushion for unexpected or guaranteed future large expenses (cars, ATV, home improvement projects).

So long story short, I'm considering making the following change to our budget:

Within the two major categories (Fixed and Variable) I would have two subcategories each (Essential and Non-Essential).

• Fixed Essential - Mortgage, insurance, utilities, required bills, dog food subscription, gym membership (debatable), car registration, etc.
• Fixed Non-Essential - Streaming services, fun subscriptions, other non-essential, automated charity donations, etc.
• Variable Essential - Groceries, gas, medical co-pays, repairs, propane, vet visits, auto maintenance, etc.
• Variable Non-Essential - Restaurants, shopping, entertainment, decor, convenience spending, etc.

I'm trying to decide if I would regret making this change and how it might affect Monarch's automatic categorization. If it's just going to make more work for me in the end. What would be some potential flaws in this system you could foresee?

I spend my weekdays alone a lot, and while the peace and quiet is nice, I find that I get almost depressed because of my boredom and isolation. Sure, I’ve got my dog, and my husband when he comes home. I’ve got some little hobbies—but not things I can fill hours with day in and day out. My friends all work. My few teacher friends live far from me & are usually busy with their kids or camp or travel.

Plus the weather has absolutely sucked in the northeast this year and I’m especially grumpy because of that. It’s keeping me indoors too much.

So I’m just curious… does anyone else struggle to fill their time?

(I realize a lot of this is a me problem that has simple solutions, but I’d like to hear from others about what you do).

After years of indecision, clarity kind of just quietly whispered to me the other day. We had back to back family events with kids and babies at all stages of life, and I left thinking… Wow. Without kids, our lives are going to get smaller and smaller.

And this is not to say that’s true of all child free people. Plenty of people without kids live big lives. That’s just not me and my husband. We’re very to ourselves. Our friends with kids have all kind of left us behind for kid events and family things and mom get togethers. Even when we do show up to what we’re invited to, it’s just really really hard to connect when they’re running around chasing the kids. I see friendships passing by.

We don’t have the desire to seek out new friends. I have my hometown friends and work friends and my husband is very independent. Our families are small. Mine isn’t especially close. So it’s like… as we get older, the numbers will drop and it’ll be just us.

And that’s not to say I’d be unhappy. My husband is my favorite person in the world. I could spend every waking minute with him. But at the end of our lives, will it feel like enough? More importantly… will it feel like we were too scared to take a chance to expand our lives? To see what opportunities having a child can bring us? To pass on all of this wisdom we’ve gained? For me, to see the actual impact of breaking the generational cycles I’ve broken? To develop the close-knit family I didn’t have?

Suddenly, all of that just felt like it outweighed the cons. I felt at peace about it.

My husband and I made some “parenthood vows” to each other, and then, since I’m ovulating any day now, decided to send it.

And now I feel the weight of it. It’s no longer theory. It’s real potential. I’m hoping and assuming that’s a normal feeling. But damn, it’s huge. I could hardly sleep last night with anticipation of possibility.

We got invited to a casual friend’s baby’s 1st birthday party 4 months in advance. We’re not wildly close with the couple. They did come to our wedding, and we’ve hung out with them as part of our larger group of friends many times—but never one on one. We’re flattered they invited us, of course, and many of our friends will be there, but as currently childless people, baby birthdays aren’t high up on our list of favorite events, especially on summer Saturdays. There’s a good chance we end up with more appealing plans.

I’d feel differently if we were super close friends or family.

Is it rude to wait to RSVP? I wouldn’t wait til the last minute, but when does it become rude? They didn’t put an RSVP date, but I keep getting the reminder texts from Evite.

We’re trying to save money and redo our porch ourselves and we can’t seem to figure out the right product to use.

After like $40 worth of samples, we tried Minwax Provincial and liked the color so we committed to a gallon of it only to find out that a) people have said it’s an interior stain and b) we absolutely hated it with the “satin” helmsman spar urethane finish we applied, which looked semi-gloss. We want a low luster sheen, which we can’t seem to find the right product for that in our research. Closest we considered was a water-based topcoat but people said not to mix oil + water because it’ll be an application nightmare.

So we pivoted to PPG (Sikkens) ProLuxe penetrating oil. We sampled three colors and even the darkest one was still just a slightly darker than pine golden color.

So we were going to pivot to Ready Seal but now I’m afraid we’re going to deal with the same thing as the ProLuxe, but have to commit to a $45 gallon to find out, which we’re exhausted by at this point. We just can’t seem to get a straight answer on what a professional would use to make this quick and easy.

Please give us some advice. We just want a medium neutral brown.

As I’m sure you have also noticed: the kids can’t write—and some are WAY worse than others.

Between class time that gets cut every year, increasing curriculum demands, and rebounding from academic disruptions from the pandemic… there’s just not enough time to address the extreme gaps.

I am likely going to have an intervention class next year. Right now our intervention program focuses solely on reading, but I’d love to use the time to address those writing gaps for students identified.

The problem is: how do we identify those students in a way that will make admin happy? (AKA: how do we get data?)

We use STAR for reading benchmarks, but there doesn’t seem to be a similar program out there (yet) for writing.

I’m curious: does your school offer writing intervention? What does that look like? How are students identified? How do you feel about it, as a classroom teacher?