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QUICK MONTHLY SUMMARY:
* Got a plurk! Promptly forgot Twitter existed. Sorry, y'all. :B I do a lot of microblogging there and am rather enamored.
* Got![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bishopped over at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
campfuckudie! Have hit my personal limit for RP and feel pretty good about having no other desires for it ever. Yeay.
* Came to a personal revelation about myself (in fact, I am a super-contrary person despite having always thought of myself as a very "whatevs |D" type, in that 9.999 times out of 10, the harder you push something at me, the more I'm just like :\a that's nice :\a APPARENTLY I HAVE TO BE SUBTLY COURTED, and who wants to waste that much time \o/) and came to peace with it. Everything works out in the end.
* An actually fairly accurate representation of myself, since they didn't have any necklaces that actually look like the one I wear.
* I feel like I'm slowly forgetting how to write fanfic. :|a I still want to, a lot, but it all keeps getting done in short bursts and stops, whereas my original fiction is like \:D/ derp derp. I still can't write novels worth anything, but short stories and novella-esque lengths seem to be great for me.
SO AS I HAVE MENTIONED IN THIS JOURNAL BEFORE, I bought a condo back in early 2010 (my actual closing/move-in date was early June). I've been having rentors to help pad the money I get from it, a big chunk of which goes into a separate "house emergency" fund for the place. And while it's always been kind of there in the back of my mind, last week, while my coworkers were discussing when we'd be getting our W-2 forms (the first week of February, apparently), it sort of hit me that I don't know how to declare the income I get from rent. So I went \o_O/!! and poked around some on the IRS website and called my parents (because while I can't really go to my parents for love and cuddles and coddling, I can go to them when I want their best advice with my best interests at heart), and have generally been like :|a for the whole thing. I use TurboTax to do my taxes, so hopefully it will work out--I won't be able to file mine till March, probably, because I need my W-2 and the statements from Fidelity (where all my investment accounts are) so \:D/ GUESS I'M WAITING.
Also while I don't visit anon comms as a general rule, I did get linked to a thread where people were talking about what they have in their various accounts. It made me feel pretty good, actually, as there was only one person in a fairly long thread who "beat" me, as it were. :B (And the thing is, if I factor in the value of my home, even though it's depreciated since I bought it, as well as what I have in my 401K, I still "win." IT'S THE LITTLE THINGS.) The whole thread was incredibly interesting to me, though, because while it's not like a BURNING PASSION TO EXPAND!, personal finance is an interest of mine, and I guess there's a nosey part of me that is just super-curious about how other people are doing, though it's not something I would ever want people to just tell me, straight-up. It's one of the few threads where I think anonymous works better, just because it'd feel really awkward and unkind to be like SO GUYS TELL ME HOW MUCH MONEY YOU'VE GOT TO MY FACE! No, Terra, it's not any of your business; you're just curious.
I also know that I am both incredibly lucky and incredibly priviledged to end up where I am today, financially; my parents, I've said before, are sort of modern embodiments of the American Dream: Dad's father disappeared when my dad was a toddler and his mother worked as a cafeteria lady to make ends meet for her four kids, three of whom fled to the US pretty much asap. My father arrived in California with the clothes he was wearing and $99 and a scholarship--fast-forward forty-some years and he and Mom live in a giant two-story house that's completely paid off on three acres of land in a pretty elitist neighborhood, and though they've lost money in the market crashes, they're both very comfortable. The thing is, my parents worked for twenty-odd years as various rankings of engineers/programmers for IBM, and we always lived very frugally--the house was pretty much the nicest thing we owned, we never went on traveling vacations (my parents very rarely allowed themselves time off or sick days), and if I wanted anything frivolous as a kid, I had to bargain and barter for it, usually in the form of taking on extra chores. At the same time, I was discouraged from having a job when I was in high school--I was given an allowance ($5/week) and expected to devote all my time to my studies. WHICH DID NOT HAPPEN, so a lot of times I did end up having to either ask for money from my parents or just not ... do all the things I wanted to. (Lack of a driver's license until my junior year helped compound this issue.)
At the same time, my parents started socking away significant amounts of money for a college fund for me pretty much as soon as they found out Mom was pregnant, when I was twelve or so, they opened a Roth IRA in my name and began making the max yearly contributions to it, and in spite of bubble bursts and market crashes, they were able to send me to a four-year out-of-state college where my graduation present was to be debt-free, and is extremely important, because compared to like, a car or a computer or any other big material thing, having no debt is probably the best thing I could have asked for. I also lucked out in finding a job before I graduated--the same one I am at almost five years later. When I graduated, my parents turned over the maintenance of my investment accounts into my name--so I have a general mutual fund with Fidelity plus the Roth IRA, I opened a 401K with my employer, and then I have my general checking/savings (and sub-accounts, for house emergencies, emergency job loss, saving up for big fun things, and a buffer account for various miscellany) that I pay daily life expenses out of; there are times where the latter dips more than I'd like--but as long as I am working, I am not ever terribly concerned.
(I have also given hilarious thought to retirement, even though I am not yet 30. My goal is to retire early, but not fully--I'd like to retire from full-time work and go to part-time at somewhere local, having hopefully made and saved enough at that point in my life that I don't need to worry about the drop in income. Am hardcore considering trying to achieve this by the time I'm 50, because apparently when I plan for longterm, I plan for longterm. HOPEFULLY things will work out in that direction; I'm planning on stepping up my extra mortgage payments once I hit my emergency account's goal; in theory the extra amount I'm already paying will come to shave something like four years off the lifespan of the mortgage loan--throwing more may chop off a good eight to ten years, which means WHEN MY MORTGAGE IS PAID OFF MAYBE I CAN RETIRE TO PART TIME . . . I'm such a sedentary homebody that I can easily foresee myself still living here. :V)
ANYWAY that is sort of the financial state of the me, brought on by the fact that actually I would really like to file my taxes but can't until such time as both my W-2 and my Fidelity statements see fit to make it to my mailbox. :(
After all that tl;dr I have determined I really want to write fusion fandom fic, when I want to write fic, but I'm not sure if I even have a direction after that, except maybe I want to write all the diece things and only two other people on LJ care. :B I'M SORRY EVERYONE WHO EXPECTED BETTER OF THIS JOURNAL, PROBABLY YOU SHOULD ABANDON SHIP NOW.
* Got a plurk! Promptly forgot Twitter existed. Sorry, y'all. :B I do a lot of microblogging there and am rather enamored.
* Got
bishopped over at campfuckudie! Have hit my personal limit for RP and feel pretty good about having no other desires for it ever. Yeay.* Came to a personal revelation about myself (in fact, I am a super-contrary person despite having always thought of myself as a very "whatevs |D" type, in that 9.999 times out of 10, the harder you push something at me, the more I'm just like :\a that's nice :\a APPARENTLY I HAVE TO BE SUBTLY COURTED, and who wants to waste that much time \o/) and came to peace with it. Everything works out in the end.
* An actually fairly accurate representation of myself, since they didn't have any necklaces that actually look like the one I wear.
* I feel like I'm slowly forgetting how to write fanfic. :|a I still want to, a lot, but it all keeps getting done in short bursts and stops, whereas my original fiction is like \:D/ derp derp. I still can't write novels worth anything, but short stories and novella-esque lengths seem to be great for me.
SO AS I HAVE MENTIONED IN THIS JOURNAL BEFORE, I bought a condo back in early 2010 (my actual closing/move-in date was early June). I've been having rentors to help pad the money I get from it, a big chunk of which goes into a separate "house emergency" fund for the place. And while it's always been kind of there in the back of my mind, last week, while my coworkers were discussing when we'd be getting our W-2 forms (the first week of February, apparently), it sort of hit me that I don't know how to declare the income I get from rent. So I went \o_O/!! and poked around some on the IRS website and called my parents (because while I can't really go to my parents for love and cuddles and coddling, I can go to them when I want their best advice with my best interests at heart), and have generally been like :|a for the whole thing. I use TurboTax to do my taxes, so hopefully it will work out--I won't be able to file mine till March, probably, because I need my W-2 and the statements from Fidelity (where all my investment accounts are) so \:D/ GUESS I'M WAITING.
Also while I don't visit anon comms as a general rule, I did get linked to a thread where people were talking about what they have in their various accounts. It made me feel pretty good, actually, as there was only one person in a fairly long thread who "beat" me, as it were. :B (And the thing is, if I factor in the value of my home, even though it's depreciated since I bought it, as well as what I have in my 401K, I still "win." IT'S THE LITTLE THINGS.) The whole thread was incredibly interesting to me, though, because while it's not like a BURNING PASSION TO EXPAND!, personal finance is an interest of mine, and I guess there's a nosey part of me that is just super-curious about how other people are doing, though it's not something I would ever want people to just tell me, straight-up. It's one of the few threads where I think anonymous works better, just because it'd feel really awkward and unkind to be like SO GUYS TELL ME HOW MUCH MONEY YOU'VE GOT TO MY FACE! No, Terra, it's not any of your business; you're just curious.
I also know that I am both incredibly lucky and incredibly priviledged to end up where I am today, financially; my parents, I've said before, are sort of modern embodiments of the American Dream: Dad's father disappeared when my dad was a toddler and his mother worked as a cafeteria lady to make ends meet for her four kids, three of whom fled to the US pretty much asap. My father arrived in California with the clothes he was wearing and $99 and a scholarship--fast-forward forty-some years and he and Mom live in a giant two-story house that's completely paid off on three acres of land in a pretty elitist neighborhood, and though they've lost money in the market crashes, they're both very comfortable. The thing is, my parents worked for twenty-odd years as various rankings of engineers/programmers for IBM, and we always lived very frugally--the house was pretty much the nicest thing we owned, we never went on traveling vacations (my parents very rarely allowed themselves time off or sick days), and if I wanted anything frivolous as a kid, I had to bargain and barter for it, usually in the form of taking on extra chores. At the same time, I was discouraged from having a job when I was in high school--I was given an allowance ($5/week) and expected to devote all my time to my studies. WHICH DID NOT HAPPEN, so a lot of times I did end up having to either ask for money from my parents or just not ... do all the things I wanted to. (Lack of a driver's license until my junior year helped compound this issue.)
At the same time, my parents started socking away significant amounts of money for a college fund for me pretty much as soon as they found out Mom was pregnant, when I was twelve or so, they opened a Roth IRA in my name and began making the max yearly contributions to it, and in spite of bubble bursts and market crashes, they were able to send me to a four-year out-of-state college where my graduation present was to be debt-free, and is extremely important, because compared to like, a car or a computer or any other big material thing, having no debt is probably the best thing I could have asked for. I also lucked out in finding a job before I graduated--the same one I am at almost five years later. When I graduated, my parents turned over the maintenance of my investment accounts into my name--so I have a general mutual fund with Fidelity plus the Roth IRA, I opened a 401K with my employer, and then I have my general checking/savings (and sub-accounts, for house emergencies, emergency job loss, saving up for big fun things, and a buffer account for various miscellany) that I pay daily life expenses out of; there are times where the latter dips more than I'd like--but as long as I am working, I am not ever terribly concerned.
(I have also given hilarious thought to retirement, even though I am not yet 30. My goal is to retire early, but not fully--I'd like to retire from full-time work and go to part-time at somewhere local, having hopefully made and saved enough at that point in my life that I don't need to worry about the drop in income. Am hardcore considering trying to achieve this by the time I'm 50, because apparently when I plan for longterm, I plan for longterm. HOPEFULLY things will work out in that direction; I'm planning on stepping up my extra mortgage payments once I hit my emergency account's goal; in theory the extra amount I'm already paying will come to shave something like four years off the lifespan of the mortgage loan--throwing more may chop off a good eight to ten years, which means WHEN MY MORTGAGE IS PAID OFF MAYBE I CAN RETIRE TO PART TIME . . . I'm such a sedentary homebody that I can easily foresee myself still living here. :V)
ANYWAY that is sort of the financial state of the me, brought on by the fact that actually I would really like to file my taxes but can't until such time as both my W-2 and my Fidelity statements see fit to make it to my mailbox. :(
After all that tl;dr I have determined I really want to write fusion fandom fic, when I want to write fic, but I'm not sure if I even have a direction after that, except maybe I want to write all the diece things and only two other people on LJ care. :B I'M SORRY EVERYONE WHO EXPECTED BETTER OF THIS JOURNAL, PROBABLY YOU SHOULD ABANDON SHIP NOW.
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Really what I think it is is that while I am SUPER CONTRARY!! when it comes to fandom stuff, I am pretty easy to please when it comes to offline/rl stuff. :B ♥
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Kya kya♥
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From: (Anonymous)
what :I
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Re: what :I
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