Pembirdie

Category: personal finance

  • Gaps in my financial experience

    Because of my parents’ generosity, I don’t have experience with two major expenses that it seems a majority of people have to deal with: student loans and a mortgage.

    My parents funded 529 college savings plans for all of us. Thanks to my highly specific skill at excelling at standardized multiple choice exams, scholarships covered my college tuition and half of my medical school tuition, but the 529 plan paid for college room and board and the other half of med school. (I think I paid for the four pre-med classes I took at USD, but they weren’t very expensive.) (I also know my 529 plan didn’t pay for it all, Mom moved some around from my brother’s plan, as he had an all-expenses paid education at the Air Force Academy.) Making it through college and medical school without student loans is a major boost and has no doubt saved me countless worries.

    When my husband and I decided to move back to Omaha, Mom told us we didn’t have to worry about applying for a loan: she’d give us the money for the house, and we’d pay her back. In retrospect, I don’t think we set the arrangement up correctly – turns out you can’t just give someone a large sum of money and have them pay you back without some contractual and estate planning considerations – but this arrangement has worked out great for us. Turns out there are a lot of extra expenses you don’t have to worry about when you pay for a house with cash. We have a very reasonable “mortgage” payment that I transfer to Mom’s bank account every month, and with the inheritance we received from various estate sell-offs (again, a major boost!), we’re going to have her paid back in the next seven years, God willing.

    As a result of my family’s wealth and generosity, I won’t be able to offer advice based on personal experience for several areas that typically have a large impact on a person’s financial life. This is a good problem to have, but something I will need to keep in mind when I’m tempted to compare my financial situation to someone else’s.

    SDG

  • How much is walking worth?

    On Monday, someone came from the wheelchair company to measure me for a wheelchair. He explained that the standard-issue wheelchairs are made in Mexico, but the fancy ones are made in Wisconsin. I’m not sure if he was implying that Wisconsinites make nicer wheelchairs than Mexicans or if that was his explanation for why the nicer wheelchairs are so much more expensive.

    While the insurance gods will ultimately determine what kind of wheelchair I get, we’ve decided to “try” for the fancy kind that has removable wheels and an extra light frame and comes in whatever color you want. (I’m going with candy red. It might be a mistake.) The man estimated that if we meet our deductible the wheelchair will cost around five hundred dollars. If that will allow me to consistently get to work by myself and diminish my fears of the wheelchair making me fall over as I try to get it in/out of the trunk — worth it.

    Even better, if, as per Murphy’s law, paying a lot of money for a fancy custom wheelchair would increase the chance of my hip problems spontaneously going away, that would be five hundred dollars extremely well spent.

    As I was thinking this thought to myself whilst driving home after almost falling over getting my wheelchair into the trunk at 11 PM at night, I kept on the same track and wondered, if I could pay money to make my hip problems go away, what’s the most I would pay?

    That is a tough question. Of course there are variables. Could the problem spontaneously remit on its own, or are we assuming there is otherwise no cure? Would this payment essentially keep me healthy for all time, or could I get another debilitating ailment the next year, or could the condition come back? Could other people contribute to the monetary amount?

    Ten thousand dollars, I would pay without thinking about it. Twenty thousand dollars (essentially our three-month emergency fund)? Mmmph… probably. Ninety thousand dollars (essentially what we have in our taxable account)? Yikes, that seems like too much. But we could probably afford it. Is ninety thousand dollars too much to pay for the ability to be able to roll around in bed without waking up to think about it, painless sex, being able to walk to Lindy’s grave, hiking?

    If there weren’t other options, I think I’d do it. If I wasn’t in a position of being blessed with monetary resources, then I guess it would be tough luck. Despite this being a hypothetical scenario, it seems problematic that I would be able to pay my way out of not being able to walk when someone without my resources would not be able to. On the other hand, my parents have paid me out of having to wear glasses or contacts (thank you, Lasik!) and smiling with crooked teeth, and that doesn’t seem so problematic. Maybe it’s because those “upgrades” seem more superficial, but I guess everything is on a sliding scale.

    SDG

  • Lumpy bumpy expenses and peace of mind

    When I was using a Google Sheets spreadsheet to track our purchases, I found that “one time” expenses were always popping up. There would be the airline tickets to visit my mom for Thanksgiving. Then our semiannual insurance premium. Then Christmas presents. Then an unexpectedly expensive car repair. It seemed like every month had one or two of these “unpredictable” expenses. It made planning hard.

    After struggling with this for some time, I finally realized: you can plan for these expenses. You just need to look a little farther into the future.

    You see, most unexpected expenses really aren’t that unexpected, they’re just easy to forget. A semiannual insurance premium, for instance, predictably occurs twice a year. Christmas happens every December 25th. Mom wants a visit at least once a year (okay, twice a year).

    Here’s a list of some of our expenses that may or may not come at predictable times, but they definitely come some time:

    • Property taxes (so expensive! Like $8,000 per year expensive!)
    • Insurance with semiannual premiums (we do all our insurance this way, it saves a little money) (also expensive!)
    • Automobile registration (gets less expensive each year your vehicle gets older!)
    • Phone plan (we use Mint Mobile, you can buy a year at a time for a discount)
    • YNAB
    • Home maintenance (various sources say to estimate spending 1-4% of your home’s value per year – you may not spend it every year but will have larger expenses every so often like paying for a new roof or HVAC system)
    • Auto maintenance (I have no idea how to estimate this one… we randomly chose $500/month. If we have extra it will just help pay for our next car)
    • Medical expenses (I aimed to save enough to meet our yearly deductible)
    • Home projects (subjective, but necessary when your husband loves interior design and building furniture)
    • Travel (again, subjective, we need to pay for a least two flights a year)
    • Presents (depends how generous you are, I guess)

    After compiling all these lumpy expenses, I came up with a dollar amount that we’d need for each expense for the year. Our house cost $370,000, for instance, so 3% of that for home maintenance is $11,100. Divide that by twelve, et voilà! Each month we need to set aside $925 for home maintenance. Essentially, you create sink funds for all these categories to draw upon when the lumpy expense finally appears.

    I love this, because now instead of feeling slightly panicked when an “unpredictable” expense comes up, I know the money is there in the sink fund, just waiting to be used. So far I’ve done a good job predicting these “unpredictable” expenses, but if a truly new, unsaved-for expense came up we’d move things around and then I’d add a new category for the future.

    This is definitely possible to do with a spreadsheet, but YNAB makes it easier to see what we’re doing (especially helpful for my husband!), and other budgeting apps have similar capabilities.

    SDG

  • Maybe we’re not going to see the world?

    I am on the Internet a lot (sigh) and spend a lot of time reading personal finance blogs. It seems that people blogging about personal finance, financial independence, and FIRE have something in common besides wanting to be good with money and to retire early and do whatever they want (like blogging): they all love to travel.

    Now, a lot of these blogs also happen to be geared toward physicians or high earners, so I guess that should adjust my mindset somewhat, but it’s common to read about people spending 20-50 grand a year on travel. Which makes my eyes widen a bit.

    It’s not just on the blogs. At my job, every new hire gets introduced by a faculty member at one of our monthly meetings. Invariably, at least one slide on their introduction PowerPoint will show them hiking, posing in front of a big building, etc., and we will be informed that this person “loves to travel.” Colleagues discuss their European vacation plans.

    Admittedly, this is selection bias. People don’t talk about how they aren’t going on a European vacation, and bloggers tend not to post about how they spend $2,000 on travel this year, not because they were awesome at credit card hacking but because they just didn’t travel anywhere other to visit their parents a few states away.

    Of my immediate family, baring the one who is incarcerated, I am probably least traveled. I was born in Europe but we moved to Nebraska before I could remember anything different. Since then, I’ve been to Mexico and Canada a few times, Peru, some of the Caribbean (on a cruise), England, and Uganda. The sister after me has spent the last two years of her life in Uganda, went to Egypt on a work trip there, visited Israel in seminary, toured through Italy and Ireland during Bible college, went on a river cruise from Austria to the Netherlands a few summers ago, and is currently visiting a friend in Finland and a cousin in Switzerland. My brother went on a world tour after graduating from the Air Force academy including more places than I’m aware of, and spend three years with his wife in England where they went on frequent trips to France, Poland, Greece, Germany and more. My youngest sister studied abroad in Spain. My mom and dad met in Japan and spend the first few years of their married life in Europe. Enough said.

    Actually, typing out all the places I’ve been is making me realize I’ve actually been to quite a few places. Ok, so this is my privilege speaking. Nevertheless…

    When I read and hear about other people’s adventures, part of me feels jealous, like I’m missing out on awesome experiences. Another part of me acknowledges the reality: I’ve been pretty busy for the last 9 years (medical school + residency + fellowship + moving, having a baby and starting my first attending job), I’m a homebody, and my husband accepts traveling as a necessary evil of being married to me.

    While I do hope to visit (some more) cool places some day, I think don’t travel will ever be a major category in our budget, unless we start paying to bring people with us. (That is a distant dream of mine!) That’s ok. My homebody heart and my husband are happy.

    SDG

  • Mistakes I’ve made: IRA edition

    Toward the end of residency, I realized I didn’t know a lot about how to manage money. I started looking for information. Like a lot of physicians, I found The White Coat Investor and read through the archives when I had spare time. I quickly learned that I had a lot to learn.

    One of the first things I learned was a forehead slapping moment, although it arrived too late to be of much use.

    What I learned was a 401(k) or 403(b) has no relation at all to an IRA. Funding the former does not prevent you from funding the latter. They have separate contribution limits. You can max out both. In my ignorance, I thought you could only contribute to the 403(b) and Roth IRA up to the 403(b) contribution limit – whatever you contributed to one account would limit what you could contribute to the other. (For example: if 403(b) contribution limit was $20,000 and I contributed $15,000, I thought I could only contribute $5,000 in my Roth IRA, even if the IRA max was $6,000.) Once, when filling out my taxes, I thought I overcontributed since I had maxed out my Roth IRA and came close to filling up my 403(b) at the same time. Basically, I thought I owed a tax penalty. I don’t know if I actually ended up paying a penalty or not (and I’m not motivated enough to go back through my old tax returns to check) but I did my best to do so!

    I was in the dark about the difference between 401(k)s and IRAs while I was a dietitian and as a PGY-1/PGY-2 resident. During those years, I preferentially funded my Roth IRA and didn’t max out my 403(b), even when I could have. Extra dollars went into my taxable account, instead of a tax-advantaged account.

    Since I now have a 403(b) and a 457(b), for ease I’m focusing on maxing them out and not worrying about funding a backdoor Roth IRA, at least for now.

    SDG

  • An alphabet soup of retirement savings

    In an effort to help myself understand the different kind of retirement accounts, I’m listing some here:

    • Traditional IRA. This stands for Individual Retirement Arrangement. (I thought it stood for Individual Retirement Account, but this says I’m wrong.) Anyone can have one of these. As long as you don’t make too much money, you can contribute dollars to this account and then essentially get those dollars deducted from your taxes. When you take the money out in retirement, you have to pay taxes on it. If you make too much money, you don’t get to deduct the dollars from your taxes. An IRA has a contribution limit that changes with inflation. I’ve never had a traditional IRA. Instead, I’ve had…
    • Roth IRA. Why Roth? Apparently Mr. Roth was a senator and he started this kind of retirement arrangement/account. With a Roth IRA, you put in your dollars (after you’ve paid taxes on them) and then when it’s time to take the money out, all the money is tax free. The other thing with a Roth IRA is, you can technically take the money out before retirement without a penalty. However, if your money has MADE money, you can’t take out the extra stuff. For example, if you contributed $10,000 to your Roth IRA and it grew to be $12,000, you could take out $10,000 but you’d have to leave in the $2,000 of growth until you reached the designated retirement age. A Roth IRA has the same contribution limit that a regular IRA has. Technically, you can’t contribute to a Roth IRA if you make too much money. There is, however, a workaround, called…
    • Backdoor Roth IRA. This is actually not its own thing, it is a combo of the above. You use it if you make too much money to contribute tax-advantaged dollars into a regular IRA or any dollars at all to a Roth IRA. It’s some kind of IRS/legal magic where your first put your post-tax money in the regular IRA, and then transfer it to a Roth IRA. If this is legal, why can’t you just contribute to a Roth IRA directly? I have no idea. Maybe so less people do it. I certainly haven’t. (Yet.)
    • 401(k). If you work at a for-profit company, you probably have this. You get to put pre-tax dollars into a 401(k), meaning it reduces the amount of money you have to pay taxes on, so your tax bill is lower. The contribution limit for a 401(k) is higher than the contribution limit for an IRA. Sometimes, instead of using pre-tax dollars, you can choose to contribute to a Roth 401(k), where the money that goes in is after-tax (you don’t save on taxes immediately), but you don’t have to pay taxes on it later when you pull it out in retirement.
    • 403(b). This is the same as a 401(k), but for non-profit companies. I’ve only worked for non-profits so I’ve only ever had access to 403(b)s. Can also be Roth.
    • 457(b). This is a “deferred compensation plan.” It’s not offered all the time. Basically, you pretend that your employer is not paying you now, but instead is paying you when you stop working for them or retire. The money they are paying you later goes into the 457(b), and you pay taxes on it when take the money out. Again, this reduces the amount of money you have to pay taxes on (for now). This can also be a Roth. I have one of these. I think it’s for high earners, typically. The money you put into a 457(b) does not affect your contribution limits for a 401(k) or a 403(b). The scary thing is that if your employer goes bankrupt and loses all its money, it will also lose your 457(b) money, which would be sad.
    • 401(a). This is also not offered all the time. It’s a retirement account for your employer to contribute to, but they can also mandate employee contributions. One of my employers provides this account. Employees can elect to contribute 3.5% or 5% of their wages, but you have to choose one of those options, and then my employer contributes an additional 6.5% or 8%. Does not affect contribution limits for other accounts.

    A lot of different number and letter combinations! I work at an academic medical center, and for some reason that means I technically work for two different employers. Employer 1 offers a 403(b). Employer 2 offers a 403(b), 457(b), and 401(a). Even though I have two 403(b) accounts, the contribution limit applies to both of them, meaning I can’t max out both of them. For Employer 1, I max out my 403(b). I’ve decided to made half my contribution pre-tax (reduces my current tax burden, will be taxed later), and half my contribution Roth (no tax benefits now, won’t be taxed later). For Employer 2, I max out my 457(b), and contribute 5% to the 401(a) in order to get the 8% employer contribution. Employer 2 is government-adjacent, so I’m banking (somewhat literally!) on the fact that it shouldn’t go bankrupt. If it does, I’ll probably have worse problems then worrying about my retirement savings.

    What I am NOT doing yet is contributing to my IRA. If I wanted to, I could do a Backdoor Roth IRA by first putting money into a traditional IRA and then transferring it to my Roth IRA. However, I’m meeting my retirement savings target and frankly feel a little lazy about it. There’s also no doubt an anxiety component as well as I’ve never attempted a Roth IRA before, but lots of posts on The White Coat Investor say it’s not hard to do. As well as an inertia component because I’d have to open a traditional IRA although it probably takes five minutes.

    That’s a future me problem.

    One other account that I’ve not mentioned is a taxable account, or a brokerage account. This is not a retirement account per se, but it’s a place you can put your money if you’ve maxed out your retirement accounts and still have money left over to invest. We actually are contributing $350 to a brokerage account every month. I should be putting that into a Backdoor Roth IRA, but, again, that’s going to be something I worry about another day.

    SDG

  • An analysis of lifestyle explosion

    My husband and I started using YNAB in March, which has made tracking our purchases easier and more graphics-friendly. Before this, I was using a Google excel sheet.

    I decided to compare August 2023 (married, starting fellowship as a PGY-4) to August 2025 (married, starting my second year as an attending). This may be painful.

    August 2023

    Rent: 900

    Utilities: 181.89

    Groceries: 456.66

    Gas: 259.58

    Eating out: 118

    Other: 303.89

    Tithe: 500.50

    Investing: 100

    Total expenses: 2820.52

    Income: 4486.81

    August 2025

    Mortgage: 2000

    Utilities: 222.06

    Groceries: 390.38

    Gas: 200.48

    Eating out: 59.62

    Other: 11559.54 (8210.17)

    Tithe: 2210

    Investing: 350

    Total expenses: 16992.08 (13642.71)

    Income: 12349.88

    Not included are taxes and retirement savings, which are removed from my paychecks automatically.

    Interesting, isn’t it? We’re in a house now, so unsurprisingly we pay more for housing, although not excessively so – around $13,200 more a year. Utilities are surprisingly similar: lower costs in Omaha, compared to Rochester, MN? Groceries, gas and eating out are all similar, although I know 2023 gas was inflated because we traveled that month.

    The big difference is “Other.” I will note that $3,349.37 of this was from funds previously saved and earmarked for our shed project, so removing this makes the Other category “just” $8,210.17. What did that include?

    1. Necessary car repairs and new tires
    2. Insurance
    3. Home maintenance
    4. Travel
    5. Auto registration
    6. Clothes
    7. Presents
    8. Medical expenses
    9. Life insurance
    10. An unexpectedly expensive sewing machine, curtesy of my mom (that we nevertheless had to pay for)
    11. Paying for this blog’s host site

    Overall, if you add up the “necessary” spending categories of car repairs, insurance, home maintenance, auto registration, medical expenses and life insurance, it comes to $6,562.70. Travel, clothes and presents, which I see as mostly non-negotiables, ate up an additional $846.65. That leaves $800.82 purely frivolous spending (I’m looking at you, fancy sewing machine!).

    Now, some of the “necessary” spending is the result of lifestyle creep. About $2,000 of the car repairs were because part of our shed-in-construction fell on my husband’s car during a windstorm. If we didn’t have the money, we could have driven it around after duct-taping the back but results would have been unideal. Insurance wouldn’t be so expensive if we were buying renter’s insurance instead of homeowner’s. We wouldn’t be paying to maintain a home if we didn’t own one. Lifestyle creep cost us $4,300 in August alone.

    The other thing not reflected in this comparison is lumpy costs. We certainly paid for auto registration and insurance, bought clothes, gave people presents, went to the doctor and purchased airline tickets in 2023, but apparently not in the month August.

    The other thing I’ll add to this postmortem is that thankfully, we aren’t exceeding our income every month. Me as a PGY-4 would find it hard to believe you can spend $12,000 in a month. Current me knows that sadly, it’s pretty easy to do.

    SDG

  • And now for one of my favorite topics, percentages

    I made $37,000 during my first year as a dietitian in 2013. Granted, this was in South Dakota so there wasn’t state income tax, although now I wonder if I would have paid much income tax at my level. As an attending physician, I paid significantly more than my starting dietitian salary in taxes this year. Taking into account Social Security, Medicare, Federal and State taxes, I’ve estimated our total tax burden comes to about 25% of our gross income. It would be a lot worse if I was filing separately or my husband made a lot more money. Taxes are automatically withheld by my employer(s) so although they are painful to contemplate it’s a painless monthly experience.

    We aim to save 20% of our gross income for retirement. This mostly gets taken out of my paychecks automatically so it’s pretty painless when you never see the money. The personal finance people call this “paying yourself first” – we are giving our future selves the ability to not have to work forever.

    We give 10% of our income as a tithe to our church. We’ve also added a category to our budget consisting of 1% of our income as designated “give away” money. (We’re still figuring out how we want to do that.)

    So, if you add that up, it comes to about 56%: taxes, retirement, and tithing, leaving 44% to live on. When it comes down to it, we’re living on less than half of my gross salary. Which is not to say we are in any way deprived! I make a good amount of money. But when you are told you make $250,000 and find you actually “only” have $110,000 to work with, it’s disorienting.

    I have heard some people say that you should live on 50% of your take-home pay. In our case, that would be $93,750. Still more money than many people make as their gross income. Less than we’re spending in a year, though. Kind of amazing how fast that adds up.

    Just as a income does not equal wealth, a paycheck does not equal what you get to spend if you hope to one day become financially independent. Crossing fingers we’ll get there some day!

    SDG

  • How much to save?

    The White Coat Investor and most other reasonable personal finance blogs for physicians recommend saving 20% of gross income for retirement. (People who aren’t physicians usually do fine with saving 15% because they start the process earlier and benefit from more years of compounding.) If you are aiming to retire early, you need to increase that percentage.

    With my current job, I am technically employed by two different organizations, the result being I get two salaries and can contribute to both a 403(b) and a 457(b). But wait, there’s more! One organization provides a 501(c) with a mandatory 5.5% employee contribution and 8% employer contribution, and the other organization contributes an extra 9% of my salary to a different account (I have no idea what numbers go along with that one).

    All together, if I max out my 403(b) and 457(b), and all personal finance sites recommend maxing out tax-advantaged space, taking into account the forced 501(c) contribution and employer contributions, I’m saving 25% of my gross income. And we haven’t even considered the backdoor Roth IRA! We could save another $15,000!

    This begs the question, do we want to do this? Would I ever consider saving less?

    What if, instead of going for a 25% percent retirement savings rate, I went for 20%? This would involve me not maxing out one of my retirement funds, which would feel weird after reading so much about the importance of doing so. It seems like everyone is doing it. (This is probably not true.) Does that mean I’d fall behind? Would I be missing out?

    What would we do with an extra 5%? Would we save it up for something big, like a bathroom renovation, a new business venture, adopting a child? Would we just inflate our lifestyle by eating out more, going on more trips (my husband would hate that) and upgrading our stuff? Would we give it away, as gifts, family assistance or support to organizations we believe are making difference?

    I have, of course, a few thoughts. The first is that, the extra 9% from one of my employers comes with golden handcuffs, meaning if I leave my job before I’ve worked there for three years, I forfeit the money. I don’t plan on leaving my job, but life does weird things sometimes, so in the spirit of not-counting-my-chickens-before-they-hatch I’m not going to include the extra 9% in my savings calculations until I’m past the three year mark. Taking everything else together, and including a little extra that goes into a taxable account, we’re saving right at 20%. Meaning, we can kick this decision down the road for another two years.

    The second thought is that there are a lot of warnings in the Bible about putting too much faith in money. A wise man in Proverbs asks God to avoid giving him too much wealth, lest he put his faith in his riches and not in God. The rich man in Jesus’ parable is foolish for building up his possessions and not putting any thought to the fact he could die any moment and that he has an eternal future on the other side of death. Jesus teaches that our hearts follow our treasure. James castigates rich people for mouthing platitudes while ignoring the poverty of their brothers and sisters. The Bible also teaches that wealth is not a bad thing, but the implication is that it comes with the responsibility to use it wisely.

    I know that I am tempted to derive security from the money I’ve saved up – that’s just I am. Because of that propensity, I believe it will be wise to avoid going beyond 20% retirement savings in the future. Instead of hedging my bets by stashing away another five percent or more, I can ask God to use what we save to provide for our needs. My husband and I will need to have more discussions about it, but I’d prefer to use the money we’d otherwise be saving for the benefit of others. One can make the argument that by saving more now, there will be more to give in the future… but the future is uncertain. I don’t want to wait for a mythical tomorrow that isn’t guaranteed.

    SDG

  • Easier money conversations with a budget

    I think about money a lot. I’ve read articles with stats saying that poor people think/stress about money more than anyone else, what with having to creatively come up with ways to pay the bills and etc. I am squarely in the upper middle/rich category, but it kinda feels like thinking about money is a hobby. A boring one.

    My husband, on the other hand, seems to think about money hardly at all. Part of this may be his disdain for math or numbers in general (unless they happen to be measurements for his woodworking projects… and even then he seems to find them tedious). Part of it may be that his family didn’t engage in long-term financial planning as he grew up. Whatever the reason, for my husband, money talk is a boring and painful chore that he’d prefer to avoid.

    He loves me, however, and so agreed to my request/demand for a “Financial Friday” every month, where we talk about our financial situation and strategize about short and long-term goals. I’ve tried to sweeten the deal with take out, with limited success. Initially, our money dates mostly consisted of me explaining a detailed spreadsheet containing meticulously compiled inflows and outflows with cells containing our savings targets. My husband played along, but Excel makes his eyes glaze over.

    Overall, it felt lonely. My husband was supportive, but despite politely listening to my explanations didn’t seem to have a meaningful understanding of what was going on. Even worse, at times I felt like the budget police, telling him how much or how little he could spend in a particular category.

    To solve this problem, I did something past me would never have imagined doing: I paid for a budgeting app. And after using it for the past five months, I plan to continue to do so.

    There are lots of apps available, but the one we use is called YNAB. (It used to stand for You Need A Budget, but this has now gone the way of the erstwhile Young Men’s Christian Association.) We each have the app on our phone, which allows us to see the available amount in each category and enter in expenses as they come up. (I am better at doing this than my husband, but he participates.) More revolutionary, each category has a green bar than depletes as money is spent, which is incredibly helpful for his visual mind. As a numbers gal, I couldn’t care less, but it allows him to stay focused during our finance talks instead of unconsciously checking out.

    As a result, we actually spend less time discussing our finances on Financial Fridays, because I have less to explain and he understands it better. I feel like I’m not doing all the work because he’s more involved in the day-to-day stuff, and his contributions to our conversations are more informed because he understands it better. I still think about money a lot, but I fret about it a little less.

    SDG