COVID for Christmas

Welp, it's official. My nearly 4 year streak is probably over. My mom and sis, who I've spent 24/7 with the last 3 days, are very sick and tested positive for COVID today. 

My sis has been vomiting once every so often randomly for the past 2 months, so we didn't even think twice when she got sick Christmas Eve. She had gone to the Dr for it and he said it was allergies (?!). On Christmas Day, she felt nauseated and was coughing. But she vapes constantly and smokes sometimes and is generally in very bad health and coughs constantly, so we didn't think twice about her symptoms. Honestly, she seemed pretty normal until Christmas Day. The day after Christmas, she said she was feeling better (?), so we thought it was a one-off health issue she was having, as usual.

But today she felt much much worse and had a sore throat, fever, chills, the works, and tested herself finally. Positive!

My mom also had a sore throat and was coughing/sneezing and felt terrible, so she tested too. Positive!

So far my dad is negative, knock on wood. I don't know how long that can last, though. We have been stuck together like glue all through the holidays, and I got an Aranet CO2 monitor for Christmas, and it says our air quality is pretty bad -- 1300 ppm CO2 or so inside the house, without any windows or doors open. Sometimes good window and door seals and insulation is a bad thing...

I feel totally fine - I'll test once I get any symptoms at all. We don't have that many tests in stores here anymore so I hate wasting them. And I wear my N95 mask everywhere (even in the house now, when I leave my room!) and am the only able bodied person left to take care of my mom, dad, and sis and the household, so it doesn't actually matter if I'm positive right now or not - I'm gonna be the one doing everything since I am the only one able to.

If I'm supposed to go somewhere (like my friend's house on Saturday - Monday for New Year's Eve fun) or I start feeling ill, I'll pop open a test for sure. Right now I have both of my room windows open and I use the bathroom in my parents' room (my mom is sleeping on the couch since my dad is bedridden with his cancer - my mom will be using the main house bathroom).

With my mom and sis down, I'm the sole caregiver to my dad, sis, AND mom right now. Whew. When I say I'm glad I didn't have kids/a family of my own -- the gratefulness is just re-emphasized during times like this. I cannot imagine trying to do this every day for decades. I'm also trying to do my 8+ hours of PhD and job work on top of the caregiving duties. 

It's a lot, but as an ADHD person, this is when I'm at my BEST - emergency situations or where I'm needed is where I shine. I  like being super useful to the people I love the most, and that is a really powerful motivation.

Once the news hit, I immediately sprung into action, going to the pharmacy (of course in my N95) to stock up on everything we'd need for a few days or so. My sis is staying at her apartment now, so I got a bunch of stuff to drop off at her place, along with all of her Christmas gifts. I took out the trash, monitored the CO2, sanitized all common surfaces, made my mom and dad dinner and dessert, did the dishes, cleaned the kitchen, fetched them their meds and OJ and ginger ale and water, and also got some work done! That's more than I've managed to do in 1 day in months, probably. 

In some ways, it feels like we've practiced for this for nearly 4 years. In the early days of COVID, when I was taking my dad to his chemo appointments (our only foray out of the house to inside spaces), we separated the bathrooms, sleeping arrangements, and care-taking duties similarly. Dad and I took the primary bathroom, mom slept on the couch, I slept in my old childhood bedroom, Dad slept in the primary bedroom where he spends 99% of his time. Back then, Mom would cook for us and deliver the meals to our bedroom doors. This time, I've got full rein of the kitchen, which I've declared a clean space. Mom gets the living room and main bathroom. Unfortunately, I have to go past the main bathroom and living room to get to the kitchen, but I wear my N95 every time I leave my room, and luckily my childhood bedroom and the primary bedroom and bathroom are at the same end of the house and close to one another so Dad and I are relatively (?) isolated from infectious Mom down the hall in the living room.

In NZ, my flatmate had COVID and we separated our forays into the only bathroom and kitchen by texting each other when we had to use it. We stayed in our bedrooms except for when we needed to grab deliveries, make food, or use the bathroom. I avoided it this way once. I don't think I'll be as lucky this time but we'll see how the next few days go. As long as I'm still feeling OK, I'll be doing all of the caretaking, cleaning, chores, errands, etc., around here. I'm just grateful that I was here when my family got COVID finally, so I can take care of them. If I were in NZ right now, I'd feel so guilt-ridden!! Esp because no one would be around to take care of my dad right now. Even if my mom masked up, she feels so terrible she can't leave the couch and has been sleeping all day.  

Crossed fingers and toes and all the things!

Got the new Novavax!

Documenting it here - I received the new novavax vaccine yesterday, 18 December 2023, in the US. 

New Zealand lags terribly behind the world in terms of new vaccination option approvals. It'll be months before other Kiwis get the chance to receive the new Novavax. Such a shame since the virus mutates so quickly.

Back in the US!

Sorry for the unexpected hiatus! I got busy trying to finish things up at work and home (including getting new flatmates, ugh) before I had to head to the US for a family wedding on 1 November. 

I've now been at home for almost a month, but my laptop suddenly failed a day or two after arriving back. It went to the repair shop for two and a half weeks. The hard drive failed, so I lost all of that data (I think I last backed everything up in early October (?) but we'll see when I arrive back in NZ - not much I can do from the US!). On top of my PhD work, the thought of re-downloading all of my programs and setting up my computer back the way I like it plus losing some of my documents was too overwhelming. I just started bawling and couldn't stop til my mom hugged me. Then my dad started telling me I told you so and yelling at me for not backing everything up every single day and it set me off again. So I've been a bit stressed, sad, angry, and annoyed at this whole computer thing.

I had Thanksgiving with family for the first time in probably a decade and a half or so. I've definitely missed it! And I'll have Christmas with family for the first time in a decade this year. WOWZA. 

Family is...A LOT. But I'm trying to enjoy the little good moments I have with them while I can, even though the rest of the time things are really tense and awful here.

My dad is still bedridden and needs constant care, feeding, entertainment, help. It's an untenable situation but he refuses to go to a rest home, or move into a more accessible home that's easier to keep up with. My mom does what she can but it's just too much for her, esp at 74. He constantly yells at her, calls her terrible names, says she's lazy, a B, useless, etc. because she doesn't make hot gourmet meals to order for him 3x a day and isn't able to keep up with him and all of his medications, care, doctor's appointments, etc., her own health issues, my sister and her  health issues, all her other obligations to people like my aunt who is also seriously ill, the housework, etc. It's so gross and complicated because of course we love him but he is straight up super abusive to her on the daily and, on fewer occasions, to me and my sister. Nothing is ever good enough for him. We try to bring him the food he wants exactly the way he wants it - it's always a laundry list of specific foods and ways to prepare it or an order from a restaurant an hour away that we have to pick up - and he finds something wrong with it every. dang. time. And then he insults us for getting it "so wrong." For example he's told me multiple times that I couldn't find a man to marry me because I'm so sh*t at making coffee and one time because I didn't know the exact correct amount of ketchup and mustard to put on a plate for him to dip his McDonald's into (I brought the whole bottles of condiments for him to decide how much he wanted because I knew I'd get it wrong if I guessed how much he wanted on the plate - that was apparently the WRONG THING TO DO, DON'T YOU KNOW THAT IS A TERRIBLE AND WRONG THING TO DO?!). If there is even a slight chance that I would be put in a situation like my dad puts my mom in if I got married, absolutely no thank you.

He's a veteran covered 100% for all medical care and has benefits like a home health care aid who comes 3x a week for 4 hours, so that is a blessing. But my dad refuses to let them do anything, because he is a people pleaser and because he is super racist and sexist so refuses to let them touch him or his belongings or ask them, a woman, for help. To us he calls them the n word, which of course we yell at him for each time, but it does no good. So they just sit in the living room awkwardly for half the day while the rest of the family tries to go about their business, relax, watch tv, cook food, etc. 

Sometimes they go out to their car in the driveway. I swear the last one smoked a joint while she was there because she came back smelling like pot. Then my dad gives them extra money to make them like him. 

We end up taking care of my dad while they are IN THE HOUSE. My mom once cancelled this service because she is mostly the one in the living room all the time and there's nowhere else for her to hang out and it's super awkward for her - she just wants some alone time reading books and such in between meeting my dad's demands - but my dad called them back and restored the service. It's all so stupid.  

My sis is struggling to find reasons to live and is just fed up with being mentally ill. I feel for her. She can't keep up with daily demands of life. She wets the bed every night so there is a huge mess to clean up every single morning, but she isn't meticulous or concerned enough about it to clean up properly, so everything in the house always smells like urine. She's in heart failure but doesn't know how to take care of herself or limit her eating / drinking to things that will help her health, but yells at us and gets super angry when me or my mom try to suggest anything that would actually work. She vapes in the house even though my dad has lung issues and me/my mom can't breathe when she does that. She luckily is part of a program that provides her with a small apartment to live in that's just a 5 minute drive from my parents' house, but she's always over at my parents' because she gets scared very easily. When she is in the house, it's chaos. She cooks things constantly and leaves huge food messes wherever she goes. She fell asleep on the couch yesterday and peed what must have been gallons of fluid onto my mom's brand new sofa. If my mom or I tell her to clean up something or try to wake her up when she falls asleep on the sofa so she goes to her bed, she yells, gets angry, lashes out, and still doesn't do what she's supposed to. Then my dad gets in the mix to defend her, starts an argument with me or my mom, and makes everything worse. Again, it's all so complicated and sad. 

It definitely shows that you can give folks lots of benefits but they have to be willing or have the where-with-all to use the benefits. My sis and dad both need to be in a 24 hour residential care home where they have proper help. I worry at the toll this is all taking on my mom.

I'm supposed to be working on my PhD while at home, but as you can imagine, I'm super stressed and distracted. I go back to NZ in early January. I'm both dreading it but also looking forward to it. Things are challenging everywhere, it's just a different kind of challenging!

1% Closer

Woo hoo! I had enough money left over from September spending to fill out my first $1.6K House Down Payment Fund to completion. 

I worked out in a previous post that I'll probably need a $800K house/apartment, and a 20% down payment is $160K. I have previously saved up $50K (about 31%), so I have $110K to go! Every $1600 more that I save gets me 1% closer to my $160K goal, and $1600 is a doable amount. 

I've now completed 32.25% of my House Down Payment goal. Hurrah!

Bare Bones Budgets

After finding out I'm going to be losing my stipend during the final ~6 months of my PhD, I took another look at my budget.

***New budget for my most cash-strapped months after I lose my stipend***: 

Income (2 paycheck months): $1,970

Rent (5 rent check months): $1,125

Internet/Electricity: $100

Groceries: $500

Cell phone: $20

Medical: $25 

Savings: $50

Charity: $60

Misc: $75

Eating Out: $50

 

This scenario (I have to pay rent 5 times but get paid twice in one month) is worst-case, and should only happen 3x in 2024. It happens in May but I get paid 3x that month, so it isn't as dire a situation.

I also receive $65 per week from renting out the car park space associated with my apartment, and the renter is super reliable and has been around for a while, but I cannot count on that remaining the case forever. Months where:

• I receive car park rent ($260/mo in 4 car park rent months; $325 in 5 car park rent months) or 
• only have to pay rent 4x in a month or 
• I get paid 3x  

will make the above budget much more doable - that "extra $$" will go to misc, medical, and eating out spending for sure. There's just no wiggle room or ability to absorb expenses in this budget - I won't be able to save above my minimum $50/mo. 

I have no idea what else I could do to cut expenses in the above budget. Rent does not get any cheaper than what I'm paying, so moving is not an option that will cut expenses - with the car park rent I get, it comes down to $160 per week. You can't even share a room for that cheap in Auckland CBD - it's that much just to share a bed or a room with another person here! Groceries are coming out to be $100 a week at a minimum. With household items I need to buy like toilet paper and cleaning supplies, it's $500/mo. Utilities are shared with two other people, and I've got the cheapest fibre internet plan I can find that bundles with electricity (I just did a review of my utilities a few months ago). For electricity, I signed up for free power from 9 pm - 12 am and I do most of my bathing, dishwashing, cooking, and laundry in that time period. My cell phone plan is $17/mo for 1.5 GB of data that rolls over if I don't use it all each month (if I downgraded to their $9/mo plan, I wouldn't be able to use the data that I have rolled over). That plan has unlimited texts and 200 rollover minutes. For Medical, I have to pay $25 every time I get my prescription renewed. 

Charity, savings, misc, and eating out are really the only places I can cut easily, and the amounts I have listed are pretty minimal for all of them.

Mind you, if I had chosen a single person to share my flat with, I'd have even less $$ for non-rent expenses!! Yikes. 

So, I will survive, it'll just be a bit stressful and I'll have to be ever more careful.

Starting My CD Ladder!

As I wrote in previous posts, I need to park a large chunk of my liquid savings and monthly leftover savings ("overages") dedicated to long-term goals somewhere while I make some decisions about where to invest it. 

I also set up two new funds for my overages: a $1.6K House Down payment fund and a $4K Dividend Fund.

With inflation as high as it is, it feels wrong to keep my money in savings, but I'm not legally allowed to invest it in index funds from NZ like I'd normally choose to do. Converting it into USD and then investing it in my Vanguard taxable brokerage account is also an option, but I think I'm going to end up in NZ for retirement. I would not want to convert the money right now due to the horrible conversion fee, plus all the fees I'd have to pay, twice - once from NZD to USD, then back from USD to NZD. 

(That's something I actually need to investigate - how much would I actually end up paying in fees if I converted once or twice? It looks like right now I'd lose $1K converting $90K NZD twice.)

The money has been parked in a high yield savings account called a NoticeSaver that requires me to give a 60 day notice when I want to pull the money out. I ordered the money out two months ago, so $50K has just hit my regular savings account. 

Immediately, I opened a new term deposit account and started my first CD ladder. 

I don't know how long current interest rates will remain high. Right now the highest I could get was a 6.25% p.a. one-year term deposit (what they call CDs here in NZ). So, I've now placed $10K in a one year term deposit, to pay out on maturity. I'll earn $625 NZD from that $10K over the next year.

On 4 Oct, the NZ Reserve Bank will review the official cash rate and decide if interest rates are increasing or decreasing. The next one is on 29 Nov 2023, then 28 Feb 2024. Some folks are forecasting interest rates to go even higher later this year, so I'll keep an eye on it, but it won't affect my strategy TOO much. Maybe I'll put a little more $$ if the interest rates climb to 7%, though. That would be ideal. I feel like 7% is pretty close to the returns you can reasonably expect from the stock market, but a term deposit is extremely safe in comparison. Crossed fingers!

Every month I'll add $5-15K to another term deposit. I eventually want to get to a point where I'll have a CD maturing every month next year, starting in October 2024. By then hopefully I will have decided a strategy for that money that will allow me to invest it properly, with some thought behind my decisions.

New Flatmates: A 50% Finance-Based Decision

My lovely flatmate - the first I've actually liked and been friends with in a long time - has to leave NZ due to no fault of her own.

So there I went, back on the TradeMe 'flatmates wanted' merry-go-round. 

This time, fortunately, I have been getting a lot of responses to my ad. Last time, last November, pickings were incredibly slim. NZ had just opened up so there were fewer people looking for rooms. My current flatmate interviewed the night before I was going to have to start paying the full rent by myself and was the only person that showed up to the viewings that seemed even OK to live with.  

This time, I was able to be very very picky about who I even offered viewings to. My time is very limited due to my PhD work. I also wanted to be careful about how many people I brought into my home due to COVID. Some stats:

• 30 people wrote to me (of a total of 840 viewings of my ad as of this writing, according to TradeMe)
•  9 were single women
• 11 were single men
• 6 were couples
• 3 were two women (sisters, cousins, friends) who wanted to share the room
• 1 was a couple who were divorcing and wanted to use the room as a pied-à-terre when the other was parenting their children in their marital home
  

Eliminations

• Six didn't follow the directions in the ad (email me some basic information), so they were immediately eliminated. I've learned that the folks that cannot read the full ad and follow simple directions either don't show up for the viewing appointments or would be a terrible flatmate due to their inattention to detail. It's a super easy way to weed the bad folks out, and has never failed me.
  
  
• After getting some good responses, I realized I didn't want to live with a single guy because it would just change the house dynamics too much. So the 11 single men were eliminated after that realization.
  
  
• I also realized that in my 40's I just cannot live with people in their early 20's anymore. A couple and one single woman was eliminated by adding this requirement.
  
  
• I did not want to live with people in messy situations, so the divorcing couple was eliminated, as was the single woman who is married to a murderer in jail in the US (for real!!). I tell people to put their full name in their email responses. I am a single gal inviting strangers into my home - I WILL google you! If I cannot find you online, it doesn't eliminate you, but you go to the bottom of the list.
  
  
• I didn't want to have to re-advertise and get a new flatmate after a few months. This whole process is EXHAUSTING and costs a lot in both time and money - TradeMe ads are $30 plus it costs to renew certain features that get your ad noticed after a week or more!, so I eliminated anyone who couldn't stay for longer than 6 months. (I have found that Facebook flatmate wanted pages don't work for my flat - everyone that replies is super flaky and a bit weird on there, so I don't even bother with free ads like FB anymore.)
  

After those very strict eliminations, this left: 

• two couples
• five single women
  

I wrote back and offered viewings to the two couples and two of the single women that wrote to me in the first few days. My viewings were held the next Saturday (after posting the ad on a Wednesday) and on a Monday evening. 

One of the couples wrote back the day of their viewing saying that they had just found a room, so I ended up seeing just one couple and one single woman the first day (a Saturday), and another single woman on the Monday.

Everyone that showed up to the viewing wanted the room, and applied to live in my flat. They all said that they felt comfortable in my place and chatting to me. I always set aside ~20-30 mins to chat with each of the potential flatties after showing them the flat, which takes like 2 minutes total since it is a small place :). This gives us all a time to ask and answer questions, do a good vibe check, and try out how we'd fit together living in the flat.

Once I had all of their applications on Monday night, this gave me something to think about, and people to compare to one another. I was already getting tired and burned out of flatmate viewings and meeting new people (it's so taxing after being so isolated during this pandemic!), so I started making some decisions. 

After weighing up the pros and cons, I decided the woman I saw on Monday was a no-goer. Her boyfriend came with her to the viewing and was super loud and kind of obnoxious. The single woman on Saturday was a possibility, and the couple were lovely, so were also an option. 

My PhD meeting on Monday ended up deciding it. I can't get my PhD done by the deadline, and I'm going to have to extend. My supervisor said there's no more money to pay me a stipend after time runs out, so I'm going to have to rely on my 0.3 FTE job for my salary only. That is less than $2K per month until I can finish, which my supervisor says will probably take an extra 6-8 months. 

With a couple, I pay less in rent and utilities, essentially freeing up at least $30 and up to $40 per week depending on utilities. This doesn't sound like much, but it adds up to thousands over the course of a year. It could mean the difference between being able to afford rent and food only and being able to have a little bit of fun once in a long while. So, money ended up being about 50% of my consideration in the decision. If I hadn't needed the money, I would have chosen to live with a single woman, definitely.

I decided to offer the couple the room, and they've accepted and paid their first week's rent and 3 week's bond. It was all done in less than 24 hours. I feel good about my decision, though when I am making more money, I will definitely opt for a single woman to share with instead. 

The three other single women who wrote to me later would have gotten offered viewings, but they were just too late in the process. By the time they wrote to me, I had already gotten the news that my salary was massively decreasing and I needed to bring in a couple. 

After looking at my budget, I feel good about my decision - I will definitely need the lowered rent and utilities expenses! Posts to come...

Net Worth Update

Thought it was time to update my Net Worth!

The last update is here, from June 2022, when my NW was ~$202K:

 

There was a bit of a dip when I went home last September, then got back on track, and now my NW is ~$227K. Not bad growth for a year and change!

That is my NW when I treat NZD and USD the same. It is a bit complicated to figure out what my actual NW is, because it depends on if you're talking in NZD or USD!

$183K NZ-only NW

$44K US-only NW

$254K NW - all in NZD, when I convert my US savings to NZD.

Given that I've always tracked my NW treating NZD and USD as worth the same amount, I'll continue for now. But since I'm likely going to retire in NZ, I will eventually need to switch to all-NZD using the current USD-NZD exchange rate.