There were any number of times Miss Cupcake would say "are you home yet" / "still at work", and nothing disappointing came of it, so I became desensitized. So when she asked yesterday around 7:45, it's hard to say now if I felt any premonition. We had spent a nice weekend together and just minutes before, she had messaged me a link to an event I assume she was interested in, so in light of that context it's safe to guess I wasn't suspecting another relationship status flip.
I had stopped for groceries en route home, and negotiating took a while, so it was close to 10 when I opened up the lappy to find it wasn't connecting to wifi. My instinct was to look at cablemodem status lights, which was when I realized the cablemodem was gone altogether. Ditto the wifi router. So I texted the landlady and she said the exiting landlord had reclaimed his equipment, but wifi infrastructure had been replaced already and she gave me the (incorrect, but close enough) new SSID and password.
Went to sleep around 12:30, snoozed to 8ish. Half an On-Cor Salisbury Steaks (20g) on bolillos with first coffee.
Sunday during the day I'd gone through the dwindling jumble of remaining junk in the Lancer's trunk and tossed the disintegrating dark green plastic crate, which may have come with me all the way from New Jersey; and some transmission-fluid-contaminated stuff (2 excessively weighty water glasses, a Tangrams set, some cotton and heavy suede work gloves) in it. It only took a few minutes, but it was something I had backburnered for so long that it felt important. Now I just need a solution to keep paper/cardboard recycling neat between visits to the drop-off, and the cab area should be presentable again.
Shaved, showered, updated accts register, long thoughts about relationship skills under the banner of "emotional labor". Updated accounts register. Transferred a chunk to brokerage.
To dos: stow clean laundry, vacuum the car and empty the vacuum wait for rain to dry up
* * *
Way back, I figured out that if you can diversify a portfolio to fairly stably return 5% APY, and you have to reinvest 3 of that 5% to keep up with inflation, then the remaining 2% is real gain. The significance is, if some living expense costs $X per year and you make it a goal to invest enough to pay that expense in perpetuity, then you need to invest 50 times the annual expense. So for example, state automobile registration costs $36 per year, so the 5% APY investment to cover that is 50 x $36 = $1800.
Since there are 52 weeks in a year, another way of looking at this is: if you sock away the annual cost every week, you can fund the investment "battery" in a year. Well, overfund it by 4%, actually. The point is, if you're an adult with a full-time job and not just barely scraping by, saving $36 per week shouldn't be a hardship. In Florida, cigarettes average around $6/pack so even a pack-a-day smoking habit costs more than that. Depending what you eat, breakfast at Starbuck's or even McD's every morning could likewise come close.
Turning the formula around, let's say you can afford to salt away $250 per month, how much living expenses will be "annuitized" at the end of 1 year? You'll finish the year with $3000 banked, which will spin off a real gain of 2% or $60. My $30 monthly phone bill comes out to $360/year, which means I'd have to have $18K in our hypothetical 5% investment vehicle to fund that in perpetuity.
That all starts to sound scary when you think about "what will it take to live indoors and buy food instead of dumpster-diving at retirement". And at my age, it should be scary - but it's not quite as scary as it sounds, because for 17 years I get to leverage that 2% real gain, plus some tax advantaging, AND I'm confident I can do better than 5% APY. Also, at the risk of sounding like one of John Steinbeck's "temporarily embarrassed capitalists", I think I can do significantly better than $250/mo.