RBOC

nicoleandmaggie

Sep 28

Before I got my first paycheck for the year, DH's raise was announced. He's making 3K more than I am now!
Neither our income percentile nor our marginal tax rate has changed with our two raises, even though it was a 10% raise for me (smaller % for DH).
It astonishes me how this is both a lot of money but also how very much more per year the people in the next income percentiles up make.
Housing calculators say that we can't afford to buy a 2 million dollar house with 20% down on our joint income. That's limiting housing to 36% of pre-tax income.
Is it better to rent for $6K/mo or to buy for $10K/mo (mortgage + taxes)? I guess there are calculators for that.
All of the above conjectures are WAY premature. I should not even be thinking about them. (But it is nice to dream.)
Said dreaming has spawned a bit of decluttering. I actually decluttered some books, which I haven't really done since the relative's kids grew up and moved out. I have decluttered children's books as DC2 grows out of them, but this time we took grown-up books (including a lot of "how to be a professor" advice) to the local public library for their booksale. Why not?
Next up is the good-will closet-- we should actually take things to goodwill!
After that, DH's office closet. It has a combination of things we need to keep, things that will go to my sister if/when she ever decides to have kids (we have some high quality wooden kids stuff that I'd prefer go to family), and a bunch of stuff we don't actually need (framed pictures and who knows what else). We should at least move out the stuff we don't really need. Also tons and tons of hangers.
Last time MIL came to look after the kids, she bought more hangers for DC1's closet. I bet DH's office closet was too packed for her to notice/get to the dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of hangers that are kept there.
DH is very picky about hangers so he only has pretty wooden hangers that match.
I'm not picky, but the last time we went on leave, I made my closet look pretty for potential renters by using only nice hangers and never really got more.
Our furniture has gotten extremely shabby since the pandemic started. Mostly cat scratches and also a slight scent of cat pee on all of the couches since she did not like us being gone for our trips this summer. If I do get another job, we will probably start over from scratch on the couches.
Schools are so eager to say they've got students from 50 states, that I suspect high school graduates from Wyoming can get into most colleges. There were 5,914 total graduates in the state last year. Assuming half are college-bound, that's still under 3,000 graduates. The undergraduate total enrollment at University of Wyoming is 9,342 and 55% of them are in-state, so around 5,100 in state students, conservatively assume 1/4 are freshmen => 1,300 attend UWyoming, meaning 1,700 do not. There's 5,300 colleges and universities in the US. So... about 3 colleges for every remaining college-bound graduate if they want to check the Wyoming box in their presentations.
Sometimes I wonder how it is that I'm an adult and like, in charge of making so many actual decisions. It's a little crazy. And yet, it's been this way more than half my life at this point.