How to survive on just one income

I told my husband last night that if I get fired he’ll be shouldering all our household liabilities in the meantime so we tried to compute how that’s gonna work and realized we’re not gonna be able to live as comfortably on his salary alone.

This is a reminder for us to adjust our standard of living.

Here’s how it works in our home. All of my earnings go to the household. Rent, parking, utilities, grocery, gym membership, gas, insurance, subscriptions, mortgage, financial support, emergency fund, stocks, and a sinking fund used for car and home maintenance. His earnings on the other hand, we split to ourselves as our personal allowance.

And it’s been great. Our allowance affords us to buy whatever we want. Normally we spend it on food, shopping, and recently on Koomi (which we didn’t expect cost a lot to maintain haha). We’re very comfortable this way. And if his salary increases, our allowance increases too.

However, I just realized that if one of us loses our job, we need to be able to live off on whoever’s income remains. If my husband loses his job, we’ll surely be able to live off of my income because it already pays for everything. We won’t have a personal allowance though, but that’s not a necessity anyway. It will be tight but at least our lifestyles won’t be compromised too much.

If I lose my job though, we need to reasses out budget and cut down on other stuff because he earns less. It’s gonna be difficult. We probably need to quit the gym, stop the financial support we give to my parents, reduce our grocery budget, and stop saving for a while. That’s gonna be so hard considering I couldn’t imagine lowering our standard of living lol. It’s not even like we live glamorously. We’re just comfortable, but not rich.

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Oh well. I’m just getting anxious about possibly losing my job because I’m not doing much at work.

It’s frustrating because the whole reorg made everyone busy aligning their current teams, and I don’t belong in a team, so nobody really checks on me. Even the one who’s supposed to be my acting manager doesn’t seem to care. She’s probably too busy. I need to scour for work if I want to stay because nothing will get funneled to me without proper management. Everybody is doing their own thing and I have to keep myself busy. At least prior to the reorg, I had a manager and a team who can join me in calls and listen in to the request. But right now I have no one.

I hate that I have to be proactive because I usually never have to be because there’s always work waiting for me. But now, nadda! I’m scared.

Please pray for my job security.

I want to get a new car lol.

Black coffee

 Daily writing prompt

What is your favorite drink?

View all responses

I drink black coffee every single day so that must be it. And speaking of black coffee I prefer home brewed one. Either pour over or drip, as long as it’s not too strong. Store bought brewed coffee is usually too strong for my liking, unless they’re from convenience stores like 7Eleven or Family Mart, even Dunkin Donuts.

More to my favorite drink. I prefer the local ones. Kalinga or Barako. My go to coffee brand is Basilio’s Muni-Muni Blend (90% Robusta, 10% Arabica). But recently I noticed that the flavor has changed (it’s more earthy now) and the price has increased tremendously so I might need to switch. Once, I tried getting the whole beans cos it’s cheaper but it’s more tiresome having to grind it.

When ordering coffee outside, I usually go for iced latte or iced mocha. I tried the lattes from Starbucks, CBTL, and Tim Horton’s… I didn’t like any of them. You know what I liked? Dunkin Donuts. And this one kiosk outside the grocery that sells local coffee beans as well.

I also love iced mocha. For a while I was on a hunt for the best one and eventually found my favorites. Nitro 7, Highlands Coffee, and Blue Wonder. They’re all very good, Nitro 7’s being the most unique because they use half and half (oh and nitrogen infused cold brew) so it has a creamier taste, also less acidic.

Sometimes I get Vietnamese Coffee too. If not from Bahn Mi, then from So Mot. 🙂

Yeah that’s it as far as my fancy for coffee goes.

PS: if you plan to make affogato at home – the best vanilla ice cream to use is Magnolia Gold Label hands down.

Cannot post emojis on WordPress for some reason

I just want to put it out there. And the only major thing I did was update to WordPress 6.4.3 but I’m not totally sure it’s related.

This is how I used to type emojis. Win + . to toggle the emoji menu

Whenever there’s an emoji in the title or post, I’d get this error when saving:

Updating failed. Could not update post in the database.

Any clues on how to fix this? It’s the first time I encountered it.

The week that was

Nothing much happened the whole week. I came to my physio session and made good progress with my range of motion. We’ve come so far, but it’s still not enough. I also went to the gym once, and finished a whole workout video. My abs hurt the next day and it feels good. I also finished a 3-day set of cold pressed juices from Juice.Co – which by the way I didn’t fast for. I just wanted it to replace my snacks, I still ate solid food. And it felt great, I actually feel better. I lost like a pound lol.

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It’s another week of not doing anything substantial at work. I’m STILL trying to fix this prod issue with my automation, I think I mentioned it before, but all I can really do is raise tickets and follow up on them. If I had all the access needed to perform the fix I would’ve done it myself but… oh wait I have no clue how to do stored procedures. My bad lol. It’s just that there are so many people involved for what could’ve been resolved by just one person but unfortunately that person doesn’t have enough clearance to grant permissons so I have to work with someone from the morning shift. Good thing we have enough overlap. I don’t know. I’m just waiting to be fired.

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My husband asked me if I ever regretted working so hard at school. And now that I think about it, I realized that I didn’t really learn much in school. Because I didn’t love learning back then, everything I learned I forgot. I studied because I was supposed to. I got good grades because I liked getting good grades, not because I liked what I was studying.

I am proud that I graduated with honors. But it didn’t really do me much. The only leverage it gave me was getting hired for my first job which didn’t favor fresh grads from unknown schools unless you had a latin honor to boot. And that was it. And it’s not like I was really ahead of the game among my peers. It’s not even like I earned the most. A decade later and I’m no better.

I like where I am right now though. I get paid more than enough without doing much. Which reminds me, I need to start doing “much” to keep this job. Hay. I wish I had a leader you know? Someone to tell me what to do. I’m lost without a shepherd seriously. And that’s my problem with work. I cannot function without a leader and right now I’m a lone wolf. I’d rather take orders.

My husband is doing well, sometimes I wonder if I can just retire and be a full time housewife lol.

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Should I continue managing my Facebook page? To be honest I don’t really know what to do there. I don’t want to engage anywhere. I just want to upload my weekly vlogs to youtube, occassionaly throw in review videos, and also write in this blog. That’s all the public online presence I want to maintain. Oh well.

Money diaries: A day in February

 I believe my expenses are a big reflection of who I am. So let’s go back to writing Money Diaries - a series wherein I document how much I spend every day in an attempt to describe how my days went. The last time I did this was seven years ago. And back then I was still going to the office 5x a week, also earning much less.

Let’s see how this week goes!

Monday (Feb 12) – ₱2,855

• Bag cleaning – ₱150
  • Had my sling bag cleaned at the laundry shop. For the first time haha. I never really clean my bags. Which sounds gross but I don’t know, I just don’t. The last time I tried to clean my own bag with a similar material (nylon), I ruined it by wringing it, so I knew I had to leave it to the pros. What’s 150 for a properly cleaned bag. If it comes out good, at least I know where to get my other bags cleaned.
• Juice cleanse – ₱2100
  • Like I mentioned in my previous post. I just purchased a 3-day juice cleanse to help detox my body and hopefully lose weight. I don’t intend to do a juice fast I just want the healthy juices to supplement me when I feel hungry.
• Parking – ₱110
  • Parking was full earlier in the office building so I had to go to pay parking. When a slot freed up in the evening I moved my car out. I was surprised about paying 110 cos that’s what I usually pay last year for the whole 9 hours, and I only stayed 4hrs. I guess they increased the rates already.
• Dinner at Mann Hann – ₱395
  • I had dinner at Mann Hann and ordered Lechon Macau with Rice which was pretty disappointing as it was just twice fried lechong kawali with mang tomas and plain rice. Couldn’t even switch to Yang Chow. And their house tea tastes like basahan. 10/10 would NOT recommend.
• Black Dragon Milk Tea – ₱100
  • Again, I couldn’t resist. Got my usual Black Dragon 0% sugar and loved it. If it’s any consolation I had to throw half of it because I couldn’t finish it anymore. I mean I feel like I’ve always felt this way about their serving size but I just couldn’t fathom throwing away food so I always finished it no matter what. I really want to conquer the mental aspect of losing weight, and part of it is not feeling bad about being unable to finish my food because sayang naman the serving. If it’s really good I’ll have it wrapped, otherwise I already paid for it and got my money’s worth so it shouldn’t be an issue. Lesson learned: Stop when you’re full.

Other household purchases I’m not adding cos we have a separate budget for it…

• We do groceries on Mondays and we spent ₱1869 for this week. Very conservative considering we didn’t get meat (cos I kept getting lazy last week so we ordered in most days) and yet I’m surprised we almost spent 2k today for what? Eggs, cereals, coffee, coffee filter, bread, avocadoes, conditioner, a lip balm, and dog food! Didn’t look much in our cart really.
• And because we didn’t reach 2,500 in groceries we had to pay 50 for parking haha.
• We also snacked before heading to the supermarket. I got vietnamese iced coffee (which tastes weirdly sour), Jeckie got buko shake. We shared kwek kwek, chicken balls, and cheese sticks. That was maybe worth ₱435. Our grocery budget covered it.
• Another thing we bought is Nexgard Spectra for Koomi. That’s ₱800. Monthly. Remind me to write a Koomi budget haha.
• My husband just booked an airbnb for his birthday and ordered grab for dinner tonight, so if I had to count that, he spent 21k today lol

I’d say Mondays are usually big for me in terms of spending because it’s when we do the groceries so normally we would eat out before shopping. And then I go to the office so I eat out as well. And because I’m out, sometimes I window shop. So you know, there’s so much tempation when I’m out.

And I hate it because it’s not like I have money to spare. I put almost everything on credit so when payday comes, all of my allowance goes to paying my credit card and I’m back to zero, charging everything to my card again. I’ve fallen into a vicious cycle of falling in debt every month, and relying on my next allowance to pay for everything. In my defence, I pay all my cards in full and before due. And quite frankly it’s very convenient living this way. But I also miss the feeling of having liquid money to spare. And sometimes I lose track of my spending and end up overspending and having to put items on installment. Much worse having to allot my future bonuses to paying credit card debt.

Oh gosh. I have a spending problem.

When will it end

I’m so broke right now but I just purchased a 3-day juice set to hopefully lose some weight this week. I’m trying to resolve cutting rice but now that I’m hungry all I can think about is eating big heavy rice meals.

As soon as I pay off my 60k worth vacuum I’ll have more clarity about my expenses. But you know it just keeps piling on! It’s already March which means it’s Jeckie’s birthday, and also my mom’s so there goes gastos!

I really really want to get my weight down but I’m just so fucking hungry all the time. It’s like dieting doesn’t work. Even if I don’t eat rice I know I won’t be able to resist bread, or pasta. Carbs in general. This sucks.

I’m trying to go back to regularly working out though. Planning to get a small floor bike to exercise my knees better. But you know, gastos lol.

Oof

 Daily writing prompt

What’s your favorite candy?

View all responses

I don’t know if a lozenge counts as a candy but my favorite one is Fisherman’s Friend Original.

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Something’s wrong with my automation. There’s a missing step we forgot to put in the stored procedure that made the automation incomplete. And it’s already in production for what, two months now? T_T Oh my gosh.

I personally didn’t know there was another aspect to the automation until an issue was raised that users aren’t getting survey access after running the automation.

Hopped on the call with my SMEs and apparently they thought we were automating the UI so roles and surveys should be automatically given after hitting Save. We were executing this through the backend so I definitely needed to know what goes on after hitting Save aside from granting access. During testing we were able to catch the roles not being set so I’m not sure why we forgot about the surveys part.

I feel very accountable because on one hand I should’ve asked more? But seriously, it never occured to me. I should’ve asked for help on the test cases though just to make sure I’m not missing anything but I didn’t do anything. I made the test cases, ran it, my SME ran it. It passed.

Oh gosh I’ll probably get reprimanded for this. Like how could this have gotten to prod incomplete?

I’m scared.

I’ve done what needs to be done to resolve the issue. Which is really just raising tickets to get the stored procedure updated. But I probably still need some explaining to do. I feel really sorry because I wasn’t able to get the whole scope.

Wish me luck.

(￣m￣）