Salty Zebra

  Last spring I wrote a few posts ( 1 , 2 , 3 ) about stock options*. These documented my learning and entrance into the stock market and all its wonders. Now that I've been doing this for about six months, I thought I'd come back to you and update you with how my new job is going! Yep, this is my job, a job graciously given to me by God that I am SO THANKFUL FOR!!! You see, when my husband was job hunting last year, I was his sidekick. I learned the ins and outs of AI for the job market and the great variety of ways to find job listings. I hunted down opportunities and sent them his way. All the while, there was a little voice in the back of my head that said, "What if you  got a job?" I knew I wasn't nearly qualified to get a job like my husband's, but I do have an AA and I have a wealth of life experience, so I thought that, surely, I could find something out there in the $20/hour range that I could do for 20 hours a week. That would both contribute to my f...

 Radiation is a big deal. My husband keeps reminding me of that. Everything I've read on the subject tells me that I will be wiped out. My brain will not function. I will not be able to maintain the complicated systems that I've put in place for our life and finances. So, today I simplify.  For the last year, I've really enjoyed using the Door Dash and Instacart benefits on several of the credit cards I've opened. In fact, I've gotten up to $40 in free groceries from DoorDash and $60 in free groceries from Instacart every month! This is really handy, and fun if I'm being honest, but it takes time, effort, and a lot of thought. I have to pick my moment, ordering from Door Dash when DashMart has a good sale, ordering $12 here and $22 there from Instacart. You see, in order to receive these benefits, each card has to be used on a different order. This came out to as many as nine different orders per month. And these orders had to be carefully curated to come in as ...

Disclaimer: I am not a financial professional nor formally trained in any way. The information in this post is designed to inspire, not direct you. I highly recommend working with a financial advisor, like my amazing one, Josh Collier , when dealing with your family's investments. Image credit: Gemini and me  There was once a Countryman who possessed the most wonderful Goose you can imagine, for every day when he visited the nest, the Goose had laid a beautiful, glittering, golden egg.  The Countryman took the eggs to market and soon began to get rich. But it was not long before he grew impatient with the Goose because she gave him only a single golden egg a day. He was not getting rich fast enough.  Then one day, after he had finished counting his money, the idea came to him that he could get all the golden eggs at once by killing the Goose and cutting it open. But when the deed was done, not a single golden egg did he find, and his precious Goose was dead. ( The Goose W...

Disclaimer: I am not a financial professional nor formally trained in any way. The information in this post is designed to inspire, not direct you. I highly recommend working with a financial advisor, like my amazing one,  Josh Collier , when dealing with your family's investments. Image Credit: Gemini and me ;)  Last week I wrote a post sharing about what I had learned about covered call options. It was written from a place of naivete and may have caused some of you concern because of that. Sorry. Since then, I've learned more, A LOT MORE. Yes, I read through the 96-page  Characteristics  and Risks  of Standardized  Options  document and several other blogs and websites and my eyes were opened. I found out that the covered calls that I had been learning about were just a tiny corner of this vast arena known as options trading, a corner that I'm pretty happy staying in.  I'm a learner, a researcher, and as I read up on covered calls, I found out...

Disclaimer: I am not a financial professional nor formally trained in any way. The information in this post is designed to inspire, not direct you. I highly recommend working with a financial advisor, like my amazing one,  Josh Collier , when dealing with your family's investments. Photo credit: Dee Jones of Open Door Photography  She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard.  Proverbs 31:16   I don't know how much thought you've given to the field that the Wife of Noble Character in Proverbs 31 bought, but it's been on my mind lately. This wise woman saw a field that she thought would bring benefit to her family and she bought it. First off, this means that her husband saw her wisdom and trusted her with the family's finances so she had money available to buy a field, that's not nothing. But then we get to the part where out of her earnings she planted a vineyard. How did she get earnings? It's not like buying the field autom...

 Last August I shared with you about how you could get groceries for free through a few different Chase credit cards and their Door Dash benefits. Today I'm here to tell you about a different promotion I happened across this fall which nets me even more  free groceries every month! In October, I opened a Chase Ink Business Cash * card. It's $750 sign up bonus after spending $6,000 in 3 months (I can pretty much do this with just grocery shopping and dining out!) was pretty attractive, but when you factor in the $0 annual fee it got even better! Then when you consider 5% cash back when you use the card to pay your internet, cable and phone bills, it's pretty great. But as I went about setting up the card, I happened upon a little hidden benefit - Instacart+.  I've used Instacart a few times, primarily to order groceries when I was on vacation and didn't have a vehicle, but I've never considered Instacart+ to be something I'd use. For one thing, Instacart pri...

 Last year about this time, I wrote to you all asking for a little help from my friends , and you showed up! We raised $357.68 in donations over the month and I wanted to share with you today how that has influenced my blog this year.  First, it showed me that there were real people out there reading what I was writing who actually valued it enough to contribute financially. That means more than I can possibly express! I love  writing, but it's hard when you put things out into the blogosphere day after day and you wonder if anyone sees it, if anyone cares, if it's making a difference. When you all showed up for me last December, it encouraged me to keep writing, to keep traveling, to keep learning and sharing things with you. THANK YOU!!!  Next, by having some level of financial income, my blog was legitimized as a business. This enabled me to open five different credit cards and two bank accounts earning me 365,000 points/miles and $1,200 in account signup bonuses....

 A week ago, our pastor's father, who himself is a retired pastor of over 35 years, spoke at our church on what he called, "The prayer of importunity."  Now that's a word I'd never heard before and I was fascinated by it. Over the last week this message has been brought to my mind more times than I can count and when it returned to my mind this morning, after reading today's LGG blog post , I decided it was time I shared my musings with you.   The biblical prayer that this message, and my subsequent musings, were based on can be found in Luke 18:1-8 . In this passage, Jesus tells a story, a parable, about a widow who had a great need. She sought out the local judge who, unfortunately, was a person who feared neither God nor man, to get the justice she so desperately required. Being this type of person, he had no intention of granting the widow's request, but she didn't give up, and so eventually he gave in, not because he had had a change of heart or ...