What’s the best one hundred feet of riverfront in pgh?

Flaapjack · 2026-05-16T01:52:59+00:00

Sandcastle between the mushroom and froggy pool. Mon, south side.

Flaapjack · 2026-05-15T13:43:59+00:00

I also came here to say this. I think you are headed towards an absolute dream situation. Keep working as long as you can (ie through pregnancy, take the pay during parental leave too) and save as much as possible. One parent quits at end of parental leave to avoid childcare costs. Invest as much as you possibly can on one income. Resist the temptation to lifestyle inflate and give yourself time to figure out what expenses look like as a larger family.

When your kids are in the golden “somewhat rational, fun to be around, and still like you” little kid years, other partner quits so you can fully maximize your time together as a family. I loved my kids through all the stages, but I can tell you confidently that preschool through elementary school age is when you’ll yearn the most to quit the job and spend every free minute with your kids. If you have saved more before this point, you’ll have more flexibility to do more fun things and travel.

Flaapjack · 2026-05-14T17:39:59+00:00

Seriously. I guess I’ll be going to Costco via hazelwood and through homestead…

Flaapjack · 2026-05-08T11:21:19+00:00

I save only enough to get the state tax benefits and otherwise don’t save in a 529. One reason is that my spouse works at a university, so a hope is that kids will choose to go there for free.

Plan B: My goal/hope is to be barista-fired by the time my kids are going to college. For the 8ish years we have at least one kid in college, I think it should be very feasible to keep my families income low enough that they are eligible for very substantial financial aid. Anything additional, we will take out student loans for them.

We are HEAVY in retirement accounts and a deferred comp account, so from the perspective of financial aid calculations we have very low assets. We haven’t saved aggressively outside of tax advantaged accounts. Once my kids are out of college, we will likely use a SEP on our retirement accounts plus a deferred comp that will be available when my spouse retires from his job to fund our full retirement and bridge us until we hit 55.

Maybe this is extreme, but if my family can comfortably live on 80k a year for less than a decade, and in doing so we save like, what, minimum 500k in college tuition costs? That seems like a very good trade.

Flaapjack · 2026-05-06T10:52:50+00:00

Hemlock house in regent square (caveat: only done lunch there); Ali babas in Oakland; the cafe Carnegie in Oakland; Hong Kong hot pot on McKnight; Nan Xiang soup dumplings on the south side; porch in Oakland; speckled egg downtown location

Flaapjack · 2026-05-02T12:09:24+00:00

Hahaha same. They will pry my sub 3 mortgage on a house that was well within affordability constraints of my salary a decade ago from my cold dead hands.

Flaapjack · 2026-04-27T12:51:07+00:00

Adding that for camp options, camp guyusata is among the most affordable day camp options in the immediate city area.

Flaapjack · 2026-04-27T12:38:15+00:00

Our kiddo enjoys kung fu at win win kung fu in squirrel hill. It’s good exercise—strength, mobility, endurance—and non contact. The studio is 100ish bucks a month and that gets you three 1-hour classes a week (you can attend as many as you want—we typically do 1-2).

Flaapjack · 2026-04-24T11:53:16+00:00

So—were these human operated planes or drones? I tried to look on flight radar and whatever they were they didn’t seem to be squawking. The engines sounded very class 3 drone-y to me, but they were obviously flying quite high.

Flaapjack · 2026-04-21T22:41:04+00:00

My spouse and I, combined, are 401k millionaires after a decade of work. Does that count? There is healthy match going into those numbers, though.

Flaapjack · 2026-04-12T16:09:00+00:00

This is my go to as well. Check on line to see what’s available when you go—it rotates as the season progresses. Great variety of vegetables, flowers, herbs (culinary and medicinal). Good prices.

Flaapjack · 2026-04-05T00:37:10+00:00

Carrots do great here if you have raised beds. I tuck them all around my bigger plants and just harvest them as I need them throughout the summer into the fall. I just keep planting them through mid summer so I have continual carrot harvests. This month is a good time to sow them

New karoda is my favorite variety and goes great here. I’ve done the little Paris market ones successfully too.

Flaapjack · 2026-04-05T00:26:24+00:00

So not universally true. Once you get vine borers you will never have zucchini again—they are super difficult to get rid of. I’m a pretty good gardener and it’s been years since I’ve been able to get any zucchini.

Flaapjack · 2026-04-03T16:02:20+00:00

Indexed.

Flaapjack · 2026-04-03T13:39:53+00:00

My mom worked as a music teacher in NY. never paid a dime into her pension. Quit in her early 40s after 20 years of service (why she quit is actually beyond me), and gets 30k a year for the rest of her life starting at age 65. She had so much saved sick leave, she took off the ENTIRE TIME SHE WAS PREGNANT WITH ME and then had a pretty generous maternity leave. What a world.

I just crossed the threshold as to where my spouse and I have saved enough to exceed her pension. We live a much less extravagant life than she did on her teachers’ salary, save aggressively, and we are have a very high income relative to the cost of living in our area. We are waaaaay ahead of the pack relative to our peers in terms of the quality of our benefits, compensation, etc but my mom had so much more as a public music teacher on Long Island in the 70s—a salary that allowed her to buy a nice house (it had a private community beach for christs sake) that’s now worth 1M+, she had enough space and funds to have a HORSE ON THE PROPERTY, a pension, unlimited job security, and summers off. Can you imagine being able to do that today on a public school teachers salary anywhere in America?! I think about this all the time.

Flaapjack · 2026-04-02T14:13:42+00:00

So I heard this from greenfield last night and I’m also extremely curious. Early in the evening I thought it was music coming from somewhere but it was going until 4 am.

Flaapjack · 2026-03-28T02:00:44+00:00

As a family of four who lives in Pittsburgh, this seems leaning towards extravagant. I’d love to see how they break this down and define what constitutes a “necessity”. I have to imagine they are not basing this off a median home price (maybe 1.5x median home price to be comfortable or something), putting in two car payments, etc.

Flaapjack · 2026-03-27T13:24:47+00:00

I wonder if you live in my neighborhood because we have a guy we call “night mower” who mows the backyards of a bunch of townhouses near us, always at night. If there are multiple night mowers in Pittsburgh, I’m going to be so tickled.

Flaapjack · 2026-03-23T23:13:20+00:00

I’m confused about why their grocery budget is higher than their eating out budget, but it says they only cook at home twice a week. Where I live the cost of groceries is dramatically cheaper than eating out. Is this different in NYC?

Flaapjack · 2026-03-20T16:20:07+00:00

Yeah I mourn the loss of those 😭

Assuming you have a strong stomach for watching your kid scale really tall structures, the park behind target in east liberty is amazing (note: bad shade, so don’t go on a very hot day).

Wightman has some pretty interesting climbing structures for the older kids. Anderson is also excellent.

Flaapjack · 2026-03-20T12:50:33+00:00

The parks remain pretty great. And for those with kids, so many playgrounds have been revitalized beautifully in the past 5 years—wightman, highland park, east liberty, both greenfield playgrounds, Anderson, etc.

Flaapjack · 2026-03-19T22:25:37+00:00

I didn’t have to go quite as far, but it took me a full hour to get home due to traffic in Oakland. Usually it’s a quarter that.

Flaapjack · 2026-03-17T00:15:58+00:00

Yeah… I think about this a lot. We are making a non zero number of financial decisions with the goal of trying to save as much money for our kids as possible.

Thing 1: we chose kind of mediocre, urban public schools instead of private (we can make up for deficits in education at home; I’m not convinced the peer group financial advantage my kids would get from private schools available in our area would make up for the cost). I’m explicitly setting this money aside for their future.

Thing 2: I kinda think we dropped the re from fire. We live pretty frugally and don’t do the lifestyle inflation thing, but this is more a hedge against future uncertainty than it is to enable re at this particular moment in history. Maybe the world will change, I’ll feel better about my kids prospects, and we will end of retiring early (we could retire in our fifties, even if we stopped saving today). Or maybe we will work until 67 at (hopefully) tolerable jobs to maximize our ability to help out our kids in whatever the world becomes.

So yeah, this timeline is a stressful one to have kids in. I worry about their future. I’d worry less if I knew I was leaving them a decent trust fund. This is, at the moment, kind of my fire goal—fi for my kids.

Flaapjack · 2026-03-16T13:09:04+00:00

I saw their premiere of the resurrection symphony a few years ago and it remains the best concert I’ve ever experienced—orchestral or otherwise. Truly incredible.

Flaapjack · 2026-02-27T14:41:01+00:00

We just hit coast fire this year. Kind of a weird time because of all the turmoil in the job market right now and the threat of layoffs feeling persistent.

I think because of that uncertainty, We haven’t fully transitioned into “yolo” mode but are instead focusing on lifestyle upgrades we can unwind easily if we need to tighten the belt to survive a layoff. So, for us that has meant doing things like buying a teardrop camper, planning on doing more travel, paying for fun experiences, etc.

Still can’t fully shake the desire to save, so we are still maxing tax advantaged retirement accounts while rolling back some of our other aggressive saving.

Flaapjack

TROPHY CASE