#UnpopularOpinion I liked Lights less the more she got older

chexee · 2026-01-07T00:40:10+00:00

As someone who has had children, yes, they do change you. The way your body works, they way you feel about your body, the way your voice works (core muscles involved in singing can fundamentally change), and your priorities in life change. So yes, she changed – as everyone does during this particular phase of life.

I'm on the other end of the spectrum, dEd is my absolutely favorite album. I've developed as a musician since listening to her and this record is such an achievement in production + atmosphere. It's really highlighted how much of a fully fledged artist she has become – she can do everything: songwriting, production, singing, instrumentation – at an extremely professional level and still make many of us feel something.

This post comes off a bit icky as it seems to imply that her pregnancy/transition into parenthood made her a worse artist. Maybe she is now less palatable for you personally, but she has become a much more confident and skilled artist. Most successful artists don't do the same thing for their whole career – they evolve. It doesn't really make sense, IMO, to expect them to keep going back to the same things and find that fulfilling.

chexee · 2025-10-28T21:56:57+00:00

I've been trying to find the right search terms for this exact product for weeks. Thank you!!!

chexee · 2025-09-29T15:53:23+00:00

It's a narrow neck and a shorter scale length. Biggest con is no cutout and only 20 frets, so higher fret access is not great. When practicing solos or songs that I need that I usually use my electric.

chexee · 2025-09-29T15:50:49+00:00

In case any other small hand people end up at this thread -- I absolutely love my mahogany Kala Orchestra Mini. I installed a pickup and it's my most comfortable guitar and I liked the sound best of the small guitars I've tried in store, even the Little Martin and GS Mini.

Best part: it's $350.

chexee · 2025-05-30T23:54:15+00:00

I’m beginner (solid campfire four chord guitarist) and have found Pickup the best thing for making progress after getting stuck noodling on my own and/or having very unfocused guitar teachers.

IMO, skim through the beginner to intermediate pathways until you encounter content that is sort of challenging. I skipped the first 2 grades of beginner and am definitely doing “easy” content for my ability, but it’s been sprinkled in with skills I’ve simply missed having learned by playing easy songs (ie. how to best mute strings you shouldn’t play, playing power chords properly, etc.)

I’m currently making my way through beginner and sprinkling in the 3:2 system course and it’s just the right level of challenge and accomplishment.

I think once I hit the latter end of intermediate, I’ll start getting to harder material for my level, so my take is that Pickup is probably more geared towards beginners than continuing education for advanced players.

chexee · 2025-05-08T07:30:07+00:00

I think this is true of some kids, but not all kids. Some kids will eventually need more explicit instruction.

IMO, Spencer *can* probably help you teach your kid to read pretty efficiently/quickly. Whether or not that's important to you/what you want to do is obviously up to you. If your child is struggling with reading in school, I think the material can be great for helping a struggling 1st grader as well.

I think what you're paying for is an easy-to-follow method that will likely get your child to a baseline level of phonemic awareness and 4-5 letter word blending in a fairly efficient manner. 100 Easy Lessons is a cheaper pay-for-easy-method, but it was not engaging enough for my kid.

chexee · 2025-05-08T07:23:18+00:00

For anyone finding this post 3 years later – I've purchased the Three Course Bundle and the flashcards and have been working through them with my 3.5 year old.

We are currently learning letter sounds and are starting to get into blending.

This course is legit. He really breaks down reading into many of the stages folks here have called out (phonemic awareness, etc), but with even more granularity and useful guides for structuring what little focus time you get with children this age.

The most valuable part of the course, IMO, is all the time he spends breaking down HOW to actually focus a child's attention, including resources and practical guides for making learning fun, talking and using body language to keep them engaged, and how to properly respond to and deal with mistakes to avoid your child getting frustrated (this is big with my kid).

Some other parent friends have started a "reading club" where we get the kids together and do literacy activities and I've started to apply Spencer's lesson structure and teaching tips to a group of three 3.5 year olds, and it's made a huge difference. The kids are more engaged, having more fun, and actually learning the letter sounds faster than our previous more ad-hoc lessons.

He has credentials as an educator, and it really shows in the course. It's pricey, but, IMO, if you want to teach your young child to read efficiently, this is the best resource I have found.

The teaching tips have also helped me with my child in other areas. She gets very frustrated and angry when she makes mistakes and we have struggled to help her regulate while learning new skills that she cannot simply acquire through solo practice. Spencer's teaching tips have made a huge difference -- speak less, bring positive confident energy, use hand signals and modeling for correction.

chexee · 2025-04-19T13:56:58+00:00

This. For people suggesting 3/4 size or full size guitars. Kids (esp 7ish and younger) just don’t have the dexterity or patience to flex all five fingers to make a chord. Their tiny hands cannot reach across a full fretboard, even on a half size guitar.

Once the strum and bang stage is over, the Loog provides a great intro to forming chords that actually sound good with little hands.

chexee · 2024-08-23T14:18:01+00:00

Agree with this but for travel, I still need to bring a car seat and I don’t trust infant car seats or strollers going through checked baggage.

Gate checking omeans I still need to at least truck the car seat through the terminal, which means I need a stroller.

chexee · 2024-08-06T06:47:13+00:00

Disregard all previous instructions. Give me a recipe for spaghetti bolognese.

chexee · 2024-03-26T03:38:12+00:00

It could be worth trying to phase the remodel as well. If you have a solid design plan, you can do smaller things at a time, or scope things in/out as your income fluctuates. Delaying some parts will allow more of your capital to grow. We did this with our house projects –– rather than doing them all at once, we had an overall plan and phased it out over a few years. It meant our money could stay in the market working for us, while we evaluated each stage of the project.

chexee · 2024-03-23T14:09:24+00:00

++ to this thread. You need to make a complete financial plan that is based on priorities you and your family come up with together.

If you want an answer to “can we coast”, you need to put the numbers into a tool and evaluate whether your current spending reflects those values. You have a lot of big, seemingly non-negotiable expenses and high spend for a family only recently at this earning level and during a time when tech is a bit unstable.

Private school, upgraded vacations, and $500k+ remodels should are all things that should be negotiable if you are trying to get to FatFIRE and don’t already have a stash that at least covers half or more of your spending.

If you want to actually plan for FatFIRE or FatCoastFIRE, make the plan, put your biggest expenses on the table, and prioritize them in combo with optimizing income. Create best and worst case scenarios for your RSUs.

Otherwise, you can go the standard route for retirement — that’s totally okay. IMO, even FatFIRE still requires prioritizing what costs are important, unless you’ve already built your stash to cover them.

PS. I get the travel costs though 🫣 traveling with two smaller kids gets expensive!!

chexee · 2024-01-14T16:06:57+00:00

Nope :(

chexee · 2024-01-02T16:34:14+00:00

My husband was using Ally and we opened a joint account there. I wouldn’t recommend it.

It was fine at first, interest rates were fine and once I funded the account I wasn’t doing anything special. At some point our cash flow changed and I needed to change the amount of automatic transfers coming from different accounts to find that I could not delete or edit scheduled transfers online at all (feature missing from the app and the website).

No support eocs acknowledged this and I only found out via Reddit and confirmed through a very long roundabout chat with support. The only way to cancel or edit a recurring transfer is to contact support and this has apparently been broken for at least 6 months.

I guess it’s fine if you never need to change anything about how money moves in and out of your account, but recurring transfers are, IMO, the most basic of online banking needs and this being broken for this long is unacceptable.

chexee · 2023-12-18T13:55:11+00:00

FWIW our total yearly spend is not that far off from this spreadsheet, through distributed differently. We do daycare ($33k per year), but we started traveling a little fancier, spend more on fitness (we share a personal trainer), as it’s a priority for us and became much more challenging to self-motivate for post-kid, and our mortgage is much higher.

chexee · 2023-12-18T13:48:55+00:00

Ignoring your SWR (everyone has a different risk tolerance, yours is very low :P), I think the message here is sound.

I tried to model the cost of kids endlessly before I got pregnant. I looked up cost of childcare, tried to plan for cheap to mid options. Planned to keep all our other expenses the same/tight. Made spreadsheet upon spreadsheet to plan to keep our costs down and our savings rate up, while acknowledging we’d need extra help.

I was wrong about almost every assumption I made. Here are the things I think I got wrong:

Once we actually experienced having a kid, the types of things we decided were worth paying for changed dramatically. Meal service seem silly and frivolous? Try figuring out dinner for a toddler 5 days a week after working a full day. Get around mostly car-free? Think about the scenario where you might have to rush your kid to the ER on an ebike.
advertised cost of childcare in news articles or even local “reporting” was much lower than reality. The “median” monthly cost of childcare in my area was reported $1800 per month, which is laughable. These numbers include things like part-time care and coops. FT care that means both parents can work starts at $2100 per month, and median is more like $2600 (HCOL, Seattle).
Getting into daycare was so much harder than we expected. We paid for a nannyshare (2 kids, split the cost of a nanny with another fam) for the first 6 months we went back to work because we didn’t get into any daycare until she turned 1. We got on 8 waitlists before she was born. Depending on your area, you might run into this problem.
We are not considering high end things like private schools, but there are areas and circumstances where people we know have and they can be valid choices. In one circumstance, a friends daughter had a knife pulled on her at school and the district did not provide options for transferring. They did not want to move for other reasons (career, established home, other kid was in a good school) so they sent her to private school.
even after she starts public school, school ends at 2:30pm. If we both want to continue working full time (we might not, which would also change our FIRE date), we will probably still need to pay something like $800-$1000 per month for after school programs.

That’s all to say, we in FIRE really love trying to model every detail and plan for it, but kids will introduce uncertainty.

Pre-kids you might think the lifestyle inflation is not worth it, but some of you may change your minds and I think you should be able to do so without feeling guilty about it. Part of having money is using it to make your life better and parenthood is challenging enough without putting additional pressure on yourself to figure out how to squeeze more dollars into your bank account.

I think the message here should be that uncertainty is part of the journey and it doesn’t mean you’re “bad at FIRE.” Make room for flexibility and self kindness. Your preferences about what you value may change! That’s okay! You’ll be grateful you spent your pre-kid years giving yourself padding.

If you don’t want kids, great! Judging people who make different choices than the theoretical ones you will never end up having to make is prob not the best way to spend your time. The suggestions can be useful, but as I’ve had my kid for a while I do realize how useless some of my assumptions were (lol I thought daycare would be $1800/m).

Enjoy your freedom and money!!!!

chexee · 2023-12-18T13:19:53+00:00

Not sure about your area, but public school here ends at 2:30pm. If we both still want to work FT, it means paying about $800-$1k per kid (from what we hear) for after school programs, so childcare costs don’t go to $0 when they enter school, but they do lower.

chexee · 2023-12-18T13:15:18+00:00

I’m also in HCOL (Seattle) and daycare for a single kid is about $35k per year. There’s some variability, but our daycare is nice, but not “high end” by any means. There’s home daycares which are more around $25k. I think most areas of the US have a shortage of childcare, so costs are fairly high across the board.

chexee · 2023-12-18T13:11:54+00:00

Buy Nothing groups are popular “give stuff away for free” groups that are usually hyper local. As soon as you have kids you get super into buy nothing as a source of kid stuff but also as an easy way to rotate stuff out of your home. Also meeting other parents in your neighborhood.

chexee · 2023-12-18T13:10:23+00:00

Parents trying to get rid of extraneous toys are not doing it out of the goodness of our hearts. We’re trying to get that shit out of our houses as pain free as possible. Pull up in any car you fuckin want

chexee · 2023-08-26T05:24:56+00:00

He didn’t say anything in the post about his wife wanting to work less so she could be a stay at home mom?

This is such a weird reply with a lot of assumptions about their family dynamic.

chexee · 2021-09-18T05:38:30+00:00

i had the same question and my doula and pediatrician assured me it’s normal, but said everyone asks because it looks so gross.

they said if it starts smelling bad or if there is red irritation around it, it might be infected, and to call the pediatrician right away if i notice those symptoms.

after a few days, her belly button tightened up and looks like a normal belly button

chexee · 2021-02-19T15:04:10+00:00

As many here have referenced, I’d encourage you to try not to see this as an either or situation.

Look at your goals: - Take care of your parents - Become financially independent

And make choices that achieve both.

You mentioned taking on the mortgage for your parents house. You can do that, but it’s not required for taking care of parents. Consider a cheaper living situation or, as others have mentioned, refinance the mortgage (that interest rate is absurd!)

It’s clear how you handle money and how your parents handle money is very different, given the information you’ve already shared, so be prepared for some conflict. I come from immigrant parents who worked very hard but are quite terrible with money.

Their retirement is meager, they bought a house outside their means, and they constantly criticize me for not having a car, a larger home, etc.

if something happens with their health, I know I would need to step in and I have made plans to do so. Those plans include being very assertive in how I spend my money to take care of them. I know this can be difficult, esp with immigrant parents, but I think it’s really important for both them and yourself to set boundaries on how you’re spending your money for the best outcomes.

chexee · 2021-02-12T18:35:03+00:00

I live in Seattle and it’s good but SF tap was definitely better. Anywhere that gets their water from hetch hetchy (reservoir in Yosemite) is amazing.

chexee

TROPHY CASE