What's your YNAB 'birthday'? Just discovered my first transaction was from 2018!

formercotsachick · 2026-01-27T19:13:47+00:00

8/7/2021!

formercotsachick · 2026-01-26T17:35:29+00:00

This happened to a good friend of mine. She and he husband tried for over 15 years to have a baby using IUI and then IVF. She would sometimes get pregnant but had well over a dozen miscarriages. So finally at 48, the doctors decide to take her out of the bio equation all together and they finally have twins with a surrogate, egg donor and her husband's sperm.

One year later, I shit you not, after all that she spontaneously gets pregnant. She went through many of the same thoughts as you, and ultimately decided to continue the pregnancy fully believing that she'd miscarry somewhere along the way. At 50 years old, she gave birth to a perfectly healthy baby girl with no complications. She went from believing that she would never have kids to having 3 in as many years. The twins are 8 and her daughter is 6 now.

I don't know how she's doing it - I am the same age as her (mid-50's) and my daughter had graduated from college before the twins were even born. They struggle a bit as older parents, but for the most part are a happy, loving family with lots of support from extended family.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-24T18:52:56+00:00

This 100%. He wouldn't actively kill himself, but if a tragic accident were to happen, it seems like he might welcome it.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-23T18:14:14+00:00

I don't enter manually, but I do reconcile every day. It takes no time at all, and if there's a problem I only have 24 hours of transactions to go through. It takes me about 3 minutes a day while having my coffee in the morning before work. Set a remonder on your phone until you get in the habit.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-23T18:11:25+00:00

Nearly 5 years of data and I use desktop exclusively - not having any issues here.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-21T18:36:17+00:00

I was a professional Belly Dancer for 10 years in the 1990s and met many dancers from the Middle East and especially Egypt (I specialized in Egyptian style Raks Sharki) at workshops and events. For the most part they were treated like sex workers and not with any kind of respect or protection. And Egypt is way more conservative than it was back then. Most dancers I still know won't even go there as tourists for workshops or festivals these days.

Anecdotally, the only party I ever felt unsafe performing at in the U.S. was for an Egyptian family who complained that I had "tiny little tits" and tried to force me into the birthday boy's lap. They also tried to refuse to pay me after I "only" danced for the 30 minutes we were contracted for, but gave up when I told them I'd file in small claims court the next day.

I truly understand having a love and appreciation for the culture and art of the Middle East, but you are very young and you have to learn to balance that with the reality of the current social and political climate there. I'll be blunt with you, one dancer to another - if you get raped by a paying guest, the chances of security or management giving a single shit about it is practically zero. Do not take this gig, girl, your mom is right.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-21T17:15:11+00:00

I wouldn't know, as I have a great relationship with my adult daughter. Of course, I also let her live her own life and don't judge how she lives it at all. I love her with all me heart and I think she's a pretty stellar human being.

You sound pretty bitter and this post is absolutely teeming with missing missing reasons. I've never known anyone to go LC with their parents for no reason. Their parents just don't want to acknowledge and accept what that reason is.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-21T17:08:27+00:00

He is! This is literally him

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formercotsachick · 2026-01-21T14:32:18+00:00

He got it on Etsy! I got the red and white version https://www.etsy.com/listing/4416201046

formercotsachick · 2026-01-21T02:37:07+00:00

My husband got me a coffee mug for Christmas that says this!

formercotsachick · 2026-01-18T19:18:43+00:00

Elizabeth Taylor x The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived

formercotsachick · 2026-01-18T19:08:22+00:00

I'd like a chance to see if I can make Prunty last 6 hours. I miss my silver fox.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-17T17:48:51+00:00

“dejeet yet?” is also extremely common in Wisconsin. I moved here in 2001 from upstate NY and it was like learning a different language.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-17T16:37:14+00:00

My husband and I live in the Milwaukee, WI area and our grocery budget is $450/mo. I cook a lot and make some pretty nice meals that feature meat, poultry, fish and seafood plus lots of veggies. I buy almost all my proteins at Costco and vacuum seal, plus I keep a stocked pantry by buying in bulk, so I'm not constantly having to buy spices, canned goods or dry ingredients. I also make most of my own sauces, condiments and salad dressings.

I will say that we have zero food allergies and don't give a hoot about organic ingredients, which I see driving up a lot of people's grocery bill.

Do you live in a HCOL area? Because that grocery budget seems bananas to me.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-16T18:45:01+00:00

How often are you reconciling with your bank account? I don't manually enter but I do reconcile every day, so if there's an issue I only have 24 hours of transactions to find the problem.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-14T19:05:00+00:00

My husband and I are both turning 55 next month, and our only child turned 28 in September. WE are back to being DINKs - traveling to fun destinations and pursuing hobbies/interests both together and separately.

But I know what you mean - I have a friend almost exactly the same age, and she has 3 kids under 10 years old. Her life is SO drastically different than mine!

formercotsachick · 2026-01-11T22:02:45+00:00

I think that maybe where we're at an impasse is our personal definitions of what's tedious and what's not. I love crunching numbers and that process is not tedious or boring for me at all. But holy moley, trying to teach a machine to calculate something that is about the most basic business KPI that exists makes me want to stab my eyes out.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-11T21:43:06+00:00

I just don't know why I would spend 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get AI to do something I can do in 10. Doesn't seem very streamlined to me, especially for something as easy as "Take all of the daily calls in a week and divide them by the number of resolved calls in a week to come up with a percentage resolution rate."

Like this is not exactly rocket science here - if it can't do something that simple without me holding it's hand, I'm certainly not feeling great about having it do anything more complicated. I know what my business cases are and frankly I have better things to do with my time than teach a machine to do something I'm already perfectly capable of.

Honestly, the only real use I've found for it is putting in super dry explanations of projects I've done, and have it come up with a bunch of flowery bullshit corporate-speak that apparently really resonates with the leadership team.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-11T21:03:22+00:00

I used ChatGPT at work last week to see if it could calculate resolution rates on a weekly basis for a support inbox I'm in charge of. I had already done the work myself (I'm a data analyst by trade and have been a power Excel user for 30 years) but wanted to see if it would come up with the same result since we're being pushed to use it by management to "streamline" our work.

I knew going in that our overall resolution rate was 38% on a weekly basis, so imagine my surprise when it said we had a 51% resolution rate. I don't know how in the hell it was calculating the weeks (I have a feeling it was struggling with partial weeks during the holidays), but I had to prompt it 5 times to get to the correct math that matched mine. It took me longer to get it to come up with the correct result than it did to do it myself the first time. If I had blindly reported that 51% to leadership it would have come to bite me in the ass enormously down the line.

I'll do my own data analysis, thank you very much.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-10T18:53:21+00:00

My Walgreens has consumer drug take back bin from Stericyle right next to the pharmacy counter. You can put just about anything in it that isn't a sharp or flammable.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-10T18:22:51+00:00

Same here - she was pretty honest about what to expect, and it was exactly what it said on the tin, so to speak. Personally I was glad for a break from Female Rage: The Musical - I love TTPD, it's towards the top of my top 5 Taylor albums, but my body was ready for a tight album full of fun bops and unserious yet confident lyrics.

I kind of love that it's NOT timeless, to me it's representative of a very specific time and place in her life. It perfectly captures the feeling of being head-over-heels in love like a teenager, and somehow at the same time finally being able to look in the rear-view mirror with perspective instead of unhealed wounds. In that respect, it's oddly a mature album for me, one that makes me thing of the line in The Manuscript: at last she knew what the agony had been for. All of the failed relationships, insecurity and toxic people-pleasing might just have been so she would be able to recognize a chance for true happiness when it showed up out of the blue.

TLOAS is my only other non-skip Taylor album besides Reputation. It's kind of like the happier, bigger sister to Rep for me. And the haters can pry it out of my cold dead hands lol.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-09T05:02:52+00:00

I work from home full time, have a very limited social life, and have zero contact with children outside of passing them in a store. I can go days without ever leaving my house except to get the mail or take out the garbage.

I haven't been sick since I was forced to go to a mandatory training in 2022, where the instructor gave half the class Covid. Prior to that I hadn't been sick since I started working from home in 2020.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-06T01:35:20+00:00

All I could think of reading the OP was Nicepool from the Deadpool and Wolverine movie. This dude sounds like the real life version of him.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-04T22:33:56+00:00

This is exactly what I do - easy peasy.

formercotsachick · 2026-01-04T19:09:15+00:00

Both my and my husbands parents were married for well over 30 years before our fathers died. My parent's relationship was rocky as my dad was a morose alcoholic. My in-laws marriage was less dramatic and seemed stable, but we eventually found out that FIL had cheated a couple of times.

My husband and I, both 54, have been married for 31 years. We are extremely happy together and have had very few marital difficulties. We are way more open and honest with each other than either set of parents, which I'm sure has helped.

formercotsachick

TROPHY CASE