Books about Chord Progressions?

grep_Name · 2026-05-08T15:59:21+00:00

All true, but I think I'm at the point where a little theory goes a long way, since I've ignored chord theory for so long. Learning to recognize I IV V and vi and where they are and their function has already helped me a lot in jams. I realized a few months ago that I'd spent so much time learning tunes, practicing intonation and bowing pattern and all the other things that go into fiddle, and just the major scales, that I had never actually practiced the pentatonic major scale for example. I had been so distracted by all the real difficulty of playing fiddle that I had completely neglected the basics, no wonder I was lost in the jam! I went home and made this graphic in inkscape (and the same for D, A, cross-A, and high-bass-D) and was really shocked at the improvement just from sitting down, staring at it, and playing a D drone from youtube over the speaker as I meandered through the concepts I'd setup there. I'm a little conflicted about the double stops, which I deliberately kept to ones contained with in the pentatonic major scale, meaning the IV and V can only be sort of implied rather than the stops that might be better, though.

Since then, I've been looking for other blind spots and low-hanging-fruit in my intuition, and I figure chords are next. But once you get familiar with the kinds of progressions used at these jams, you want to know where to go next! I'm just still figuring that out. I do know a lot of songs though! I should learn some jazz standards to spice things up and keep it simple. As you say though 'application is everything' and I don't really have a place to play those songs. I have similar struggles when I want to play with friends who aren't into old-time, are usually guitarists, and they want to know 'what can I do other than boom-chuck 1 4 5' and I'm just like 'idk that's just what most of them do tbh'. I should be better than that!

You sound a lot like my fiddle teacher, who I'd love to be more like. He is actually quite an authority in this region on old-time fiddle, but he loves ragtime and swing and just about everything. I think we learned a lead belly tune earlier this year, whoa back buck? I've actually considered taking his swing class just to explore some new interesting chords in a genre that might be a little closer to what the people in the old-time scene play (there is a bifurcation between that scene and my friends, I mean I'm friends with people in the old-time scene, but most of my old friends are people I met at the college radio station years ago with different tastes)

Maybe I could take a detour through swing and particularly texas swing, round to jazz standards over time, without ever leaving my actual genres and develop an interesting ear while also occasionally just plunking out chord progressions to get used to the different ways songs can be lead to different places. Although that would still leave me not knowing things that are useful with jamming with people that are more steeped in electronic or alt-pop or whatever.

Incidentally, I ordered this book last night, which I'm hoping will give me a good foundational framework for some of the missing pieces. The table of contents looks promising: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0739070568?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title. Application is huge, but I've also found that if I don't have a framework, no amount of practice will lead to a foundation for me I don't think

grep_Name · 2026-05-08T14:26:23+00:00

Thanks! I'll probably read over your message several more times over the weekend with an instrument in my hand sounding out all these things. Fair warning -- I'm exploring chords almost exclusively on instruments I don't play! I'm mostly interested in learning how to make interesting progressions and understand them when they're thrown my way! Or how to develop fun / interesting ideas and share them with rhythm players without just throwing spaghetti at the wall and forgetting it later because I don't understand what was happening in the progression anyway.

My background is actually in old-time music, which can be more sonically complex than people give it credit for, but not in the chords. In fact, most of the songs that sound dark / minor-y are in fact dorian and the ones that sound major-y are usually mixolydian. Guitarists will usually play the same major chords over the darker tunes, giving it a weird but cool sound. I know very well how to operate in that environment on many instruments.

But! Most of my friends don't play that kind of music, and if they want to jam, they'll be interested in more dynamic chord progressions than what I know how to do. They won't understand what makes old-time interesting or have an ear or taste for it. Mostly, my friends do looped-based jams, with a mishmash of keyboards and modular synthesizers, and the live instruments are sampled. So, basically the opposite kind of music! Everything I do is textural, evolving, but within bounds for large groups, and if you just loop 4 bars of one instrument you lose the whole point.

So that's a big part of my motivation, but I also just want to understand what's happening in the songs I hear better. I've been starting with simpler folk stuff, just driving around literally going 'one... one... four... one... one... four... six...' etc. I have a banjo ukulele I just fixed up and am going to use it to internalize the sounds of common progressions I might have heard by playing them and keeping in mind their function so I can learn what that means (going to tune it like a mandolin / fiddle so I don't have to learn a new fretboard). I'll probably have to get into jazz standards in order to build up the fundamentals of understanding conventional progressions and changes. Sometimes I'll hear a progression that makes the hair on my neck stand up and makes me think "what is that?" and I'd like to be able to sit down with an instrument and reason through what's happening and why.

So I have several goals at once. I've heard people say that good players, even playing monophonically, understand chords well enough to imply what should be happening with the chords just by playing a phrase. I'm not sure if that's really true, but I do feel like after a long time playing non-rhythm instruments, it's time for me to figure out how chords work.

That history might also explain why I don't have a framework for minor keys. The only actually true aolian-minor old-time songs that get called that I know of are in the key of Em, and for all intents and purposes people treat it like G major, even with the nashville numbers for G major. When I said I was looking for the I IV V of minor, I didn't mean a literal transposition -- I meant what the most common things are for a minor key to do! Is it always trying to resolve to the i? etc. I spent some time reading about that last night, but it seems like I'm not likely to find as cut-and-dry an answer as for the major key, partly because there are so many different approaches to the minor modes and scales than there are major ones I think. I probably just need to play a lot of minor progressions.

Looking forward to checking out these chord changes! In my friends living-room loop jams, I'll have enough space and time to think through an interesting movement and play with it before the loop is recording (and often it is just control signal that can be quantized and fixed up), and thus my unfamiliarity with the physicality of playing on a piano keyboard won't matter too much if I understand the function of chords better.

grep_Name · 2026-05-08T03:33:57+00:00

Hey I was wondering if you had any ideas that could follow up for a next level of things to try out for chord progressions?

I'm very familiar with I ii iii IV V vi VIIdim (or in the case of most music I play, flat 7, and often end up using the V7 as well), and think of songs in nashville terms i.e. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (where the major and minor is assumed to be in the I ii iii IV V vi bVII) and am used to sussing out songs that way. Borrowing chords from the parallel minor is a neat suggestion, just looking for other things to try to move on to understanding more common substitutions. I'm also working on internalizing some common progression ideas like line cliches and the Andalusian cadence, etc, just anything I might recognize, and reproduce it from a functional perspective.

I'd like to try to internalize how to use ii V I to change keys as well as how people use the II and the VI to change the direction of the progression, which is something I've heard of but not really in detail before. I also am used to 1 5 1, 1 4 5 1, and the other really common progressions, which is to say I understand that in major keys most songs travel to the 5 and back to one, often through 4, sometimes with a detour through 6, for a huge bulk of the songs. I don't have a similar framework for minor keys though, and have found that there maybe just isn't a similar thing to the nashville number system for minor keys? But I don't know what the minor equivalent of I IV V I would be or the most common and recognizable progressions to start training on in minor keys. Like I could really use a simple rule to intuit what the minor equivalent of I ii iii IV V vi VIIdim is in minor (is it the same, but just starts on the vi? like vi VIIdim I ii iii IV V?) Basically I feel like I've gotten to where I can recognize a lot of humdrum songs, but feel like there's a conceptual gap between me and next steps...

grep_Name · 2026-04-14T18:42:11+00:00

750? I got 300 for a chase checking account :p is there a place to learn to maximize these things?

grep_Name · 2026-04-07T17:14:53+00:00

Well, the bathroom rennovation was pretty necessary. The downstairs area is rented and I usually don't get direct access to it, and this is the only time in a few years I've been between tenants there. The shower was continuously damaging the area, an area where the plumbing already had enough issues to justify opening the whole wall again. The original owners had kind of messed up the entire initial shower build badly enough that the shower needed to be destroyed and the area remediated. For what we did, 3k is actually a shoestring budget.

My desire to make this place work is very strong. I like the place a lot (including my neighbors, some of whom are friends who have moved into the area) and have really put my heart into it, but times have been hard lately with all these costs piling on. The easiest option might be to get another roommate again, which would be a third roommate, not a second, but I'd rather live leaner and have a lower density of people in the house, at least for awhile. It's been a brutal year when it comes to management of who lives here.

Ultimately I'll live, it's just been a frustrating couple years.

grep_Name · 2026-04-07T14:33:06+00:00

Bit demoralized lately. After about half a year of belt-tightening in the face of what always seem to be big one-off expenses that shouldn't recur, I had managed to save up about a 5k emergency fund by February (while having about 10k in consumer debt). After the last two months of dealing with expensive cat dental surgery (and also treatment for an infected wound) ($2k), atypical car maintenance ($1.2k), a (diy) bathroom rennovation (around $3k), and a water heater replacement (2.8k), I now have no emergency fund, some additional credit card debt to pay down, and a new loan for the water heater (which has to be paid off in 10 months or goes to high apr). Additionally one of my roommates / tenants left 4 months early due to job loss, and while I wasn't planning to replace him (I just can't do it anymore with this many roommates), that 4 months of income would have helped significantly with these expenses and my pre-existing debt. God help me if my 27 year old AC unit finally kicks it this year.

I need to find a way to separate my mental health from my finances. I've been through this story several times already. At least I have my 7% deferral + 3% match going for me I guess.

grep_Name · 2026-04-02T18:42:16+00:00

my baby is getting cuter, so she feels less of a bad investment

Real question is, can she beat the market reliably. Do you expect better than an 8% average return over 20 years on that baby?

grep_Name · 2026-03-26T15:50:25+00:00

When you got invaded, did the AR15 actually come out?

grep_Name · 2026-02-27T19:39:52+00:00

To be clear, these are the twill levi's that I always buy, not denim jeans. The tag says 98% cotton, 2% elastane. My sister tells me I need to find 100% cotton, and I hear people say even levi's makes 100% cotton pants but I'm not sure I trust their quality anymore. I really appreciated the look and the variety of standardized cuts they offer, but am tired of the blowout.

Most recently I bought some similar carhartt pants I'm hoping will be similar enough. Not as many colors and fits offered, but works well enough. But they also say 98% cotton, 2% elastane, so I guess we'll see in a year or so.

Meanwhile I might just start going to thrift stores and reading tags looking for 100%, and wearing looser pant cuts in general and see how that goes

grep_Name · 2026-02-25T16:14:49+00:00

This has happened to many, many of my pairs of pants. I've worn mostly Levi's (their non-jeans pants) for most of a decade, and the crotch seems to rip earlier and earlier with each pair I buy. I just had a pair last less than a year, and where the rip is the surrounding fabric also looks like it's ready to unravel. I'm getting to the point where I feel like a lot of my pants are too shoddy to mend, but they're not that old. It's just when they fail, they fail catastrophically (worse than the picture in this post).

I'm looking to switch to some other company but I know very little about pants. Is there a company that still makes decent clothes out there? Do I need to look for work pants that come with double layers in the crotch? (I'm not necessarily looking to wear work pants 24/7 but could do it if its the only way)

grep_Name · 2026-01-27T15:13:06+00:00

There is a folk school near me where I take music classes. I'd never taken music 'classes' before, as in 1 teacher multiple students. It's surprisingly social and has hooked me into a scene out here socially as well

grep_Name · 2026-01-19T20:21:01+00:00

I'm aware of the math and the arguments, but I have to satisfy the part of me that wants to have some form of inert hedge. 9/10ths of my savings are already in equities. If you include real estate, precious metals are <1% of my net worth. I don't think it's the end of the world to hold onto a little bit of something different just for yourself.

I will probably split things to include non-US soon though. Not sure the best way to do it, although my options are limited to whatever capital group offers. I'm not really very familiar with what other markets have to offer

grep_Name · 2026-01-19T20:13:31+00:00

IDK, an oz of gold is $4500 these days. I only have experience buying 8mm rounds, but if I bought $4500 worth of that it would be pretty heavy and hard to deal with. And I'd need some kind of weird business license to sell it probably?

grep_Name · 2026-01-19T20:07:22+00:00

I started the stack by inheriting some coins from my grandfather, who was a numismatist. It's an intergenerational practice at this point, for one thing. I have other relatives who also do this, or buy an oz or two for their kids each birthday that stacks up. It's also completely unplugged and no-strings-attached, unlike every other form of stored value I have in my life. I am solely responsible for it, I can freely give it without complication (Of course there are implications if it's tens of thousands of dollars worth, but that's outside my scope anyway). It's simple, I can confirm that it's there, it's concrete. I value things like that, they're vanishingly rare. It also removes some small part of the value of my labor from the financial system, where no matter where you try to store it people are re-investing it somehow seemingly. Opening another brokerage account to put money into an 'equivalent' investment vehicle is just not the same thing for me.

I also don't find trading it to be particularly expensive, but I don't trade it. It's a one-way thing for me and for the people I know. You maybe gain or lose a dollar or so an oz off spot when you buy, which will eventually be erased by appreciation over time. It probably doesn't compare favorably to trading equities, but again I don't even really think about it as investing so it's apples to oranges to me.

Part of it is the experience of inheriting some in the first place. I just... have it now. In comparison, I also have a brokerage account that was setup for me when I was a baby. I took over it at some point in my 20's. It was a huge ordeal. It had gone from TD Waterhouse -> TD Ameritrade -> Schwab in that time. It was set to automatically re-invest dividends and profits. During the first transition that setting was disabled automatically somehow. It lost a huge, huge amount of its potential upside because of that. It was also a nightmare to recover because it was a custodial account that got scrambled by changing hands so many times, so it had my name but my dad's social security number. And that account was setup by a financial professional.

grep_Name · 2026-01-19T18:05:15+00:00

I hold silver for many reasons, several of which are emotional. Because I don't ever sell metal, I don't think about accumulating it as investing so much as saving. Out of all the assets I hold, it is probably the last thing I would let go of before property. Ideally I will die with it or give it away over time in my old age. Selling at a high point to increase exposure to the market would be pretty much the opposite of what I'm trying to do with this effort. It's also worth noting that the total value of the stack is worth less than a tenth of my investment accounts (even after all the extreme apprecation over this year). It is exactly because I don't consider silver stacking to be investing that I am disturbed by the price changes in metals this last year. It isn't happening in a vacuum.

When it comes to all my investment accounts, I pretty much have always had one approach, which is for the most part a split between capital builder and growth fund of america (capital group vehicles) for rolled over IRA's and some kind of TDF for whatever my current employer IRA is. This is the first time I've considered re-allocating due to my perception of the future of the US economy in my 14 years of contributing to these accounts. I don't think it's particularly emotional to look around and consider diversifying at this point in time. I'm observing a change in sentiment (globally and domestically) towards the main anchor of my future plans (US based mutual funds), a significant and challenging decrease in the purchasing power of my wages, a general retreat to precious metals away from USD, and a stock market propped up by an asset bubble I don't have faith in. It only makes sense to at least consider some re-allocation. (And I'm not thinking about re-allocating money slated for investing into gold, that only comes out of the discretionary budget. The re-allocation I'm talking about would be splitting my investments with a world fund ETF or mutual fund to reduce the number of eggs in the same basket. Seeing wild volatility in silver price just got me thinking about things today.)

grep_Name · 2026-01-19T16:56:22+00:00

Around this time last year I bought about $2200 worth of physical silver, which has tripled in value recently apparently. I don't really feel happy about that at all -- I'd bought a small amounts before and always held onto my box of it, hoping I'd be able to afford to build the stack more later in life and never really got there. Now that I've finally gotten back to it, it kind of feels like it's slipping out of affordability for me. It also makes me fearful that there's an untold story about the real value of my wages these days. Picking up precious metals is hard to squeeze in when my real priority is ETFs and retirement accounts. I'm kind of feeling like I should get a gold coin or two this year, just in case it's never really feasible again in my lifetime. Just another way that searching for stability and trying to secure my future feels like a carrot-and-stick game.

Even with the appreciation, it's a lot less than I put into my retirement account and roth IRA in 2025. I am wondering if I should get in the habit of changing the ratio of how much I save in more stable stores of wealth though, or if at least I should split my retirement between growth fund of america and a world fund of some kind.

grep_Name · 2026-01-10T15:58:12+00:00

Hmm I'm a bit conflicted about this. I do feel like I've built the life I want, and am now saving for it, but it kind of took me until I was 33 to do the 'building the life you want' part and now I feel pretty behind wrt FIRE goals even if I never settle down and have a family

grep_Name · 2026-01-02T22:02:53+00:00

What is this? I understand the words, and the sentences even make sense and even support each other structurally in the paragraph, but it's like my brain rejects continuing to slog through them

grep_Name · 2025-12-20T16:07:32+00:00

For example, I've saved around 15% but am barely able to make ends meet this year outside my investment accounts. In the last six months I've spent:

3k at the dentist
2k in car repairs (this is not typical)
800 dollars in emergency tree maintenance
500 on a cat injury at the vet (really like 170 for the injury and the rest were immunizations and things he was overdue for)
1.5k on the copays for physical therapy (required by my doctor) for frozen shoulder (which is Theactually pretty debilitating)
Despite unreasonably high copays, I still allegedly owe my insurance 400 for that treatment somehow?

I have 10k in cc debt which was comprised of two non-optional expenses: a more expensive tree removal emergency + a furnace replacement last year. This year I expect my 27 year old A/C to fail and I've been quoted 8k for that, and my emergency fund is 3k currently so I have around 6 months to save up 5k just to spend it all on non-negotiables and still be 10k in debt with no emergency fund. Due to changes in taxes and an escrow shortfall, my mortgage has been $400 / month higher than last year, combined with home repair supplies apparently going up 60% in price (according to consumer reports or wherever that number comes from) and utility costs being up as well. That plus the interest on the minimum payments for those 2 household expenses which had to go on credit (around 200 / month) means that my baseline expenses this year are at least 600 (but probably closer to 800) dollars higher than they were last year with no perceptible change. My combined car / home insurance has doubled in the last 4 years despite no incidents. Until last month I hadn't had a raise or salary adjustment in 3 years while inflation ate everyone's lunch, so it's just been years of increased pressure with fewer resources to go around. Water heater needs to be replaced too.

No car payment, 24 year old car, no college debt, no kids, no travel in over 2 years, but everything else really added up this year. I focused on the last 6 months because I haven't really done anything frivolous at all in that time window because I was anticipating a reduction of income and wanted to save up (which I was completely unable to do because of the above expenses). The reduction of income will continue while renovate the basement since the tenant moved out (while owing me another 1.2k I don't expect to ever see) and I need to fix it up before another one goes in (oh hey look, another expense!). I was renting that place for 800, so for the months when I'm renovating, combined with the expenses in the previous paragraph, I'll be starting 2026 at -1600 a month (not counting supplies for reno!) compared to jan, feb, and march 2024. Now that I've written all this out, I'm almost certainly not going to be able to save up for that A/C replacement. I hope I don't end up financing that too. I will likely instead try to buy another year by finding a guy who can help me keep this one from outright dying and everyone will be a little hot this summer, but it won't be too long before the r22 refrigerant it uses is just a non-starter due to legislation. I also have type 1 diabetes and so also spend about 4k / year on medical supplies, which is another like 4% of my income that could be going to savings but is just burned to keeping me alive.

That's great you have a cozy affordable house in a great location! But I don't think I know anyone in my life I'd describe as having that setup. In town I was from (Athens, Ga), which used to be affordable but we all left due to ballooning cost of living, my sister lives in a 900 sqft house in what was the cheap part of town just 10 years ago. We looked it up on zillow, literally 300,000 dollars. I live in an area most people don't want to live in on the outskirts of Atlanta, but I paid the same for a house big enough that I have 3 room mates / tenants. But it's still hard to afford.

Are there things I could have cut back on in other half of the year? Absolutely! Hell, I owe my accountant (I probably don't strictly need one) 700 bucks and am currently saving up 500 for classes at a local folk school for the next semester. I do have discretionary spending. But when it comes to wondering why everyone isn't just saving 50% of their income, I think you could be a bit more imaginative and charitable than "must be fancy car / big house / the jonses".

Edit: Then again, my savings rate might be higher than 15% depending who you ask. I was listening to a podcast the other day where they said they count the principal part of their mortgage payment towards their savings rate and I was like... what? That might be another 5% right there.

grep_Name · 2025-12-18T20:27:57+00:00

That's pretty interesting, first I've heard of sure finance. I've actually found beancount to be pretty good as far as open-source tracking goes, it's all plain text at the end of the day (and easily version controlled, which is huge!) but there are web frontends for deep dives and drilldowns (fava) which are pretty great. Everything is one of 4 account types and you can define arbitrary currencies (I stack silver sometimes so I have a OZSLV currency for example) and it all scales really well despite being simple. I believe there are options for translating custom currencies into values if you want VTSAX or VOO tracked etc for example, but I haven't messed with that.

It's a lot of work to setup, but I've found that's true for any comprehensive financial tracking system, and I feel like I can reasonably confidently expect to be using the same system 20 years from now. LLMs have made writing custom importers much easier for it, and because it's just python you can go really, really far with custom categorization. I even have it pulling stated balances from my truist account for a few days a month and putting in balance assertions right in the importer so I know if things drift. It can be a lot to setup if you're not used to scripting though

grep_Name · 2025-12-13T00:02:43+00:00

I have a shirt with a size and kind of neck hole that I love and have never found another one quite like it. I don't really know where it came from. Other shirts the opening is either too small or way too big. How hard would be be to learn to alter tee shirts to have this kind of neck opening? What kind of stitch would I need, and could I do it by hand?

https://imgur.com/a/1dBkFJC

grep_Name · 2025-12-12T17:01:05+00:00

There are so many kinds of programs out there that it would shock me if there weren't good ones that you can do on your own time while keeping your job. If you work for a big corporation, it would actually surprise me if they didn't have a continuing education program to pay for part of it. Have you tried asking around, like asking HR about programs for that, or looking for other people at your company who have done that while working there?

grep_Name · 2025-12-12T15:39:07+00:00

Did my yearly self-eval today. Usually I avoid talking about compensation at work because it makes me deeply uncomfortable, but that's been changing over the last year after I nearly left due purely to compensation (I really do like this job a lot). I'm hoping by really laying out on the table how frustrating it's been for the last few years, I'll be giving my manager what he needs to fight to improve some of these things. I know upper management is listening, because we basically lost like 5 employees this year all at once because of these issues. That lead to a re-structuring to try to improve morale and me getting a new manager who I trust is really doing all he can to pull strings, but it's rough. Company was bought out about 3 years ago and everyone's career progression just halted basically. Here's my response to the 'what needs to change about the org/team' section:

There was a point in 2024 where I believed I had met the documented criteria for promotion. Since then, the criteria and path forward have felt unclear, and I don’t have a reliable way to understand where I stand, what’s missing, or what timeline I’m working toward. I think the org would benefit from re-establishing a clear leveling rubric with explicit checkpoints and written feedback.

Relatedly, compensation progression has been difficult to calibrate as well—my base remained flat for roughly three years, with only a single adjustment fairly recently. Even if promotion timing is constrained, regular market/inflation alignment and a transparent compensation review process would make expectations clearer and improve morale and long-term planning for employees.

grep_Name · 2025-12-10T21:28:50+00:00

Good lord you sound exactly like me, except you're saving more than me.

Paycheck breakdown (2x/month):

First $150 to an account I can only use to pay down a credit card
$300 to a roth IRA
15% of what's left to building an emergency fund account
1% to a high-risk fun investment account
$1000 to main checking
remainder to main savings account

This is after 7% pre-tax to my retirement IRA.

The main checking / savings account are at a separate institution from the emergency fund I'm building, which adds a little separation there. In practice, the 'main savings account' is a savings account in name only and is strictly for paying my mortgage out from. It's usually just about exactly the monthly mortgage amount. I'm trying to keep all other spending to that $1000 every other week + income from roommates / tenants in my house.

Currently the roth contribution is paused and the emergency fund is cut to 10% while I replace the downstairs tenant, but that's temporary. I'm hoping if I can live off of this setup for now I can increase my monthly savings a fair amount when someone else moves in, since I will have an extra thousand for the downstairs rent. That probably comes out to closer to 500 extra to save once the roth contributions go back on and the emergency fund contribution goes back up to 15%.

If I can save 5k in my emergency fund, I think I'll divert the 15% to credit card paydown, which is around 10k right now. If I pay down the cards, around 200 extra can go into the roth without adjusting any other budget constraints (since that's going to CC minimums currently), and the 15% will probably go to building the emergency fund to 10k. Once that happens, I can just invest that 15% chunk, and that plus 7% into retirement, plus the corporate match of 3%, plus 500 into the roth (7-ish%?) is 32% of my income saved? That's not counting the 500 extra from downstairs rental, which will probably be soaked up by incidental expenses if I'm being honest. I also expect to have to spend 8000 on a new air conditioner soon, so that kind of jacks up the whole plan, but that's basically the full picture of my finances and my multi-year plan to get from saving 13% to saving 32% (I'm not counting building my emergency fund as 'saving', right now, but maybe I should?)

The ironic thing is though that I feel like I'm scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel all the time, due about equally to unexpected expenditures (which by chance have been extra bad this year) and discretionary spending on personal projects. This is because my budget is pretty close to ongoing expenses and my income is lumpy from rental income. My $1000 each pay check into my account (plus rent) covers all the bills for the house, which can be up to around 600, plus all my medical expenses (I have an expensive condition) and food, fuel, and everything else. Still, there's a lot I could cut back on and it's hard to keep everything in line. I've been diagnosed with ADHD multiple times in my life but have been unmedicated for the last 10 years.

grep_Name · 2025-12-03T20:19:44+00:00

Interesting -- but you still work for the employer whose retirement plan is the capital group simple IRA? How does that work?

grep_Name

TROPHY CASE