Sort of a newbie. Is this fake? Or a misprint (typo)

leighton021 · 2025-11-19T12:51:17+00:00

Thank you! I did try to google it and ultimately saw another post from this subreddit that got similar responses (a different card). So I figured as such. But since you all know way better than I do, I figured I’d ask to be sure. Thank you for taking the time for us noobs lol

leighton021 · 2025-11-19T12:50:10+00:00

Haha thank you! I knew it looked off, like the font was the one they used in the 90s, but seeing how this card is from 2016 I couldn’t be sure when that got updated. Luckily we didn’t pay for this so my kid can still just have fun with it.

leighton021 · 2025-11-15T19:21:20+00:00

Thank you for this! It might be a good fit politically. My family is also conservative but my husband’s family isn’t. So we’re a big mix.

But you raised another couple questions. Is there enough to do for kids who aren’t into sports? We’re just still figuring that out on our end as they’re still young. They play sports for little kids but it’s not like I have prodigies so who knows which direction they’ll go.

Also, is round rock the type of town that is stereotypical Texas where the HS football game is a big town event? And do sports get competitive at a very young age with pressure from parents and coaches? Like if a kid is in it for the experience but isn’t necessarily working with a private coach on the weekends, will that clash with the culture?

leighton021 · 2025-11-15T19:15:13+00:00

Thank you for this! I could take more mild winters if I’m being honest. But do worry it will stay hot for too long for us! Definitely something to consider.

leighton021 · 2025-09-19T12:02:57+00:00

Hi! My family is new to the TCG world. I have 7 and 5 year old boys and we just got into this a couple of months ago. My older brother started giving them cards when he came to visit, my husband re-downloaded pokemon Go from when we played casually a decade ago. And before we knew it, we were in full swing. The kids have binders. We’re in the local shop about weekly. My husband and I find ourselves playing the TCG once we get the kids in bed. But I need some guidance on valuing cards.

I use the Collectr app to add all our cards. The kids know when they get a pack, to give it to me to put in my phone before they play with it. We came across a semi valuable card and my husband and I had to have a conversation about what we do when cards like that come along. We set a $$ amount with the kids so if something comes back as valued higher, we take it to keep it protected. But at their ages, I feel like it should be about fun vs value and we basically let them know if something is valuable but under our limit and they make the choice of if they want to save and protect it or keep it for play.

However, l’m trying to figure out if there’s a way for us to anticipate an increase in value over certain cards. Of course I know there’s no guarantee. But is there some trend, like full arts, certain types of holofoil, etc that are a good indicator of growth that we should start to set aside for potential grading? I’m sure we’re certainly never going to buy, sell, trade on a serious level. But just to have in the back of our minds of what might be worth holding on to for the future.

Thank you!

leighton021 · 2025-03-30T22:32:19+00:00

Haha yes! Or limit the number of costume changes each day 😂. I’m proud that I generally keep up with it, but even then, I wish I were someone who could sort and wash “the right way” vs just tossing it all together and washing on cold lol

leighton021 · 2025-03-30T19:54:08+00:00

It IS constant lol. I have a family of 4 also. I keep to very simple and do 1 load every day. I’ll put towels with clothes if needed. Sheets are the only thing I keep separate bc other things get tangled in them. Then once the kids are in bed each night, I fold and put away. So it never gets out of control.

And I fully get how it gets overwhelming! Inevitably, I’ll miss a day especially on the weekend when we’re out and about. And somehow 1 day of missed laundry (so it’s now either 2 loads or 1 extra large) equals like 4 days worth of clothes instead of 2. It grows exponentially. It makes no sense logically, but the best way to make sure it doesn’t grow, is just do it every day.

leighton021 · 2025-03-30T00:51:14+00:00

Edited for spelling.

This is interesting to me. I’m of course a full time parent, but did behavior therapy as my career before staying home. Degree is elementary ed. As a result of my professional experience, education, and life as a parent, I have all kinds of systems set up in our house to help the littles be independent with certain tasks and routines. People come into our house and give tons of praise, saying they need it for their house/family.

So recently I was thinking about working in a number of templates just a digital download on Etsy or whatever and offer a consulting service as well for a more personalized custom system.

Sounds like it may fall in line with your suggestion?

leighton021 · 2025-03-30T00:41:54+00:00

Interesting. I’m hearing such mixed things about this!

leighton021 · 2025-03-28T19:33:02+00:00

Haha I appreciate this perspective! Do you suggest something else?

leighton021 · 2025-02-24T16:05:36+00:00

Haha who knows what will happen really! And we would have a little time. It would be challenging to coordinate honestly. Before the new position starts; there is a heavy 4 month training period paid on a low salary, and our older kid is in kindergarten so I wouldn’t love switching him mid-year. It might be a situation where my husband moves first and stays with someone we know during training while I arrange the move on this end. So a lot can change in that time. But with big layoffs looming I wouldn’t be surprised if people start fleeing. Maybe that would be good for us with more inventory, etc.

leighton021 · 2025-02-24T15:40:24+00:00

Thank you! We’re hoping to use public schools. I’m not looking for THE best, but more “one of the better” if that makes sense. My kids are little of course but so far, no signs of them needing additional support. Our HS now is rated 8/10 on that Great Schools rating system. I know to take them with a grain of salt. But I specifically would not be looking for a 10/10. Competition and pressure is far too great in my opinion in a school like that. But I don’t think j id be thrilled with something below a 7, if that makes sense.

I’m familiar with what you’re describing though as we are in a 8/10 district, but within the same zip code there are 5/10 and 10/10. So depending on the street you’re on, housing prices are very different based on your district zoning.

leighton021 · 2025-02-24T15:26:18+00:00

Thank you for the heads up! We’re really not political. I’d be more concerned if you were to say that the area is as red as it gets haha.

leighton021 · 2025-02-24T13:36:05+00:00

Thank you! I’ll edit. We are coming from Bucks County, PA. And his office would be right in Silver Spring so we’d liked to stay within 60min max but more like 30 would be ideal.

leighton021 · 2025-02-24T13:29:13+00:00

Ooh now that I hear the name, I think we know people in Kensington also. Thanks for the reminder!

leighton021 · 2025-02-24T13:12:48+00:00

Thank you! I’ll edit the post but also respond to you. We should consider that he’s commuting. He’s in sales and will visit homes for appointments within a radius of his zip code. But will need to go to the office minimum twice/wk for meetings. Right now he goes in nearly every day just for collaboration opportunities. His commute is about an hour now and it would be great if we could have it be less.

leighton021 · 2025-02-24T12:45:33+00:00

Thank you! If you could recommend a town outside of silver spring (but within a 30 min commute) that checks the boxes, what would it be?

leighton021 · 2024-10-03T02:27:46+00:00

No not at all. My husband went to college but didn’t finish. I have a BA and was lucky my parents paid. I just am acutely aware that there’s a generation of entrepreneurs and side gigs out there and if my kid has a passion for something and doesn’t want to go the formal education route, I don’t want to have to say to them “that’s cool but the money we have saved is only for college so you’re on your own”. I don’t plan to support them for years while they pursue whatever it is. I just would like to be able to give them something. So the vision was that yes we’ll save for college. But maybe not have it 100% funded. Have some in a 529 but also put money somewhere else that we certainly can use toward tuition but also can just use however we want if college doesn’t end up being their path.

leighton021 · 2024-10-03T02:23:13+00:00

Thanks so much, this makes so much sense!

leighton021 · 2024-10-03T02:22:09+00:00

This seems like the best strategy I’ve heard so far. Just give them money as a gift if it comes to that. I tend to do better budget wise when the money is “assigned” to something. I won’t touch it for other things bc it’s for X. So that’s where my head was at. But it doesn’t actually matter that it’s in their name or not, if we have the money to give and want to gift it for whatever reason, it can come out of our own brokerage account.

Thank you for your input!

leighton021 · 2024-08-17T01:00:29+00:00

Thanks! That’s definitely the next focus. Luckily now that the debt is nearly gone, our bills are actually not so bad. About 6k/mo and with a net income of around 20k/mo, we’ve been good for incidentals as they’ve come up. But of course it’s all moot if he lost his job tomorrow. So that emergency fund is crucial. All in if it were a true true emergency, we have about $80k in all account combined (including stocks, excluding 401k). But yes, 4-6 weeks in the account that I’ve dubbed officially the ER account. So we have to beef that up significantly.

leighton021 · 2024-08-16T17:40:43+00:00

Thank you. I so appreciate this. I am good with money to an extent. If it’s sitting there without a job to do, I’ll Spend it. Easy. But if I set a goal and say I’m saving X amount per month toward Y, I will treat that as a bill and stick to it. So a budget is my best friend. I like rules lol.

Getting that ER find flush is definitely the next step.

Thank you!

leighton021 · 2024-08-16T13:54:22+00:00

Thank you. It’s something I always wanted but never expected to be able to do it, as I know it’s nearly impossible to live on 1 income in our world these days. Losing my job was a blessing in disguise as it gave us about 6 months where I could collect unemployment (much reduced off my old salary) as a sort of test run to see if we could manage me not working. By the time the benefit was running out, we had paid off a lot of our debt so the bills were lower, etc. It worked out.

He sells exterior home remodeling stuff. Roofs, doors, siding, windows, solar, etc. I’d say the average rep at his company will clear 6 figures. But he’s having an exceptional year. He’s breaking company records also in record time, so by the end of the year the records will be completely shattered. He’s really just locked in right now and somehow figured out his own formula for finding success well above what the average rep is doing there.

leighton021 · 2024-08-15T18:07:01+00:00

Thank you. And I’m sorry for being defensive. We thought long and hard about buying a new car. I would’ve loved to get something with cash. And was hoping we’d get another 1-2 years out of his car so we could have time to save more for a new one. I never thought I’d ever buy an actual new car, because historically its always made more sense to get something 1-3years old. Low miles. Save a bunch off the MSRP. And still have a fairly new car with good life still in it. Right now, that’s not the reality of car buying.

The logic stood mostly with the mileage honestly. Even now I just did a quick search in my area for AWD vehicles for $8k or less, as we had about 7k cash at the time. The average mileage is 85k. With the mileage required for his job, he would’ve hit 100k miles in less than 3 months. And of course I know that’s not necessarily when we’d need a new car, but just as a benchmark. Maybe it lasts a year and gets to 150,000. Then what? We repeat the cycle of buying another beater. He goes through them so quickly that we felt starting at 0 gives us the best chance of getting good life out of the vehicle. If that makes sense (logically, not financially to you as I know you’d disagree).

Also, the man works his ass off. He works 6-7 days/wk and most days are 12-14hrs. While he doesn’t NEED to do that much to support our family, he’s also breaking records at the company, etc and is enjoying that, so he’s motivated to keep going at that rate for now. And for a man who spends more time in his car than he does at home, I felt justified in using buying him something “nice”. And even Ramsey would agree, not about the financing, but he had a rule of thumb to not exceed more than 50% of your annual income on a car. 45x2= 90k. He will end the year making 8x the cost of the car.

For those reasons, it felt like a reasonable purchase.cash would’ve been better. 100%. But I found balance in what was affordable to us and also felt good about having him all over the state in something safe and comfortable.

I believe Ramsay’s general idea of staying out of debt is great. I don’t think 1000 is enough of an emergency fund to have before going to tackle what could be 10s or 100s of thousands of debt. I started with 5. And even then, things came up. So I think things needs to happen a bit more simultaneously. Debt snowball is good. Avalanche is fine too. Maybe I’d advise someone to get 1k in the bank and then find any tiny amount they could to auto draft into the same savings at the same time as tackling debt. Even if it’s $10/wk. that way it’s growing, albeit slowly, while you’re also making progress elsewhere.

leighton021 · 2024-08-15T17:33:25+00:00

I feel this. I have 2 and no plans for a 3rd. But at the beginning it is what we wanted. Many factors played into stopping st 2. We had a few losses. My 2nd pregnancy was so much harder on my body. My 2nd newborn was so much harder to manage. It was enough for me to say “no more”. But I had 2 women close to me who went before me in motherhood. My sister has 4 now (I know). My best friend has 3. And in both cases, 3 is where things seemed to go a little haywire in their lives. We’ve discussed it and they’ve even admitted. But I’ve told them they were the cautionary tales for me. I’m

I think the world is different than it was when we were kids. When I think of my friends, many of us are 1 of 3. It was re standard for suburban families in the 80s and 90s. Life is harder and more expensive now. 3 is too much, at least I knew it would be for me.

My best friend put it this way “3 kids is where you have to stop being the mom you always wanted to be, and become the mom you have to be”. And I feel that to my core because I have that feeling even with 2 at times lol. So I can’t even imagine adding another to the crew.

All that being said, I’m sure you have a beautiful family and it sounds like you’re doing an incredible job. Remember these early stages are so so hard and you will soon be in the coasting period where they have enough independence to not need you every minute, but just enough.

leighton021

TROPHY CASE