Five more days until I’m fully vaccinated (two weeks after my second shot). My husband gets his second shot on Wednesday. And our roommate got his one and done Johnson & Johnson shot a week ago, so he’s fully vaccinated next Friday.

The kiddo won’t get his turn for a while yet, but the rest of our household is so close to being fully vaccinated. It’s wonderful. Washington state opened up to all residents 16+ yesterday, and Pfizer has requested authorization for the 12-15 age group. We’ve got a long way yet til we get back to “normal” (whatever that will look like now), but the future is starting to look brighter.

Friday’s Frugal Five

1. Over the weekend I was able to help a friend set up a Roth IRA and begin to fund it. She had started talking to a financial advisor and was going to pay for the help, but to simply open an account with Vanguard, she really didn’t need them. After we set it up, she remarked at just how easy it was.

We also went through some compound interest calculators and messed around with conservative returns over a 20+ year period. If it feels too late to “get started,” it’s not. Every day you get started now is a day that will set you up better for the future.

2. I finally but the bullet and set up a 529 account for the kiddo. I’ve been waffling about this for about as long as he’s been alive, but I decided a small one has no real downsides. We don’t know what college will look like in more than a decade, but *some* amount of dedicated 529 funds seems wise.

Washington doesn’t have a traditional 529 program, and the GET (Guaranteed Education Tuition) program is one we’ve actively decided to avoid after dealing with paying for part of my husband’s college with one funded for him. The program is wonky, and the rules continue to get worse. Instead, I opened a Nevada 529 account with the minimum $3,000 deposit. Now will I add more beyond that or keep other funds in more flexible locations? Time will tell.

3. A payment got pulled from our bank account a day earlier than it should have, and it overdrew our account for a day, so we were charged a $35 NSF fee.

Even a few months ago, I likely would have just grumbled and let it be because it would have felt like too much effort to fix. I’m starting to feel like I have more bandwidth though, so I took the time to chat with the bank and get it reversed. Instead of just then letting that $35 sit though, I moved it to my “found savings” account, because that’s really what it was at that point.

4. My Bing account had grown again and I was able to cash out $15 worth of Amazon gift card rewards. While I may be attempting to quit Amazon as much as possible, we still buy some things that way, so the gift cards are still worth it.

Just like with the returned NSF fee, I sent an equivalent $15 straight to savings. These may not be big numbers, but I find that because they’re small, the money just flows through our fingers unless I intentionally put it aside into savings.

5. The chicken coop build continued to advance this week, and we now have the coop platform built and the nesting boxes in process. Lumber is EXPENSIVE right now, and I literally couldn’t be buying wood at a worse time. I want the coop done though, so I’m sucking it up and paying for materials.

Some of the materials are coming from Second Use though, which makes me very happy. We have windows, hardware, and some other odds and ends that aren’t new, and they’re cheaper for it as well.

Exercise Update

We spent last weekend in Leavenworth, so Friday and Saturday were spent walking around the town. We stayed at the KOA, which is about a mile out of downtown, and well spaced out for Covid concerns.

I went for a twenty minute run on Sunday when we got home, and then another forty minute one on Monday. Even with all that time on my feet, my heel still feels good and I’m so thankful for that.

Tuesday was a weights workout with my local friend again. Wednesday and Thursday were longer walks, plus working on the coop and in the garden.

Have you been able to be vaccinated yet? Has it changed your perspective of how things look right now?