The First $100,000...

Tory Burch Robinson Colorblock Card Case (affiliate link) 

As I mentioned in an Instagram story last week, I've officially fully repaid my student loans! It almost feels anticlimactic to be done so suddenly with something that's taken a little over six years from when I graduated law school. (But with the paycut I took while clerking, I was only able to make serious payments for five of those years. I couldn't even keep up with the ~6% interest that was accruing to the tune of roughly ~$990/month while I was clerking.) 

Is it funny, or maybe just strange, that I don't even actually know what my total student loan balance was at its peak? Because ~6% interest was steadily accruing on the vast majority of the balance at all times - including while I was in law school and in the months between graduation and when I actually started working - the total balance was constantly in flux. If you've ever noticed inconsistencies in how I've described the size of my initial student loan balance over the years, it's mostly because of this constantly accruing interest. My total amount actually borrowed was different from my balance upon graduation, which was also different from my balance when I started working, etc. etc. I know the all-time high was at least ~$195,000, but I can't recall if it ever actually got much closer to $200,000, or even slightly exceeded it. 

There's a pretty common trope in personal finance-focused online discussion spaces about how "the first $100,000 is the hardest" to accumulate in savings and investments, and that's certainly been the case for me. Heck, because I started with an extremely negative net worth thanks to my law school student loans - and because I took that aforementioned paycut to clerk very early on in my career - it even took a super-long time for me to get to "the first negative $100,000" in net worth!

A Big and Somewhat Impulsive Idea

Somewhat random, but I really like Julianne Moore's street style. It's totally how I'd dress if I was an extremely wealthy woman living in NYC, with lots of practical-looking shoes plus nice handbags and comfortable-looking - but also luxe - coats and sweaters, all heavy on neutral colors. 

This is totally not the best thing to admit, and I'm not exactly proud of it, but now that I'm within spitting distance of finishing off my student loans for good - I'll most likely fully pay off the last ~$5,000 with the lion's share of my next paycheck in a few days - parts of my brain have been really clamoring for some extremely fancy shopping. And it's not just for the jewelry gift to myself I've been thinking about for a few months, the impulsive part of me wants even more than that! 

I think I'll end up doing a passable job controlling these impulses. I'll probably indulge a time or two, but primarily through the secondhand market. Given that I'm currently actively seeking to take a dramatic paycut to work for the government - if only they'll have me; it's a process that could take a year or more, and I only started applying recently - there's a definite budgetary limit to how much or how often I can act on these shopping ideas that have started popping up in my mind.

With this particular specific idea I'm about to name, I'd hoped a search through my blog archives would reveal that I'd been foreshadowing it for at least a few years now. In other words, I thought I'd previously mentioned this item at least a time or two, even if only in passing. It turns out that was not the case. 

I'm pretty sure I remember saying somewhere that I think this specific handbag is pretty cool, and that people roughly around my age who fell in love with it as far back as the mid 2000s, including Jessica, had excellent taste. (It's definitely a design that's withstood the test of time so much better than many other "it bags" that were also around back then, such as the Miu Miu Coffer I was totally in love with.) Maybe I only mentioned this in comments on other blogs? 

Please note that this post contains affiliate links that could result in my earning a small commission - at no extra cost to you - if you click and make a purchase. Thank you for your support! 

The item I'm talking about today is the Balenciaga City bag, specifically in black lambskin. I call it a "big and somewhat impulsive idea" for me because, up until a few weeks ago, I never seriously considered even a used one as a possible purchase for myself. At its retail price - which I think may have been around $2,050 most recently, though Balenciaga doesn't really sell this classic style much anymore? they also offer newer, more structured takes on the City design that I don't personally like - it was completely off the table for me, in part due to my highly nitpicky preferences that lead me to heavily favor extremely simple handbags (most of my collection is pictured here, I think you'll see what I mean by "extremely simple").

A Gift to Myself?

Via Mociun's Instagram page, most of these designs probably exceeded my maximum price limit, however. 

My remaining student loan balance is now down to ~$18,700. At my current rate of repayment - I've been putting in approximately ~$5,100/month - I remain on schedule to finish paying it off in full by late August or early September this year.* It's going to be a huge milestone for me when I finally finish paying off the ~$195,000 or so in student loans I had when I first started working full-time in fall 2015, after graduating law school. I simply can't wait to be done with my student debt once and for all.

Even though I haven't been shopping much for my wardrobe in 2021 so far - and have now proven somewhat disinterested in window shopping for any more clothes, shoes, and accessories while my day-to-day life is still not restored to something resembling pre-pandemic normal - I can't help but think about maybe buying myself a significant gift to commemorate this financial milestone. 

One idea - though, spoiler alert, I'm almost 100% certain this won't actually be it - is a handbag, provided there was a design I absolutely loved and was certain would be highly functional for me and would be something I'd reach for often. This could be the Celine Seau Sangle bag I was seriously contemplating 15 months ago, when I thought I'd soon be visiting Paris as part of a lengthy business trip also including stops in London and Luxembourg. (COVID-19 international travel shutdowns intervened before we got to Paris.) In the end, though, there still isn't any single handbag design I actually like that much and am absolutely sure would be worth it. 

The more likely idea for this milestone-commemorating gift to myself is a piece of jewelry, specifically a sapphire right-hand ring. I've looked at quite a few jewelers and types of designs and don't really have any specific ideas about what my ideal ring would look like, and thus, what the target price range would be. Obviously, there's definitely a concrete upper limit on what I would be willing to spend on this, I'm not planning to go absolutely wild to the point of financial irresponsibility! But there's a fairly wide range of prices I'm potentially willing to consider. 

2020 Year-End Shopping Reflections

Unlike in past years, I don't really have all that much to say when it comes to my 2020 fashion-related shopping, particularly when it comes to the analysis of individual purchases. I shopped a fair bit less than normal because it was a strange year, purchasing 20 total items in 2020 compared to 28 total items in 2019. I spent $3,528.14, significantly less than 2019's personal all-time high of $4,409.33 and also less than 2018's $4,016.51. 

I've already laid out most of the relevant personal finance context for 2020's fashion-related shopping in my recent and very belated 2019 year-end shopping roundup. My personal finance situation has changed dramatically since 2018: I first hit "net worth zero" in April 2019; paid down my student loan balance to five figures in late December 2019; and I've been steadily making substantial student loan payments since, most recently at $5,100/month. Assuming all goes well, I should finish paying off my current ~$38,900 balance - down from over $190,000 when I graduated law school in 2015 - by mid-August 2021. The end of my student loan repayment journey is finally in sight! 

Now that my student loan balance is solidly in the lower five figures and the possibility of being debt-free seems far more concrete and easier to imagine than before, I feel more acutely that every dollar spent now to indulge my fondness for clothes, shoes, and accessories - or to enjoy any other luxury - is a dollar not put into eradicating my remaining student loan balance even more quickly. To have full repayment be so tantalizingly close is to develop a more acute sense of opportunity costs with all my discretionary spending, I suppose. Would I rather buy this fun or pretty thing? Or are those dollars better spent on leaving my student loans behind for good? 

That's an indirect way of saying that I think - fingers crossed! - the first half of 2021 should be a fairly low shopping time for me when it comes to my closet, mainly because I'm just so eager to put more cash into my student loans. In any case, I expect to still be working almost fully from home until the COVID-19 vaccine is widely available to the general public here in NYC (vaccine distribution has been logistically challenging and slow in NYC so far, so this may not occur until summer). Between that and all the nice, colorful loungewear I already bought in 2020, I really shouldn't have any wardrobe "needs" coming up before August this year. 

I can't guarantee I won't still pick up something for my closet here and there when I see something pretty, particularly if there's a good sale available. But I also feel like I've gotten all the pandemic-induced stress-shopping urges out of my system by now - I pretty much went through two separate rounds of that in the first six or seven months of social distancing - so I also don't think I'll indulge too much. 

(Very Belated) 2019 Year-End Shopping Reflections

Now here's a post that's a year overdue! I'll admit, it feels silly to look back now on lessons learned from 2019 - particularly about something as light as my wardrobe and shopping - when we know, in hindsight, that it's soon to be followed by the postscript of the dramatic changes wrought by 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

But in the end, this type of shopping reflection is the original focus of my blog. Also, I really do think I came into my own in 2019 with regards to knowing and understanding my fashion tastes and preferences. Even if, starting in March 2020, I then had to learn yet another set of tastes and preferences to accommodate my new - even if temporary - work-from-home lifestyle.

Before getting into the shopping-focused analysis, some words about the larger, mostly financial context: April 2019 was when I first hit "net worth zero" - my student loan balance was finally equal to my cash savings and investments - nearly four years after graduating law school. (If I hadn't delayed my repayment progress by nearly two years due to the pay cut I took while clerking, I would probably have finished paying off my loans by April 2019. But that's not the career path I've chosen.) Then, in late December 2019, my student loan balance dropped below six figures for the first time, which really made it feel like the end was in sight. Since then, I've continued to ratchet up my monthly student loan payments, I now pay $5,100/month. Assuming no significant disruptions to my income, I'm now on track to finish paying off my loans in August 2021.

My total spending on my closet in 2019 - as documented monthly here - was $4,409.33, a personal all-time high. Totals for previous years were $2,729 (2015), $1,945.99 (2016), $2,883.13 (2017), and $4,016.51 (2018), as listed in my 2018 year-end shopping reflections post. I could even argue that most of my rather jaw-dropping January 2020 shopping should more properly be attributed to December 2019, as these were almost all post-Christmas sale purchases I ordered before the end of the year, though they arrived after. This would drive my 2019 total up even further. 

For all that I've been facing the prospect of, and then slowly chipping away at, a massive - initially over $190,000 total - student loan balance the entire time I've kept this blog, I've never been too worried about how much I spend on my wardrobe. Sure, the year-end totals look - and, in fact, often are - extravagant, given that my net worth was negative until April 2019. But whenever I've had a private-sector income - for four years out of the past five - I've always devoted well over half my take-home pay to "net worth positive" activities, a.k.a. loan repayment or savings and investments. Furthermore, with the exception of 2015, each year's total spend on clothes, shoes, and accessories is generally less than just a single a month's worth of student loan payments I'm making at the time, or would soon be making. 

And, as you'll see once I get into the nitty-gritty analysis of my 2019 purchases, I knew my fashion tastes and preferences well. There were no significant mistake purchases or shopping regrets that, in hindsight, I should have seen coming. 

Shopping Plans for the Rest of 2020

I've had serious writer's block lately when it comes to blogging! I have many ideas for new posts, particularly personal finance and career-related ones, but can't bring myself to do the actual writing. In times like this, shopping is pretty much the only topic I can manage to write a few paragraphs about. Lighter topics, such as shopping, are much easer to work with when my brain can't focus on writing about anything more substantive. 

With only two months left in the year, I feel as if I can now be somewhat confident in my predictions for what my shopping might look like for the rest of 2020. Though I also don't want to make overly lofty promises about buying relatively few items or about buying almost nothing! The only way to go from there is down, really, by breaking those promises if I get swept up by seeing something new that I think is beautiful or by seeing a particularly good sale. 

Though there are a few factors that make me feel somewhat more confident in saying I'm pretty sure I'll buy what is - for me, given my well-documented history of often being driven by somewhat sudden shopping impulses - a relatively small number of items for the remainder of the year:

• First and foremost, I'm still social distancing and working from home as much as possible. I'll go to the office if explicitly instructed to or for certain tasks (basically just for filing deadlines or assisting with remote depositions or hearings, things that only happen once a month or so at most under my current caseload). Outside of that, K and I only go out for doctor's appointments or essential grocery or pharmacy trips. So I clearly don't need more clothes, shoes, or accessories! And I also don't encounter new inspiration from seeing what other people wear.  
• Second, because I rarely go out, I almost never need to wash my outside clothes or put them in the laundry hamper. All my outside clothes are hanging up in the closet or tucked away in my dresser at the same time, a rare occurrence pre-COVID. It really drives home how much I already have. My share of the wardrobe storage space in our apartment is not quite at 100% capacity, but it's honestly getting close. That helps me think twice about potential new purchases.
• Third, now that I'm - finally! - somewhat close to paying off my student loans in full  roughly 10 months left if I maintain my current rate of paying ~$5,100/month), I've been focused even more than before on saving and my finances. (And I was already extremely focused on these topics before, I've been doing tons of labor-intensive - though not always productive - personal finance tracking for years!) To tell the truth, cutting my fashion-related shopping spend doesn't have a huge impact on my overall financial health. My total spending in this category last year - as documented here - was $4,409.33, a personal all-time high, but that's still less than a single month's worth of student loan payments. Regardless, thinking about these things still puts a damper on my interest in spending more on my wardrobe right now. 

For 2020 so far, I've spent $3,083.22 on clothes and accessories, as described in my monthly shopping posts. Thanks to the lifestyle changes wrought by COVID-19, I definitely don't need anything new for the foreseeable future, though I might still want to add a few things to my closet because I think they're pretty. I'm hoping I can keep the rest of my 2020 shopping to a somewhat moderate level, limited mostly - maybe even entirely - to the following:

The Earrings: As I mentioned last week, I've been trying to decide on a pair of earrings from Lingua Nigra, a Black woman-owned jewelry line. I think I've decided on the smaller, slightly less dangly "Shower of Faith" baby fringe earrings, rather than the more statement-making "Fringe Theory" earrings. (I'm not used to wearing longer earrings, I mostly wear studs and get a little nervous that longer earrings might get tangled up in my hair or scarves, so smaller earrings are better for me.) 

The Coat: I totally said a few months ago that I specifically should not buy a coat this year, because I have plenty of perfectly good ones and will barely leav my apartment building this fall/winter. I even explicitly said, and I quote: "I think I can be counted on to stay away from actually buying any more [coats] this year." Famous last words, potentially. 

Since then, I haven't quite been able to get The Curated's "Classic Coat," a camel-colored wool-cashmere blend wrap coat, out of my mind. There are tons of blogger reviews out there for this coat, see here, here, here and here from people roughly my height (5'4'' or shorter) and here or here from people who are a bit taller (~5'7''). I am, however, curvier and more busty than most bloggers who've reviewed this coat, and would be taking a larger size (a M rather than S or XS) than most of them, so it's a bit difficult to predict whether this somewhat relaxed-fit coat will actually look good on me. 

Social Distancing Life Lately: Six Months and Counting

via Unsplash

When my colleagues and I abruptly rushed home from Luxembourg in mid-March, none of us could truly have imagined that, six months on, life would still not be anywhere close to normal. As we transited through Heathrow that day - after having booked new tickets last-minute in the wee hours of the morning, upon being woken up by concerned friends and family back home following the President's sudden announcement of a proposed Western Europe travel ban - the pandemic didn't feel real yet. Barely anyone at the airport was wearing a face mask. Things still looked almost normal, even if we knew they were not. 

Local Policies in NYC 

Now, six months later, NYC has - since June or so - controlled the spread of COVID-19 better than many other places in the US. Yet the prospect of resuming any substantial new indoor activities here - things bringing bigger groups of people together in closer quarters than the retail stores or museums that are currently open with drastically limited capacity - still feels potentially perilous. For the attorneys amongst us, participating safely in in-person court proceedings - particularly jury trials - and in-person depositions still feels like an impossibility. (Especially when we keep in mind that at least some participants or attorneys typically need to travel from out-of-state for such events.) 

Our state and city government are generally moving slowly and cautiously to gradually allow more significant indoor activities. In-person schooling at NYC public schools may restart in phases starting next week, on a partial schedule for the families that opt-in. Restaurant dining rooms may be allowed to open at the end of the month, at 25% capacity. 

Personal Comfort Levels

Completely separate from the issue of what's legally allowed, there's also the question of my personal comfort level with additional activities. I would not be happy about being forced to attend in-person court proceedings anytime soon. Nor am I willing to put others and myself at risk by partaking in indoor restaurant dining before a vaccine becomes widely available. Nothing short of a court order - and the fear of being in contempt of court - or a serious family emergency would get me on a plane before I'm vaccinated. 

I am somewhat apprehensive about when my workplace might start requiring attorneys to come into the office more often. New York officially allowed white-collar workplaces like law firms to reopen with certain safety precautions back in early July. But up to now, state law has also required that categories of employees who can perform the vast majority of their duties from home - attorneys included - be offered the choice to continue working from home, something I've availed myself of to the fullest extent. I'm not sure when that state policy might change.

K and I have loosened up somewhat since I last wrote about our ongoing social distancing experience in late July. We've both had our long-overdue haircuts now, and we each felt quite safe with all the new safety precautions at New York salons. In the next month or so, we'll probably both go to our first routine doctor's appointments since the COVID-19 shutdowns began. As mentioned in my recent money diary, we also ended up needing our building's superintendent and then a contractor to come in to our apartment for some repairs, across a few different days. And that also felt just fine, with everyone wearing masks and given NYC's continuing trend of favorable COVID numbers. 

While we've applied for absentee ballots, we may yet decline to use them and choose to vote in-person instead - most likely by early voting - knowing there were... some issues... with absentee ballots actually getting counted during the recent New York primary. To be fair, our election procedures have changed to directly address these problems, including to allow voters to track their own absentee ballots and have an opportunity to cure alleged defects instead of the ballot just being thrown out.

But I think it's fair to say our household is technically still practicing fairly strict social distancing. Outside of the errands described above, we are still staying home except for essential grocery and pharmacy trips, which we continue to limit to approximately once every three weeks. And our friends in NYC are still not quite ready to socialize yet, even outdoors.

COVID-19 Spending Changes

Chloe Alphabet Wallet (affiliate link)

This post about COVID-19 lockdown-driven changes to my spending is somewhat inspired by Luxe and Kathy. Over the past five months of staying home and observing fairly strict social distancing, I've continued my longtime practice - six years and counting - of tracking my spending down to the individual transaction - no matter how small - using old YNAB. With all the data I've collected, it's easy to look back and analyze exactly how much my spending has changed due to our new lifestyle under COVID. 

Although New York's already-favorable COVID numbers are continuing to improve, K and I still expect to observe fairly strict social distancing through at least the end of the calendar year. Our friends in the city are still not inclined to socialize in-person. My  mom would also not take lightly the decision to have my sister or I get on a plane to see her - or vice versa - basically until we've all been vaccinated. We are mentally preparing for the possibility that we may not feel comfortable enough with air travel to visit each other during the Christmas holiday period this year.

K and I desperately miss indoor dining at our favorite restaurants, but we would absolutely not feel it was safe - or socially responsible - to sit down inside a typically-cramped NYC restaurant before a vaccine becomes widely distributed. In any case, indoor dining is still banned in NYC, and there's no indication of when our state or local government would consider allowing restaurant dining rooms to reopen. 

In short, I think it's likely most of my spending changes from the past five months of COVID-19 lockdown could persist through the end of the year. I don't see any way K and I will go back to traveling or restaurants before 2021. And unfortunately - because the US national response to COVID has gone so poorly - we might end up needing to stay away for longer than just through the end of the calendar year.

Change of Plans (Maybe)

Natori Flora (affiliate link)

This time last year, I was all ready to go ahead and start consulting with plastic surgeons regarding certain plans I'd made. I'd been setting aside cash for months by then - in anticipation of how unlikely it was that my health insurance would ever deign to cover the procedure - and I believed I had enough to cover the full cost, separate from and on top of my robust six-month emergency fund and without disrupting my other savings and investment plans. 

My overall financial situation back then, in January 2019, was admittedly not as healthy as it could be. It was only more recently, right before December, that my student loan balance dropped to five figures for the first time, just barely. And my net worth was still negative back in January last year, I didn't hit "net worth zero" until April. At the time, I didn't think this was reason enough to change my plans. In any case, if I were to move forward now, or in the foreseeable future, I'm currently in a much stronger financial position than I was a year ago.

What actually made me change my mind about surgery last January wasn't my still-substantial student loan balance, nor the obvious fact that the expense would deplete a significant percentage of my savings and assets. Instead, I got spooked by the downturn in the markets, and then by the US government shutdown. Almost my entire practice is in the federal courts, which could have eventually run out of money to stay fully open, though that ultimately did not come to pass.

Immediately afterwards, there were some unexpected events in some of my cases, and things never really quieted down again at the office for the rest of the year. (Though I also never got back on pace to bill anywhere close to 3,000 hours for the year after that extremely hectic period last January, for which I'm very thankful!) And in the end, I think a subconscious part of me is also more scared of undergoing general anesthesia and surgery - and the associated risks of complications, however small - than I originally thought. I never ended up feeling much eagerness to actually take concrete steps to start looking for a surgeon.

And now, a year on, the larger context for my decision-making is significantly changed. As time passes, I get closer to the point when I'd ideally like to have children. I think this particular decision looks very different if one doesn't plan to get pregnant in the next four or more years, versus if it's looking like a possibility in the more immediate future.

These days, I may also be thinking more critically about how much longer I expect to, or will choose to, work in the private sector. I've never planned to be in biglaw or biglaw-ish for my entire career, but I'd previously been a lot more open-minded and flexible about staying in the industry for a fairly long time. I never had a specific end date in mind, in the past, but these days, I may be more inclined to thinking about one. One's financial picture changes significantly, in that case.

Anyway, even if I was eager to move forward with the procedure right now, I wouldn't be able to any time in the next few months. My work schedule in the near future definitely doesn't have enough room for me to take even a few days off to recover afterwards.

I suppose it's clear that I've had a lot on my mind, recently. One surprising - but somewhat positive - side effect of being so busy at the office is that I've somehow still managed to find a lot of time to read for fun, probably in part because it's a more effective escape from thinking about work-related stress than blogging or watching TV. I've read quite a few enjoyable books recently, including Circe, by Madeline Miller, and The Trespasser, by Tana French (affiliate links). I hope that everyone is having a good start to 2020!

Little Life Updates Q3 2019

My pencil bag and the notebooks (including a splurge-y Smythson Panama notebook) that I currently keep in my work bag (still the Madewell Medium Transport Tote). 

I say this all the time, about any given time period - and it's not as if anyone ever actually disagrees with me - but dang, time sure goes by fast, and 2019 is just racing by! It's looking like things at the office will be hectic for both K and I through at least November, and probably for longer than that, which is a bit daunting. 

Please note that this post contains affiliate links that could result in a commission, typically a few cents, for me if you click. Thank you for your support!

One result of this continuous busy period is that we, as a household, may finally be done hemming and hawing over whether to hire someone to clean. We've had a few "false starts" with making that decision in the nearly 18 months since I wrote that post, times when a weekend "big clean" session turned out not so bad after all, or times when we had a slow period at work for a while and felt reinvigorated to do the chores ourselves. This time, though, I think we've finally made the choice. We're likely going to hire someone through Si Se Puede, a NYC-based women-owned co-op that recently came highly recommended via Anne Helen Petersen and a few of her readers. 

Billable Hours

Though I must say, despite having had several intense - including by biglaw standards - periods at work this year, my billed hours are still barely on track for a 1,950 hour year, i.e. one that's still a bit less busy than what some biglaw firms consider the minimum to get a full market-rate bonus (2,000 hours). And well, look at how, in its answer to a sex discrimination class action complaint, a certain biglaw firm sneered at some of the named plaintiffs' histories of ~1,700 or 1,800 hour years. (I once wrote about day-to-day life during an ~1,850 year, and while it wasn't bad at all by industry standards, it did involve quite a few late nights at the office and working through a few weekends.)

I'm only really tracking my hours out of curiosity, by the way. My current workplace does not base bonus amounts on billed hours. (Our bonuses are significantly less than the biglaw market rate.) Plus, even with all that's going to be on my plate at work for the rest of the year, there's at least a moderate chance I'll still finish at closer to 1,850 billed hours, or maybe even a little less than that. After all, there's the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday periods coming up, and I'll also take one more week-long vacation this year. 

Fall/Winter Shopping

Now that the weather's starting to cool down a bit, I can't help but look ahead at potential shopping for the fall/winter season. I just enjoy sweaters and coats so much more than summer clothing! There are a few things that I've been mulling over, as seen in my Pinterest shopping list. 

Sweater-wise, I have plenty, including from earlier this year, but I really enjoy sweaters and so I don't think I can stop myself from buying at least one. (Ideally, it'll be the only one.) Last year, around Black Friday, I became interested in a Vince funnel-neck sweater in boiled cashmere that they seem to bring back most years, but by late November, the color I liked was already sold out everywhere in my size. So if I want to try it this year, I expect I might need to order it earlier in the season, even if there are no discounts available. 

Shoe-wise, I'm actually pretty well set for fall/winter, since boots are so much more sturdy than my warmer weather shoes. But as I mentioned not long ago, some of the spring/summer shoes that I continue to wear sometimes in colder weather are kind of on their last legs. They're likely not in good enough shape that I'll still be wearing them next summer. So I've been thinking a little about new shoes. I've become interested in the somewhat menswear-inspired shoes by Office of Angela Scott, including the Mr. Colin monkstrap oxfords, the Miss Button mid-heel shoes, or the Mr. Franklin loafers. (In all instances, the fullest range of colors is available at the brand's website.)

Please follow the link below for a few other little life updates! 

Unpopular Facts: On Biglaw and Biglaw-ish Financial Trajectories

Did you notice and hate this graphic when it went viral via CNBC's twitter account recently? I felt that way too, but maybe for different reasons from the norm.

Eagle-eyed individuals using certain RSS feed readers may have noticed that, for just a minute a few weeks ago, I accidentally published a half-finished draft of this entry. I'd only ever made that specific mistake once before, on another post I also thought could be a little controversial. I'm terribly embarrassed, in part because, as it turns out, I actually wanted to approach this topic very differently than how my half-finished draft originally did. 

Recently, CNBC regurgitated, with little critical analysis, a somewhat infamous graphic from a certain personal finance blogger who shall not be named. Among many other things, this person had recently been known to gleefully and repeatedly revel in their own ignorance during the recent "manifesto" kerfluffle I alluded to, so theirs is, let's just say, not a blog I'd ever recommend. Here's an archive.is link to the original source, so that we may all refrain from giving it page-views. People hated this graphic, and all that it implied, and one understands their reasons. I hated it too, though for maybe slightly... nontraditional... reasons, ones that may turn out even more unpopular. 

Specifically, I think it slanders (in the colloquial sense, not the legal one) the good name of attorneys like me, attorneys who started off with substantial student loans, who are now inching into their early 30s, and who have been in biglaw or biglaw-ish for most of their relatively brief careers thus far, as this purportedly real couple allegedly is*. (Please note that, throughout this post, I make the assumption that both halves of the couple earn roughly equal shares of their alleged $500,000/year household income.)

Just about the only thing the graphic gets right is that we're all very lucky and financially privileged. We work hard for that, and often take out a jaw-dropping total in student loans to get there, which gets difficult sometimes. Nonetheless, it would never be cute for any of us to complain about our finances too much. 

But this supposedly real account gives unrealistic views of too many important things, from actual student loan payoff timelines, to typical family planning decisions in my cohort, to sensible approaches towards car ownership, and so on. And that's just the things I can speak intelligibly about, before even getting into nitty-gritty details about the actual numbers associated with the cars, the house, childcare, and so on! I also suspect the tax numbers are a bit off. (My own effective tax rate in 2018, making in the general ballpark of half of this alleged couple, was ~31.8%, including federal, state, and NYC city taxes, fairly far off from 40%. Though of course, tax laws change frequently, and I don't know much about what taxes look like for my peers who are married with children...) So many of the most important details are so implausible, so incapable of passing the "sniff test", that I don't think there's any way there wasn't tons of rounding up, rounding down, or wishful thinking involved, most likely in the service of making up some clickbait, such that there's no way the graphic and accompanying post are a particularly accurate or helpful picture of much.

I'm totally being overly dramatic. And I'm also totally doing that thing again where I'm overthinking something, likely devoting far more time, effort, and energy than the original author probably did in the first place. But really, it hurts my feelings to see people like me so misrepresented! There's many a complaint or somewhat typical for our demographic negative trait that can be laid at our collective doorsteps, but not this annoying fairytale, no sir. 

Wardrobe Life Lately

Some of my favorite personal style inspiration photos recently. I keep a smaller, more tightly curated board for a small number of photos that I feel like best and most accurately capture my current ideal aesthetic.

We're only a few weeks into 2019 and what I'm hoping will be a year of more restrained shopping than in recent years past. I think it's going well enough so far, though it's obviously far too early to even attempt to claim victory or success. I've stuck to only browsing for things on my consolidated "wish list", or items substantially similar in design, and have generally not gotten distracted by anything else. With certain items from the original list, I've had the chance to try them on, only to realize that they won't work for me after all.

Spoiler alert, I have shopped this month, but only for jewelry so far, and I think it's likely to stay that way. One item technically hadn't gone on my formal "wish list" before, so I sort of broke my "all shopping must be from the central wishlist" rule, but it was something I'd tracked on another of my Pinterest lists for at least a month or two before, so I gave myself a pass.

Changing Plans

Some of my plans for the first part of the year may be shifting. Savings-wise and spacing of time off work-wise, everything's in place for me to start scheduling a certain procedure, something that should, in practical terms, keep me away from most clothes shopping for quite some time. However, now that I'm finally so close to actually being able to take concrete steps towards getting this longtime goal accomplished, I may be balking a bit, mostly because of the expected price tag. Outside of my law degree, it would be far and away my most expensive single purchase ever (keeping in mind that I've never needed a car, and that I'm not yet in a stage of life where the purchase of a home is a feasible and sensible possibility). On the one hand, I've thought about this for years, saved in earnest for nearly a year, and wanted it badly for most of my adult life. I've rarely been so sure of anything. On the other hand, such big purchases should never be undertaken lightly, so if I'm feeling any sort of doubt or hesitation, however faint, I should certainly wait until those feelings have all dissipated.

I think I'm also feeling a bit of anxiety about the risk of another protracted economic downturn. Given my age, where I grew up, and the industry I chose to enter, I've always felt like a "child of the recession", always expecting a market slowdown to cause serious disruptions to life and career at the worst possible time. It is, to be frank, a specter that has haunted every year of my life since I started law school, and that haunts me still. When I matriculated, I was well aware that recessions were highly destructive to the careers of junior attorneys and, almost more importantly, to their ability to pay off their typically massive student loan balances. I don't think I can be completely free of that kind of fear until I'm completely done with my student loans, which is likely to take another three years (though within another year or two, I should have enough cash saved that the remaining loan balance won't be as big or scary a concern any longer). And when I'm feeling nervous about the economy, I want to save more cash, not spend it.

There's also the question of whether there are other things I should spend on first, namely some cosmetic dental work. One unfortunate and otherwise permanent aftereffect of my 2017 accident is that I still have a front tooth that doesn't look quite right and is a little out of alignment. I've never actually looked into what it would take to get it back into place and looking pretty again. From what I know about cosmetic dental work, it'll probably be extremely expensive, and maybe I should prioritize that first, before any other elective medical procedure!

Shopping Lately

Sweaters are among the things almost guaranteed to fit differently if I go through with the plans I'm currently hemming and hawing about, but because we've got plenty of winter weather to look forward to, I still get tempted to try on more sweaters, the cozier the better. I'd also been so busy at the office that I was feeling some stress-induced urges to shop. Though actually, I also discovered that when one is truly busy (for the first half of the month, I was on pace to bill 3,000 hours in 2019 if I worked at the same rate all year long, a formidable number for even the busiest of biglaw associates), there is barely any time to really think about shopping or even to make some online orders. Though because I like clothes and get excited about sales, I still made some orders nonetheless. And well, things have quieted down considerably at the office now, but hopefully that doesn't increase how much I shop.

Please note that this portion of the post contains affiliate links that could result in a commission, typically a few cents, for me if you click. Thank you for your support!

With regards to this year's rule that I only buy things after they've spent some time on my one consolidated wishlist, it may need to be amended slightly to allow for items that are substantially similar, including in color and design, to ones on my list. I tried on a gray Club Monaco waterfall cardigan (sold out, other colors available) that was very similar to a Bloomingdales cardigan on my list, and also a funnel-neck Club Monaco sweater I thought might be similar to the one from Vince that is on my list (both items now sold out). Neither of the Club Monaco sweaters worked, though, I think their items better suit people who are a bit taller and less busty than I am.

In terms of other items on my list, I also ordered the Bloomingdales tie-waist cardigan in burgundy, but didn't like it, it had awkwardly high side slits and the waist tie didn't sit in a flattering spot on me. Outside of sweaters, there haven't been any other types of clothes I'm interested in, except maybe that, if I end up deciding not to have that procedure in the foreseeable future after all, I might want to try the MM. LaFleur Etsuko dress in blue and black brush jacquard print. Although I generally find MM. LaFleur overpriced, they don't have that much competition when it comes to workwear, especially now that I tend not to be interested in most of Ann Taylor's and J.Crew's new offerings.

Child of the Recession: On Financial Fear

via - I moved away from the Bay Area long before Apple started building their new office complex, but my elementary school was quite near their old headquarters.

For an inordinate amount of time after I start each new job, I'm regularly plunged into a simmering state of abject terror, filled by the mostly irrational fear that I could, at any moment, be summarily fired* without having spent enough time in the job to adequately or reasonably explain, in future job interviews, why it lasted such a short time, leaving room for only one possible inference, that my performance (and thus my suitability to be an attorney) had been horribly defective in some way. I didn't initially feel this way when I started my first ever job, the only time I was actually in biglaw, but well, I learned from that experience, and I learned real fast.** 

By describing it this way, I may be overstating how much time and total headspace this line of thinking actually took up, but this was also the best way I could think of to accurately describe the intensity of the feeling when it did hit, and to indicate that the feeling reared its head often, even if it was only for extremely brief, fleeting moments most of the time.

It wasn't until recently that those feelings dissipated as to my current job, a few weeks after I crossed the one-year mark. Finally, I had some time and mental space to reflect on where the fear comes from. Fittingly, financial fear and anxiety are themes that some of my favorite money bloggers have discussed recently. For some of them, it sounds as if the source of their fear or anxiety, or how it manifests, may be similar to mine.

My own deep-set financial fear or anxiety is, I think, the product of being a true "child of the recession". And it wasn't just the 2008 crash, either. I also grew up the child of a Silicon Valley tech industry employee, surrounded mostly by other children of the tech industry. Throughout our childhoods, through the dot-com bubble and its bursting and other boom times or slow times, what little information trickled down to me, mostly through overhearing gossip shared between parents and family friends, was only enough for me to half understand what was happening. It was enough, though, to make life seem like a constant cycle of feast or famine, with some peoples' parents getting sudden stock options-related windfalls and other peoples' parents caught (sometimes more than once in just a few short years) by layoffs that always seemed to come as a surprise***.

Then, when I was in college, came the 2008 crash, which hit a year or two before I graduated. I wasn't old enough to have built any real financial foundation for myself yet. (I could certainly have been more responsible with my money as a student, but, trust me, I did not have realistic opportunities to make enough income as a college student to make a significant and lasting difference to my future after graduation.) The result was that I (and most others my age, I'm sure) felt like this terrifying thing had happened, except that I had never had a real opportunity to prepare for it, or to protect myself from it. It also came at the exact right time that my job hunt, and the first few years of just about any career I chose, would almost certainly be greatly affected by it.

I remember senior year of college being this awful time suffused with extreme anxiety and stress, not just for me, but for all of my classmates, enough that I believed deeply that there was such a thing as a "quarter life crisis" and that we might all have been in the throes of it right then. There was so much fear and, because of the crash, we all seemed to be acutely aware that desirable job opportunities were in short supply, and that we were all in direct competition for them.

I feel like a certain shared madness set in for myself, and all my close friends, one that didn't lift until at least a year after graduation. For that first year or two in our jobs, or in graduate school, we all had those typical growing pains that come from entering adult life and taking on the full range of adult responsibilities for the first time, but they were amplified tenfold by the anxiety brought about by the recession. Every little sign that things weren't going swimmingly (and we each encountered a good number of such signs, we're all only human, and learning the new norms of the workplace, or of any given graduate school, was hard work) inspired an outsized amount of angst and worry.

Please follow the link below for the rest of my thoughts on financial fear and the steps I take to try and mitigate it, some of them more useful than others. You'll also find the rather lengthy "footnotes" of this post, which may be helpful background information to the rest of this post. (In writing said "footnotes", I also got the chance to ramble about topics I've long wanted to write dedicated posts about, but haven't  quite gotten around to yet.)

Money Tour: The Clerkship Year

via. I did not clerk in this courthouse.

A recommendation for people who enjoy the Refinery29 Money Diaries concept: Glamour Magazine's Youtube channel puts out some very interesting money-related content. Their first video, from April, about "How One Woman Spends her $95,000 Salary", made a bit of a splash and may have gone a little viral, but they seem to have flown more under the radar since then. As for how the "Money Tours" (and the similar "Honest Accounts") differ from Money Diaries? It's an (anonymized) video interview. The format is somewhat similar, starting with monthly numbers, including paychecks and recurring bills, but generally also adding more information about current savings. Their format is a bit more flexible. Instead of focusing on one week only, many people go through a set of (redacted) credit card statements for a month and explain the bigger or recurring charges. They sometimes also discuss a random-ish sample of some of the person's larger purchases from the past, things like furniture or sports equipment. I've been enjoying these videos a lot!

Separately, I've long wanted to go back and revisit how I approached spending during my clerkship year. As I've often mentioned, clerking requires a significant pay cut, at least if one was otherwise going to be working in biglaw. Measuring the opportunity cost of taking a clerkship would likely result in a shockingly large number, between lost income for that year, extra interest accrued on student loans due to being unable to refinance, and possibly a lost year-end bonus as well, due to the timing of leaving and returning to one's firm. I haven't yet calculated that number for myself, but may do so in a future post.

Yet, I'd go back and clerk all over again again. Heck, I'm even sometimes tempted to do a second one, but financial realities, and how much less practical and useful it likely is as a career move for an attorney further along in their career, mean that it will probably never happen. Clerking a first time was an incredible privilege that I'm grateful for, and it likely was necessary to place me in my current, absolutely wonderful job. Clerking a second time would likely be... irresponsible, all things considered, especially given that it likely wouldn't add much to my career prospects.

Recent events, including with Kozinski and some of the smaller news items surrounding the Kavanaugh confirmation, have really forced me to think about the institution of clerkship hiring (diversity is, let's just say, not a strong point) and the role of clerkships. In order to fully analyze some of the other questions on my mind, it's important to get an accurate sense of the "cost of clerking", and whether it's a financial choice that is equally accessible to all who are qualified (it isn't). To the extent that it is a bit of an elitist institution, that has implications for diversity in the profession, as clerkships may be a necessary (though not sufficient) prerequisite for certain jobs.

Overall Numbers: The Clerkship Year

• Savings at the Time: (My student loan balance was still over $180k throughout the year.)
• Cash Savings: $15,000, an emergency fund accumulated during my first year in biglaw, I never touched this until my accident. 
• 401(k): ~$11,500, accumulated during the approximately nine months that I was eligible to contribute while in biglaw (with no employer match, as is standard for us). Term clerks also can't contribute to the federal government equivalent of a 401(k). 
• Roth IRA: ~$2,200, and I put in another $2,000 during my clerkship year, but that was the only longer-term savings I could add to during that year. 
• Total Salary: ~$83,500/year, as a JSP-12. Link is to a current-year PDF for the NYC metro area. They get a tiny cost of living increase most years, so the current number is a little higher.
• Paycheck (BiWeekly): $2039.50. For the two "three paycheck" months a year, I usually put the third paycheck entirely into savings or student loans. 
• My Share of Rent and Public Transit Cards: ~$2250/month total (numbers combined to protect my anonymity).
• Commute: As I've sometimes alluded to, I had an extremely long and somewhat complicated commute, and monthly transit expenses (using both NYC transit and a commuter train) were a shockingly large percentage of my take-home pay.*
• Rent: K and I stayed in the same apartment from when I was in biglaw. Given the location of our jobs and the start and end dates of our lease and for my clerkship and prior and subsequent jobs, moving out of NYC solely for the clerkship was never a realistic option. As I sheepishly mention somewhat often, we feel like we really splurge on rent, and that's worth it to us. So while I was clerking, that was also a shockingly large percentage of my take-home pay. 
• Student Loans: ~$445/month minimum payments. I occasionally put in more, but not in amounts large enough to make much of a dent. 
• The bulk of my loans, borrowed directly from the Federal Government, were on income-based repayment ("IBR") for a monthly minimum payment of ~$220 dollars/month.  
• ~$225/month represented the actual 10-year repayment minimum payments associated with my other tiny (and lower-interest, 5% as opposed to ~7%) loans borrowed from my undergraduate school and a Perkins Loan from law school. These loans couldn't be put on IBR as easily. 
• Utilities: ~$70/month on average for my half. Water and heat are included in our rent, but we pay for electricity, including to run A/C in the summer. Numbers vary greatly throughout the year. 
• Internet: ~$32/month for my half.
• Subscriptions: ~$25/month on average. I pay for Netflix for my mom, sister, and I. I also split Amazon Prime and Spotify Family expenses with my sister. 

* One thing I learned while clerking: People and their significant others end up needing to make eclectic, seemingly impossible, and unsustainable sacrifices in terms of commuting and where to live, in order to accommodate clerkship locations (which are highly inflexible). I spent more than 4 hours a day commuting in total and didn't even have the toughest commute out there. (People who drive, even if it's for significantly less time, definitely have it harder.) When one wants to clerk, you go where you're able to get one. Only the rare true superstars among us generally have the luxury of only applying in one city or one location and knowing they'll definitely find one on the schedule they want. 

That left me with ~$1252 to spend each month, and I'd reliably spend it all (including, sometimes, on a very small extra student loan payment). Technically I was living "paycheck to paycheck" during this time, and with no significant contributions of any kind to longer-term savings, it may have been less sustainable than many other "paycheck to paycheck" situations. It was such a short time in my career however, that... I wasn't really worried about the sustainability of my finances at the time. To be able to approach it that way is an incredible luxury and privilege, which I'm so grateful for. Oh, and because the student loan payments obviously weren't enough to keep up with the interest that was accruing (at a rate of ~$990/month), my total balance increased while I was clerking, undoing pretty much all of the repayment work I did while in biglaw the previous year.

Please follow the link below for a tour of some of my typical spending choices during a typical month of my clerkship year! I took all my credit card statements from a random month, April 2017, and got the numbers from there.

Student Loan Chatter

via

Today's post is about two recent articles regarding student loans that left a bit of an impression. Naturally, student loans are a topic on which I have many thoughts, though neither piece was about a situation remotely similar to mine. Please note that I'm not an expert on student loan policies and the intricacies thereof. I only have the working knowledge that comes from handling my own. I may not be completely correct in my understanding of how some of these policies work. 

Knowing What You're In For

First up, Refinery29 published a piece by a NYU student who'd already accumulated $182,000 in student loans for her undergraduate degree, and who was considering journalism school. Oh lordy! For context, that's about how much my law school student loan balance was upon graduation. After roughly 2.5 years, ~$65,500 in payments, refinancing to a 2.6% interest rate with First Republic (an option I believe is only available to high-earning individuals located in cities where First Republic operates), down from ~7%, the standard federal rates available to graduate students while I was in school, I still have about 6 years of $2,500/month payments to go, or three years at $4,500/month. (The real numbers will be somewhere in between.) 

Given how noxious the Money Diaries commentariat is, the comments here were fairly reasonable. There's really not a lot to say, now that it's too late to go back and change it, except to advise the person not to go to graduate school at this time. This scenario is tragic, not least of all because, to my knowledge, undergraduates can't take out the full cost of attendance in federal loans, so the protections of income-based repayment and possible eventual forgiveness (like in the next story) may not be available. 

Is any 18 year old (or heck, even a 21 year old considering grad school before they've started making real progress on their undergrad loans) ever fully capable of understanding what they take on when they sign for student loans even a quarter of this size? Heck, I committed to law school at 23, with some adult life experience under my belt, and I don't think I made a fully educated decision. By that stage of life, of course, that's my fault and responsibility. Intellectually, I knew I'd owe ~$2,000/month on a standard 10-year repayment plan, mostly thanks to the University of Michigan's law school "debt wizard" calculator. Even then, I still found myself a bit surprised once I graduated. Among other things, whenever I calculated my expected total balance, I never processed that I should factor in the interest that accrued while I was in school, even though I knew it was happening. (Silly of me, I know.) I also never really figured out my post-tax income. Every year (post-raise and/or after new tax laws), my paycheck is always a surprise. So I never actually knew what I'd be working with.

Obviously, nobody should feel sorry for me because everything turned out a-okay, but if I, as an adult, could find myself taken aback by some aspects of my student loan situation even after doing tons of research, I'm not sure high school students can ever truly know what they're getting into. Regardless, I can't begin to imagine how the system could be reformed to take this into account. 

On Loan Forgiveness

The next piece is from the Wall Street Journal, about the orthodontist with a million in student loans and counting, but only because they're counting on income-based repayment for eventual forgiveness, and have no intention of repaying in full, so it's not exactly what it sounds like. Most reactions I've seen are a bit ambivalent, I think because most people found the headline misleading, and were expecting to read about someone working hard and living an extremely bare-bones lifestyle in order to pay their million dollar balance in full, rather than someone making the practical and understandable decision to pay the minimum for eventual forgiveness (and living a pretty sweet life in the meantime). 

I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand loan forgiveness options particularly well. I applied for and was on income-based repayment for most of my first two years since graduation, but solely as a way of getting flexibility with my monthly cash flow (I almost always paid at least my ten-year standard repayment amount while in biglaw) and then because of the pay cut I took for my clerkship. I didn't need it because, so long as I stayed mostly in the private sector, I didn't anticipate PAYE-type forgiveness being cheaper in the long run. As seen from the math above, I'd almost certainly end up paying more on PAYE. That's often the case for other biglaw types as well, unless someone took out the entire cost of attendance in student loans (there's a lot of smaller scholarships available), as seen in the hypothetical below. Both calculations were done using this calculator.

Even if PAYE or REPAYE was likely to work out for me, I'd be terrified to have such a large and ever-growing balance hanging over my head, even if it's supposed to go away at the end. I would also live in constant fear that Congress could retract the policy without grandfathering in people who took out their loans back when those policies were in place (something that I believe is generally seen as unlikely, from following discussions of it online, but who even knows). Also, there's the "tax bomb", because the total amount forgiven is likely to be deemed taxable income. 

Did you notice either of these articles? What did you think? Do you know anyone relying on PAYE,  REPAYE, or the other non public service-linked loan forgiveness programs? I know of law school classmates with much larger student loan balances than mine, maybe veering into the territory where going for forgiveness makes sense, but everyone seems to be repaying their balances in full. I have a vague sense that the financial picture is very different for medical professionals, and that they're more likely to rely on loan forgiveness plans, as they're in school or training for far longer than would-be attorneys. 

A Biglaw-Ish Attorney's Money Map

This post is inspired primarily by the money map posts by Luxe and Jess. I tend to be a little obsessive in how much I enjoy tracking my money data every which way: I use Personal Capital and YNAB near-daily, and draw up an additional Excel spreadsheet now and again, so making a visualization like this was right up my alley. Whether all my tracking is useful is another question entirely. I'm notoriously averse to actually doing math and attempting to make projections for important things like when I'll finishing paying off my student loans, even though I totally have more than enough data for the task. (The projections above are courtesy of plugging the numbers into Unbury.Me. For more advanced calculations, I recommend Vertex42's debt reduction spreadsheet.)

Longtime readers may know that I'm not shy with transparency about some very specific financial details, though I'm also oddly reluctant to type out actual numbers in full because, to be frank, they're big and scary (the loans for obvious reasons, the salary because it's so temporary). There's no point being too coy, though, because the biglaw payscale is so standardized and transparent, including bonuses, as were clerkship salaries (rates in the larger NYC metro area, term clerks are generally limited to step one of JSP-11, JSP-12, and JSP-13, so only a sliver of the chart is relevant). I'm in a different part of the industry now, but my salary matches biglaw, though my bonuses will be less (maybe far less) than half of the biglaw market rate.

Some percentages in my money map are fudged, but the general picture is accurate. For instance, I set my actual 401(k) contribution rate last year, before my annual raise, so it's higher than ~8.8%. I'll stop making contributions in mid-November, once I'm maxed out. I've already maxed out my backdoor Roth IRA for 2018, so my contributions were higher in earlier months, but I'm done now.

The student loan-related numbers, arguably the most important ones, are accurate. And I wish it weren't so, because darn, there's still a long way to go, years after graduation and after ~$65,500 in payments and counting. My ability to repay in earnest was curtailed when I spent ~14 months clerking, which brings a significant pay cut. (It's an extravagantly expensive choice, but one that opens certain career doors that would otherwise be closed.) The hypothetical three-year plan I described, which isn't actually in the cards, requires monthly payments of more than $4,700! For 36 months going forward! The six-year plan still calls for monthly payments of more than $2,500! (I'll probably be able to knock a few months off the projections with year-end bonuses, which I couldn't factor in here because the numbers are so uncertain. Either way, terrifying!)

The main thing that requires further explanation is the "E-Fund, Planned Expenses >6 months" piece that I group under "Net worth positive" activities. Classifying the emergency fund that way is uncontroversial, I think. I really hope not to dip into it in the forseeable future, but in the unhappy event that I must, that's why it's there. Classifying money set aside for other major expenses expected to hit more than six months from now this way is perhaps a little odd (at least when that number mostly represents a certain elective surgery), but at some point savings for more traditionally "net worth positive" things, like a down payment on a home, will be part of that number.

One big omission is Charitable Giving, which will likely be done late in the year in a lump sum or two of yet to be determined size, to yet to be determined cause(s), but probably something like Planned Parenthood and a local pro bono legal services organization. I must confess, with regards to charitable giving, I struggle sometimes because the benefits of the small amounts I'm able to contribute (thanks, student loans!) feel so minuscule and abstract, especially when compared to the far more concrete benefits of my pro bono work. I've had a pretty good run of success with my cases (lion's share of the credit to my wonderful, dedicated supervisors), and my 150+ hours of service a year while practicing have truly helped people, which is incredible. But I'm also acutely aware of how much work and resources (and thus, money) it takes to meaningfully assist just... three or four individuals and their families. It'll never feel like enough. Of course, the organizations I would donate to are far more efficient in their good works than I am! Still, as an attorney, I may be in a category where, due to highly specialized qualifications, my time is far more valuable than what money I'm able to put to charitable giving at this point.

Another thing I didn't break out into its own category, but that is a significant part of my expenses, is Travel, for which I allocate around ~3.5% of my post-tax income most months. Presently, about half of that is in "Living Expenses" (for a trip sometime this fall with K, probably to Japan) and another half is in "Planned Expenses" (for a trip to Europe with my mom and sister sometime in 2019, which I'll shoulder most of the financial burden on, in keeping with my income). I broke out shopping into it's own category just for fun. The ~4% of post-tax income is for the year to date, but it should decrease as the months go by because my first few months were unusually spend-y.

Please follow the link below for some additional rambling about the cost of law school!