Welcome to the 58th edition of Into the A+ Advice Box, in which we answer all the queer and lesbian advice questions from A+ members who submitted their queries into our A+ ask box! Here, we answer your questions in a space just for A+ members, safe from the general public. (No guarantees regarding your ex, however.) Here, the Autostraddle team’s doling out advice on everything from sex and relationships, to friend and family dynamics, career questions, style, and more! We’re doing this column TWICE a month, now.
Every SECOND A+ Advice box of the month is themed, like this one! Next month’s theme is simply: SEX. Send us your sex questions! Have you been keeping something to yourself? No more! We want to answer any question you have for us about SEX! Get those in by Monday, May 9 .
The general Into the A+ Advice...
This is great and filled with such loving and thoughtful advice <3
For the cookbook question: I’m biased because I am obsessed with cookbooks, but what I do is check a couple of cookbooks I’m interested in out from the library! I get two renewals before I have to return, so my rule is, if I’ve made a couple things and/or feel the need to check the book out again after renewing twice, then I buy it. (For me, this keeps me from going broke buying books, but for you could be a way to explore them without committing $!)
I definitely use plenty of internet recipes too, but there is a ton of value to me in the way cookbooks expand the scope of my imagination and interest. Enjoy!
YAY FOR LIBRARIES!
I came down to the comments section to say the same thing! I love trying out new cookbooks at the library.
Q1: I don’t personally know anyone who has paid the full 20% down payment! I paid 10% down and my PMI was almost $100 a month (yikes!), but after 3 years, I was able to refinance and get the PMI taken off. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend applying to be “pre-approved” so you can see what size loan you qualify for — this really helped me start knowing the numbers I could work with way before I looked at houses. Also, I recommend working with a credit union!
Q3+4: My spouse is a stay at home dad (with a handful of side gigs), and I am a public school teacher who makes 8-10x more than him. Something super helpful for us (in a decade long relationship, might not be best for a first date lol) is a joint habit tracker. At the end of each day, we record who did what around the house, who connected with our families/elders/neighbors, and other mental health practices we are trying to cultivate (aka taking a shower). It’s a non-biased memory that helps me see all the shit he gets done while I’m at work, and shows him the ways I help when I get home.
Q5: the best cookbooks are at the library! I often check out 5-10 cookbooks per month (EASILY worth hundreds of dollars — I only pick the prettiest ones with huge full color photos), look through for ideas, and then return them. If there’s a recipe I love I’ll take a pic or make a copy, and if I adore the whole book I’ll buy it (that’s only happened twice, ha!). Plus, I don’t have to store them long-term! And they’re not smothered in pesky advertisements like on all the food blogs!
Re: cookbooks, I love checking them out from the library! It allows me to test-drive them before deciding whether to buy, and to have more beautiful, colorful, hardcover books around the house than I could otherwise afford to.
Re: Q1: remember that when you buy a house, you’re not just responsible for paying the mortgage and PMI. You’re also responsible for paying for upkeep on the structure and appliances, home insurance, HOA fees, and property taxes – for the whole time you own the home, even after the mortgage is paid. Take all these into account when you’re deciding whether renting or owning is better, and how much you’ll need to save.
Yes! So much this!
Remember the invisible house systems not just the exciting part like painting and gardening. And you can do some rough estimates when you’re looking at specific places (like if the roof will need to be replaced in the next 5 years and the furnace needs to be replaced in the next 2 years, how much do you need to save per year to be ready to pay for those things). And also remember DIY takes time and that materials aren’t free so you can’t budget $0 to retile your own bathroom. I don’t mean this to be discouraging, I actually think it’s pretty cool to learn about this stuff if it’s not something you’ve done before. And it’s all learnable and knowable and doable 💪💪
Q2. We learn our money habits from our families and people around us so it’s great that you’re questioning the methods you’re currently using and identifying how it’s making you feel. I teach financial Literacy to teenagers and am far from an expert on this! The strategy that works for me is from a guy called the Barefoot Investor (he’s Australian). Essentially, you are aiming to live off 60% of your income, with 40% going toward long term wealth. All the info is easily searchable or your local library may have the full book.
What is terrific about this method the most is that you’re building up an emergencies account & paying yourself an allowance each time you get paid. This has made it easier for me to non-judgementally know what I can afford to spend and whether I can pay for someone’s dinner or I need to split it/state that I’m only spending X amount.
I’d also encourage you to compare banks and consider the advantages of switching. There may be a better interest rate (although they’re at an all time low) or an account that rewards you for increasing the balance each month.
Long term, I’d encourage you to consider investing in your 401K (even if it’s only $5 a month) or investing in solid stocks such as the S&P200 over a period of at least 10 years. Money makes money given enough time.
If someone’s making enough money to put 40% toward building long-term wealth, they should be redistributing a meaningful amount of their money. Resource Generation is a good place to learn about this (resourcegeneration dot org)
Agreed!
Q9: love the advice from both of you. Thinking in monthly increments feels very freeing instead of feeling like each day or even week needs to contain everything.
Q9: Autostraddle has recommended this before, but I wonder if you might find a Passion Planner useful! Or umm maybe a vision board?
YES for donating to Austostraddle! Also for anyone out there who is looking for where 501(c)3 money can go, here are a few googleable black & indigenous led LGBTQ+ orgs (there are more!) Highlighting them because as of 2015, 3.8% of LGBTQ+ funding went to African-American/Black communities. I don’t have a number on indigenous groups, but the number is vanishingly small. The needle on this hasn’t changed a huge amount since then.
Montana Two Spirit Society
Bay Area American Indian Two Spirits
Trans Queer Pueblo
Allgo in Austin TX
Black Transmen
Atlanta Transforming
La Gender Inc
The Audre Lorde Project
TGI Justice Project
Black and Pink
The Astraea Foundation is great if someone with money will move more to a larger foundation that’s been around for decades than to smaller scrappier groups. They are 100% queer and focus donations on black & indigenous queer organizing around the world. (“lesbian’ in the name is a holdover from a long time ago, they fund a lot of trans & intersex work)
Q6: as a slight modification to Anya’s suggestion, I’ve seen/done a grid with four categories that start to tease apart needs from desires or dream job qualities: must have, want, don’t want but can handle, and dealbreakers. This gives you a bit more fine-grained way to find the jobs that might fit!
Also, I have sometimes found the opposite of an interest-based job to be better for burnout: if my “passions” are too tied up in career it can easily lead me to overextend myself, vs being able to really leave a job behind at the end of the workday and find fulfillment elsewhere. But i def also can’t hate what I do, so it’s all about the middle ground… good luck with your career move!!
For Q1: in short my advice would be to do whatever it takes to buy now. Not sure the area where you live, but prices are generally going up in most places faster than they can save.
When we bought our first house, many years ago, it was the cheapest on the market at that time. Really a dump, within several hundred feet of railroad tracks where trains would go by all hours of the day. The master bedroom was actually a converted garage and still looked like it. But in a few years the value went up enough so we could move into the house we live in now. The house that has everything we want and far away from the train tracks!!
If we had waited to buy the first house, I am not sure even now many years later we could have afforded a house given how prices have gone up. After we bought the second house (the one we are in now), within several years the value of it on zillow nearly doubled. It would have been way outside what we could afford even with my 6 figure salary which probably put us in the top 1% of the wage earners.
Ultimately, like any financial advice (this is the disclaimer part), do what you are comfortable with and the level of risk you want to take on. My example worked for me and the overall statistics support it, but everyone has to make their own decision that is right for them.
WISH YOU THE BEST AND I REMEMBER HOW DIFFICULT THAT FIRST DECISION WAS TO MAKE, SO, IF IT IS ANY COMFORT, I DON’T KNOW ANYONE I EVER MET THAT SAID THE DECISION TO BUY A HOUSE WAS EASY!!
Have not read past the first question but worth mentioning that in some places, charging below market rates for rent is considered a form of tax fraud, and if the rent is too far below the average for that area, you get penalised for it. Don’t know whether this is applicable in the US but you might want to check. Helping provide a housing option for someone who’s often locked out by systemic discrimination may be more straightforward
Thank you for this! It would be good to check out. When I looked into it, I found that if you own the property and live there with the tenant, then what they’re paying you is just considered “house sharing.” It’s didfferent than if you own a property you do not live in and you rent it. I could be wrong though and I’d check with a tax expert.
Re: the cookbook question: I can’t recommend enough your local library, who will likely have someone (like me!) who purchases cookbooks based on reviews. I found a couple I loved enough that I just bought them for my home. (I love buying for the cookbook section, seriously I love it.)
Q9: I am really struggling with this right now too! The part of the advice given that I think is actionable for me is to spend time reflecting, so I can start figuring out what I want to be doing with my time.
Cookbooks – one advantage of them is that find more recipes in them than I would online and am more likely to try recipes with names that wouldn’t typically appeal to me because I can see the pictures and ingredients immediately without having to scroll six pages of irrelevant nonsense on a blog. And I don’t risk a website changing a recipe or taking it down altogether (though I do now save to a word doc or print my favourites after a few disappointments here).
People have mentioned the library, I also get them through the elibrary and screenshot, the same with a couple of BBC Good Food magazines. And you can buy them cheap second hand! I have some from charity shops that were a fraction of the RRP. They’re very often unused or barely used.
Some good British books: Rukmini Iyer’s The Roasting Tin series, Jack Monroe’s Good Food for Bad Days, River Cottage Veg, The National Trust Cookbook, Ruby Tandoh’s Cook As You Are (lots of effort on accessibility), Ian Taverner’s Cookfulness (designed for cooking with pain and fatigue), and the Nosh series.
I’m curious. Does anyone reading this own an apartment? I am wondering what the differences are like in terms of upkeep vs a house. For the building do you pay into some kind of collective maintenance situation?
I own an apartment in a condominium.
My spouse and I own our unit and the condo association (made up of all the owners) owns and manages all of the common spaces, including the grounds. All owners pay a monthly assessment (based on how big each unit is) to the association to cover maintenance, etc. The association is run by an elected board of owners. (In our association it’s so hard to find 3 people willing to be on the board that the elections are never contested).
My spouse is the president of our condo association and thanks to his (heroic, unpaid) efforts, our association is (finally) pretty well managed – we have a management company to handle the day to day stuff and a reserve fund for emergencies like needing to replace the furnace or the roof. I love knowing that the building manager will take care of things like shoveling snow.
We were very naive about condos when we bought in 2003 and I’ve learned a lot the hard way. Happy to answer questions for anyone thinking about buying a condo / apartment.
It can vary by region, so worth looking into local bylaws. Where I live, any building with more than two units has to be run by a strata, which is similar to a condo association with monthly collective maintenance fees etc., but they can also be really micromanage-y. All unit owners are supposed to attend monthly meetings, and the strata can set pretty much whatever rules it wants (and enforce them with fines). I ended up backing out of several offers when I read over the meeting minutes and found that there were rules for things like the number, size and type of pets people could own, whether the owner was allowed to rent out their unit, and in one case even whether the owner was allowed to have a live-in partner (I’m pretty sure that last one wouldn’t stand up in court, but still).
I do! I have a coop in NYC which is a bit different than a condo. I personally am only responsible for maintenance within my apartment (i.e. fridge breaks, it’s on me) and partially responsible for things that affect everyone (i.e. a new roof, that’s partly on me). I also have a super who will do a lot of things in my apartment, usually just for a tip, which I like as a non-handy queer who is NOT SURE WHY MY FAUCET IS DRIPPING. I personally like having those financial risks spread around. That said, my building is well-managed and we just have pretty small annual increases to cover increased property taxes and my super’s raise and building maintenance (that new roof), but I’ve heard horror stories about others where maintenance fees go up erratically or where large assessments come because the board did not start planning for that roof replacement 10 years ago so you def have to do your research.
Also I love everyone recommending getting cookbooks from the library!!
For LW1 – I own an apartment and I have a few things to add to list of things to consider. I was extremely naive when I bought my apartment and I learned many things the hard way.
Note – all of my advice is based on my experience owning an apartment in a condominium building in the US. Condos are set up so individual owners own their individual units and the association of all the owners owns and manages the common areas including the building itself and the grounds. There are also co-op buildings that have a different legal structure – but as I understand it, individuals still own their own units and the whole group still manages the common areas.
Things to keep in mind:
1 – assessments. One thing that’s really important to factor in to your budget is the monthly assessments – that’s on top of the mortgage. The assessments pay for regular maintenance of the common areas.
A well managed association will also have a reserve fund to pay for big stuff and emergencies. Sometimes the association will need to have a special assessment, where everyone pays extra for a specific amount of time to fund something specific like a new roof.
2 – the condo association/ home owners association (HOA). We didn’t realize how important it is to buy into a well managed association and we didn’t ask nearly enough questions. Everyone seemed nice and they said that they had a reserve. And then once we’d bought in, we discovered there wasn’t a reserve (but most owners genuinely thought there was because they’d had one in the past) and there were a series of special assessments we weren’t expecting and hadn’t budgeted for.
3 – property values for condos don’t always go up the same way single family units do. So do your research for in your area.
4 – low rise vs high rise. In general, smaller buildings with smaller HOAs require their owners to be more hands on / more community oriented in running the association.
Misc stuff:
I know several people who rent out a bedroom in their condo, so it’s definitely a thing that people do.
This is such good info!!
Your thoughtful and well crafted response is one of the best examples I have seen of the value of these advice columns. I have no doubt that LW1 will benefit immensely from your experience and wisdom…..
Have a great weekend
Want to add another thing about HOAs, after seeing Chandra’s comment above. They can be ridiculous or micro-manage-y so look at the meeting minutes or rules / declarations if you can. And ask how the rules are enforced.
Our association will only enforce some rules if there’s a complaint. So there’s a rule about no visible signs but no ones complained about the BLM sign in one of units, so it’s still there.
For Q4: maybe not the sort of advice you need now, but the biggest thing I wish I’d known earlier about getting involved with someone who makes a dramatically different amount of money is that it’s ok to not merge your finances if you move in together or get married. I so wish my spouse and I had keep our separate bank accounts and just made a joint one for household expenses. And each contributed an agreed % of our income to it.
Q6 & Q9: “What Color is Your Parachute?” It gets updated every year and has a workbook now, too. I made copies of important pages at my library when poor and now buy copies for myself or others periodically. I wouldn’t have known about some of the options out there without it! Good luck <3
For Q4:
Relationships are so hard in the beginning that I would focus on just getting to know the person better and are you compatible. Financial discussions are very important as the relationship develops into other stages.
My experience is as you develop a relationship with someone beyond a few dates, you will get plenty of cues on how they feel about money and whether it is compatible with how you see things.
Also, even if there is a big difference in income now, don’t assume that it may not turn around as a relationship develops. In my own case my current partner and I (married 30+ years) changed who was the higher wage earner about 4x.
Ultimately as the relationship develops you will need to work out the financial arrangements and if separate accounts works best for you, then by all means that is what you should do. There are no rules for these things other than “only do what you are most comfortable with”.
Lastly, you should never feel uncomfortable bringing up financial issues early at any point in a relationship if that is something very important to you and if the other person has difficulty with that, it may tell you alot about where they stand on these issues.
WISHING YOU ALL THE BEST!
For Q1: I am super fortunate in that I bought a house last year and purposefully bought one big enough so that two of my friends could live with me in intentional community. One is a student and one works part time, so I cover the mortgage and then we split everything else finance-wise. One of my housemates is really handy and has been doing a lot of work on the house (it is definitely a fixer-upper) and both of them do general house and garden keeping that I know I wouldn’t be able to keep up with on my own. Guess where I’m going with this is when you think about buying a house, think about the community that you can build with that as well, if you want. You don’t have to be a landlord, but you can still live with other people!
Also, like other commenters have said, owning a house means paying for a lot of little things too on top of a mortgage, so keep that in mind when thinking about finances.
Maija, I love this! Sometimes it is easy to get locked into the conventional arrangements, when there is the possibility of building a community around an alternative.
When we bought our house many years ago, we bought it with a couple of extra rooms, thinking in terms of friends and extended family staying over, but not really like the community you are building.
Since then we have taken in for an extended time an individual that is immunocompromised to keep them safe and in the past another who was dealing with alcoholism (we don’t drink so no alcohol around to be tempted) but we didn’t really think about things like this when we bought our house. It just happened later.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, I found them very inspirational…..
Super late to the game but I haven’t seen anyone mention my all-time favorite source for money advice: Bitches Get Riches. Some relevant posts to the themes here:
– { MASTERPOST } Everything You Need to Know about Getting a Job, Raise, or Promotion (https://www.bitchesgetriches.com/career-advice-from-the-bitches-everything-you-need-to-know-about-getting-a-job-raise-or-promotion/)
– How Dafuq Do Couples Share Their Money? (https://www.bitchesgetriches.com/how-dafuq-do-couples-share-their-money/)
– The Financial Order of Operations: 10 Great Money Choices for Every Stage of Life (https://www.bitchesgetriches.com/financial-order-of-operations/)