Crazy Gas Surprise, Baby Buys & Investment Surge (Jan. 2026)

Well, the big news is pretty simple—Jenni is about 29 weeks pregnant as of the publication date on this post. Wild! We’ve been working towards this for years, and, we just published a post that scratches the surface of our pregnancy journey and infertility experience. We’ll have more about that in the near future. It’s quite the dichotomy from our sad news last month, but life does tend to come in ebbs in flows.

Read on for our first baby-related purchases, a roundup of our fertility expenses from the last few years—we’ll do a more thorough breakdown in the future, how a gas stove has cost us over $3K, and Chris’s 750%+ return on an investment.

For our monthly donation, our theme is helping victims of abuse. You can read more about the three charities we’re considering and vote for your favorite in the poll below!

We track our income, spending, and savings each month to stay on our FIRE path and share it with you. Keep reading to see our monthly updates, tips, and charity reviews.

Budget Update

In the Sankey diagram below, the income on the left matches our expenses on the right.

We’ll run through the income and expense sources for the month and remark on any interesting items.

Income Summary

Our income saw a little drought this month, though that’s not surprising as our labor income continues to drop and our big dividend period was last month.

Dividends
Coming in after “Dividend Christmas” last month is a fairly small distribution from one of Chris’s few remaining individual stocks—Seagate ($STX). While reviewing these investments, Chris noted a massive run up in value for digital storage makers like Seagate. This is mostly attributed to the current data center buildout and AI development.

It’s a rare case where laziness and delay created pretty significant profits. We’ve gone ahead and sold this investment, exchanging it for for $VXUS. So, this’ll be the last of distributions we see from Seagate. These distributions were automatically reinvested.

We earned $268 in total distributions.

Local Sales
CVS was running quite a few sales around Christmas time that involved earning their internal currency (ExtraCare Bucks or ECB). The deals that were especially good were things like: buy a $75 Amazon gift card, earn $15 ECB. We leveraged these deals quite a bit and then cached out the ECB for sale priced groceries and whatnot that we actually use. In one case, Chris grabbed a clearance wooden kid’s train for a few of the ECB. We wound up selling it on our local Facebook Marketplace for $25.

We earned $25 from local sales.

Cashback
Where possible, we try to earn cash back with our day to day shopping. Often this is with programs that convert the cash back into miles or points (like Rakuten) which we earn even more value from while traveling. But, Ibotta is fantastic for grocery cash back. Jenni cashed her balance out this month.

We earned about $48 in cash back.

Expense Summary

From our $14,553 monthly budget, we saved and invested $1,204 dollars.

After subtracting our credits, savings, and donations—we spent about $13,314 on living expenses.

That’s 278% of our FIRE budget from 2022 ($4,787/month).

This would look much more reasonable if set aside the fertility expenses—bringing things down to about $3,965.

Let’s break down some of the more exciting details this month.

Food & Dining

Even with just our short trip to Florida this month, there’s a noticeable spike in our food costs. That’s to be expected—we dined out and used more convenient food.

Groceries
We’re still doing our best to take advantage of the Chase Instacart promos monthly (about $100 between the two of us). That offsets all of the higher Instacart pricing and then some. Plus, it saves us some time! Our local Fresh Market store had a pretty significant closeout (75-90% off) for foods we eat a lot of and can stock up on (nuts, namely). That’ll save us money into March no doubt.

Restaurants, Fast food, Alcohol & bars

While in Florida, we took Chris’s sister, nephew, and great nephew out for a meal on the water. It was great to catch up as they live a few hours from Tampa where we were visiting. While restaurants increasingly seem like luxuries as prices rise, we feel like this is some of their best use. We get to socialize and slowly dine at a lovely spot. Of course, we also visited some pretty cool spots around the city while we were there—a legit Cuban sandwich place, a cafe with a complete gluten-free menu, and more.

We spent $696 on food & dining this month. 

Health & Fitness

We recently announced our first pregnancy! And, it turns out, years of battling infertility isn’t cheap. Health & Fitness spending this month rounds up all of our expenses to reach our current 29-week pregnancy. We started to try to conceive way back in 2023. We’ll likely due a full breakdown of what we did and what it cost in a separate post in the near future, but, for now, we are applying these costs to this month’s budget.

Doctor

We visited fertility clinics in Virginia—in multiple cities. And, eventually, into Europe. Doctor visits, specialist visits, and procedures. One ultrasound after another. The bulk of our fertility expenses appear in this month’s budget. But, about $1,063 also slipped through into our April 2025 budget.

Pharmacy

Jenni underwent numerous blood tests and hormonal injections in the last few years. We needed to ensure she maintained certain hormonal levels, and then adjust those levels as each pregnancy progressed. Blood tests were frequent. At one point, Jenni was injecting a single $200 shot into herself daily while traveling in Europe.

Additionally, Jenni has been on prenatal vitamins now for years. Those monthly costs stack up! Our total pharmacy expenses crested $967.

There was an additional $1,338 in pharmacy expenses we tracked back in our April 2025 post that were related, too.

We spent $9,349 on health & fitness this month.

Shopping

With a baby on the way, we’re expecting some of our shopping expenses to grow. We don’t expect to be the type of parents that want every gadget, but there are various items that we believe we’ll need.

Clothing
Chris bought a new pair of minimalist Whitin shoes on Amazon—he’s been pretty happy with his other pairs. Wide toe boxes, zero drop. Light weight. But, we both tend to eat through shoes with lots of walking. They were about $37. He also picked up three pairs of similar style of shoes by Merrell. Given a stacked deal with an AMEX offer of $25, the three pair were only $116. He’s already sold one pair for over $70 after fees and will likely sell another. That’ll leave the third pair to use and, likely, a little profit against the $116 cost. Lastly, Jenni picked up some maternity clothing for $16.

We spent $163 on shopping this month. 

Childcare

Behold! A brand new expense category for us! With a baby on the way, we’re breaking out child-specific expenses into a few new subcategories.

Baby Supplies

We set out reading Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, and various online forums for different recommendations and experiences with various baby gear. Cribs, bassinets, clothes, and much more. We developed a list of items that seemed to be well regarded, safe, practical, and generally pretty minimalistic.

All parents are different, but generally we’re aiming for functional things with low plastic and a lack of technology. We’ll see how long we can stick with that!

Then, we started shopping—and will continue to for months, no doubt! Buying secondhand or being patient for deals saved us over $600!

Facebook Marketplace purchases this month included:

• Unused Ikea SNIGLAR crib with barely used Lullaby Earth 2- stage crib mattress for $30 (new: crib $129, mattress $200).
• Secondhand Arms-Reach Mini Ezee 2 in 1 Co-Sleeper Bedside Bassinet for $40 (new: $240).
• Two secondhand Arms-Reach cotton bassinet sheets for $4 (new: $23 each).
• Seven secondhand variety of cotton cotton crib sheets for $7 (new: $10 each).
• Two secondhand baby blankets for $10 (new: $15 each).

Baby consignment store purchases:

• Variety of 10 cotton onesies, pajamas, and sleep sacks, new or secondhand for $27.56 (new: $5 to $10 each).

Amazon Flash Deals:

• New Honest organic cotton baby washcloths, 10 pack for $10.71 (regular price: $25).

Of course, we’ve got more baby supplies to purchase still. We’ll probably do a roundup of everything we bought in birth preparation in the future.

We spent $129 on baby supplies this month.

Florida Travel Summary

We took an 5-day trip to St. Petersburg, FL to have a few days of fun in the sun and see family too! Our timing couldn’t have been more perfect as we escaped the impending snow and ice storm that left our hometown in a blanket of thick ice for almost two weeks.

Let’s break down our trip budget.

We’ll include all expenses we incurred for the trip—even groceries, restaurants, and amusement. But we’ll skip expenses that we incurred during the trip that were not part of the trip (for example, our utility bill back home in Virginia).

Trip cost table

Let’s take a look at our total trip cost. In the table below, you’ll find four columns:

• Description: a summary of what the expense was for. We’ve included some basic geographical information for things like flights or hotels.
• Cost: our incurred expense in US dollars for the described line item. In some cases, this appears as zero. If a travel currency like hotel points, airline miles, or a credit card reward certificate covers the total expense, we record a zero here. Sometimes, there’s a minor fee in addition to using points/miles for surcharges or taxes.
• Rewards Points/Miles: we maximize our credit card rewards and frequent traveler currencies to cover the costs of our travel wherever possible. You’ll see a short description of the type of certificate or currency that we used.
• Estimated Value: when using a reward from the previous column to cover an expense, we record what we would have otherwise paid for the line item. This gives us a sense of our savings.

The table is generally in chronological order.

We still incurred expenses at home (mortgage, utilities, etc.)—but these do not appear as part of our trip costs.

Trip cost discussion

We spent about $929 on a 5 day trip for two people. That’s not exactly cheap at $186/day (or about $93/person). But, shorter trips tend to be more expensive. Defraying the flight costs across fewer nights and other fixed costs make it more expensive per night.

We used two hotel free night certificates for the trip. Our receive these through branded hotel credit cards which carry an annual fee. We attribute those costs to the trip, $95 for Hyatt and $99 for Marriott. Without using the certificates, the two hotels would have run about $438. Solid savings—and we still get some other minor benefits from those credit cards.

During our recent trip to Mexico, we booked one of our group’s rooms via Super.com which earned a pretty significant cash back of about $96 to use on a future stay. We applied that to one of our stays on this trip, cutting the cost for 2 nights from about $321 to $225.

Our direct, roundtrip flights were pretty darn cheap which was part of the original motivation for the trip. An easy ride down to Florida in the middle of Virginia’s worst winter storm in recent memory turned out to be quite fortuitous.

Summary—
Instead of about $1,269—we spent just $929 on this trip by using a pair of hotel certificates and some hotel cash back from a recent trip to Mexico.

But of course, the real win for us was getting some sun time together as Jenni gets closer and closer to our birth window. This is likely our last trip for a bit! And, we had the added bonus of seeing family for a day while avoiding a big winter storm.

Expense Conclusion

While that covers the big stuff, we still had a few random things or small purchases to mention that might be of interest.

Home Improvement
We’ve got a plan to replace our existing gas range in our kitchen with an electric unit. More specifically, we’re shooting for an induction unit. We pay about $25/month—which is about 95% a hookup fee—to have that sole gas appliance. We don’t use natural gas in any other way. Really, it’s crazy we’ve done this since we’ve moved to this place in 2013. That’s 13 years at, conservatively, $20/month in extra expense. $3,120! Holy cow. Another big factor for us is that we don’t have great ventilation in our kitchen—a nearby powder room’s fan is how we exhaust larger meals. The over-the-range microwave’s fan doesn’t do much more than kick the fumes into your face and around the kitchen. It’s just not practical for us to have an over-the-range exhaust hood installed to the outside, unfortunately. So, induction will relieve a little of this concern. Anyhow, we had an electrician come by to run a 50amp, 240v circuit from our nearby fusebox to a newly installed 4-prong appliance plug behind the stove. An investment in a future replacement.

The electrician’s service was about $450.

How Much We Work

We like to keep track of how much time we spend doing work that is paid.

Let’s add this month to the list…

Jenni earned a year-end bonus even as a part-time employee at her pharmacy. That, plus some labor hours, created a nice little 401(k) contribution for her to close out the year. We clocked a little under 30 hours this month together.

Net Worth Update

Net worth is not our primary measurement, and can understand it can be discouraging if you’re working yourself out of debt. We also understand it’s difficult to be transparent with our readers without divulging this information, so we continue to do so.

Account breakdown

Even with the wild swings in the market lately, our investments continue to be pretty stable. From a high level, our assets and liabilities are shown in the data table below as of January 31, 2026.

• Miscellaneous assets include specific investments we’ve made in physical assets (think collectibles) and treasury bonds
• Amounts do not reflect the value of the businesses Chris owns or their assets, which should appear as income to us over future years
• Jenni’s Prius is omitted

The S&P 500 was up about 1.5% for the month.

We were up about 3.1%—that’s a good bit more than the market and makes up for some of our recent lagging. This is partly attributed to the big $STX run up mentioned in the income section above, and partly just due to diversified investing in things like $VXUS which is outperforming $VTSAX recently.

Overall, our net worth increased by around $97K this month.

Previous Donation Winner

Our poll winner, Winter Walk Inc., brings communities together to highlight the needs the homeless population. All funds raised are passed directly to nonprofit partners providing shelter, food, healthcare, and other essential services for those experiencing homelessness. This is a positive example of people coming together in groups to help those in need.

Our Reader’s Fund seeks to leverage the principles of FIRE to build a lifetime of giving.

Thank you for your participation in our polls over the last 5 years. We’ve given over $9,600 to deserving charities with your help in deciding which organizations to donate to.

Polls are now open for our next round of candidates: Victims of Abuse Charities.

Charity Round-Up

A very close family member became actively involved in these organizations as part of her personal recovery from sexual abuse. She has shared her traumatic story with lawmakers and fellow survivors to shed light on the gaps in our system. Most recently, she spoke in support of VA House Bill 475 to expand availability of sexual assault nurse examiners (SANEs), to provide protocols for how hospitals treat sexual assault survivors, and to require every hospital in Virginia to have a SANE on staff. Currently only 16 out of 122 hospitals have the ability to provide exams to victims meaning, those who seek help are often turned away in a desperate time of need!

In support of her bravery and determination to help protect the inevitable future victims of sexual abuse, we have summarized three excellent organizations fighting for survivors. They each have great charity ratings. We invite you to learn more about their great work and join us in donating to one of them by casting your vote.

Summaries below include the impact metrics and a link to their Candid profile, which details the nonprofit’s operations and transparency.

1)​​ Safe Harbor

Why? They have spent the last 25 years directly helping victims of abuse address their trauma and transform their lives. 

Where? Richmond, Virginia

What? Safe Harbor is a local nonprofit organization that provides direct support for survivors of sexual and domestic violence and human trafficking.

They offer the following services in English and Spanish at no cost and without any discrimination:

• Counseling and support groups specifically designed for adults, teens, and children who’ve been abused or witnessed abuse.
• Safe Houses Program providing emergency shelters with alternative hotel stays when shelters are full, complete with overnight care packages, and transitional housing options.
• Court advocacy to navigate the court systems when seeking protective orders.
• Hospital accompaniments consisting of trained volunteers to respond to area hospitals and emergency rooms to provide advocacy and support to victims.
• Community education and outreach including Safe Bars RVA. This is a sexual violence prevention program where professionals train hospitality workers and bartenders to recognize unwanted sexual attention and respond to it.
• Operate a  24-hour helpline

[Candid] [About]

2) RAINN

Why? RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) is a national system that allows survivors to access help from anywhere. 

Where? The United States

What? RAINN is the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence nonprofit organization, that was founded in 1994 with its first crisis hotline. 

They offer the following services for the unfortunate victims of abuse: 

• National Sexual Assault Hotline: a free confidential, 24/7 crisis hotline with trained specialists via phone, chat, or text.
• Education and community support: education to recognize, prevent, and respond to sexual violence, creating safer communities.
• Policy and justice advocacy: fighting to develop and strengthen the laws that protects victims, prevents harm, and holds perpetrators accountable. 
• Consulting and training: training for workplaces and institutions to increase awareness, prevention and identification of sexual abuse.

[Candid] [About]

3) National Domestic Violence Hotline

Why? Beyond providing crisis support, they offer early intervention strategies and safety planning to reduce the risk of violence.

Where? The United States

What? The National Domestic Violence Hotline is a nonprofit organization operating a domestic and intimate partner violence crisis hotline for anyone who needs help immediately. To accommodate specific groups, they offer support in over 200 languages, partner with Abused Deaf Women’s Advocacy Services and StrongHearts Native Helpline for culturally appropriate services. Through their communication support, they hope to shift power back to those affected and develop a plan to safety. When a person calls they can get help in the following areas:

• Crisis intervention and support from trained advocates.
• Education on abuse warning signs, power and control, why people do this, how to support others, and tools to stay safe and make a personal safety plan.
• Loveisrespect.org a teen dating abuse hotline for young people or curious about healthy relationships.
• Resource list to local providers like shelters, legal aid, financial aid, counseling, healthcare, and state coalitions.

[Candid] [About]

Nonprofit poll

After reviewing the list above, please take a moment to vote for which nonprofit you think will put funds to use in the best way.

(Have trouble using or seeing the poll above? Some reader tools or apps may not display it. View this page in a browser or use this link to our Reader Fund page, which has a copy of the poll!)

Thank you for taking the time to vote!

One of our primary goals with TicTocLife is building a stream of giving within the FIRE community, and that starts with knowledge.

What’s Next

Well, we’ve revealed the “little project” we’ve been working on and teasing in recent months! It’s been a long time coming, and, we’re sure you can understand why we wanted to keep it under wraps until the pregnancy was further along. Years of difficulty make you a little gun shy. But we’re here now, with our first baby due in May! How exciting.

No doubt, much of our upcoming posts and updates will focus on baby-related topics. But, don’t worry, after you tough through that part of our journey—we’ll get back to more regular topics at the intersection of personal finance and money psychology. Though, we’ll have a new dimensions to see things through.

February will bring lots of baby-focused shopping prep, home upgrades/changes, and some educational elements. We don’t know how to be parents, after all! 🙂 We can’t wait!

With Baby on the brain, got any tips or thoughts?
Let us know in the comments or on Threads and X (Twitter)!