Maximizing FMLA Caregiver Leave

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TL;DR: Don’t use your vacation time when you run out of sick leave if you have to care for family due to medical procedures or ongoing medical care. Plan any optional medical procedures toward the end of the year when you’re more likely to be out of sick leave. If your employer pays you while you are on family caregiver leave, apply for that instead. If they do not pay you while on that leave, ask them if they could!

I have had the opportunity through my employer to apply for this leave twice in 2018. The first time was when my wife needed surgery and I needed to take a couple of days off a few months into the year. I had a discussion with our HR department about how I could take caregiver leave, and they said I needed to use up all of my sick leave before I could apply for the caregiver leave. I then made the argument to them that if I were to use all of my sick leave early in the year to take care of my wife, I wouldn’t be able to take family caregiver leave when I got sick or when I needed to take care of a sick child. They responded by saying that I should use my vacation days. This was unacceptable to me because I consider vacation days to be used for both mental and physical recovery for myself and my family. In addition to that, our vacation time rolls over up to a year worth each year, so unless I was in danger of using it or losing it, I want to keep as much of it saved up as possible to be paid out when I leave the company or used for larger vacations or to extend other leaves like parental leave for a newborn or adopted child. If we had a combined vacation and sick leave policy, it would be a different matter, and I would attempt to conserve my leave in that case even more.

Learnings

So, what I learned from this experience is that if your family member is going through a surgery or something that requires you to take time off to help them in recovery, plan it toward the end of the year when you are more likely to be close to using up all of your sick leave than at the beginning of the year so that you can take advantage of the caregiver leave and not have to dig into your vacation time.

The second time I was able to apply for caregiver leave, my son needed surgery which would take a week to recover from near the end of the year. Again, I went to my HR department and applied for the leave. This time it was a simple affair, where I had one sick day left by October due to mostly having to take care of sick children throughout the year and taking a couple of days for my own sicknesses. They needed me to fill out a form, and have my son’s doctor fill out the rest of it to prove that the medical leave was necessary. After that my leave was approved with no problem.

I am very fortunate in that in the last year my employer announced that they would pay employees that needed to take caregiver leave. This is not required by an employer, and usually the leave is unpaid or only part of your full-time pay.

Other Considerations

One factor that should be taken into account about leave is that rewards your company may give you can be pro-rated based on how much leave you take. It was the same with paternity leave when I took that, my bonus was reduced based on how much leave I took. It was totally worth it to me to lose that opportunity for money to spend those months with my sons. I consider spending time with my wife or son during their recovery after surgery worth it as well. If I were not paid for the time off, I would have to do more evaluation on whether my finances could sustain the hit of taking the leave or take vacation time or find other ways to pay for that time off.

If your employer doesn’t pay you if you take caregiver leave, you should ask them to! Whenever I see a company that has a benefit that is better than what I have, or something that my company doesn’t have at all, I always email our HR department suggesting that they offer it. This may be easier in the tech industry than in other industries due to the high demand in some areas, but it couldn’t hurt to ask regardless of where you work. If no one requests it, then they don’t know that employees want it or should have it. Get that movement started at your workplace and be a voice for change. If your workplace would look down on you for trying to improve the working environment and increase employee retention, then you should start looking for another job today.

Hopefully my story has given you some good things to consider when handling your own leave. I know I haven’t covered all cases of leave or company sizes and protections provided by state or federal government, but this should give you some ideas to do more research on your own for your specific situation.

Managing Multiple Investment Accounts in Personal Capital and Rebalancing

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TL;DR: I’ve found that tracking my investments over multiple accounts is easiest through the tool, Personal Capital. It is the best at keeping your account information up-to-date and has the fewest problems connecting to new accounts and staying connected as well as letting you specify assets in the account if it is not able to connect. It helps me in seeing my allocation in different sectors across my accounts and allows me to rebalance every 6 months with ease.

If you’re like me, and you have a diversified portfolio for retirement spread across two or more accounts, you’ve probably looked into different solutions to track performance across those accounts. Unfortunately, every solution that I’ve tried falls short in one area or another in providing a comprehensive picture of your overall financial health. However, the one tool that I have found the most useful is Personal Capital. I mainly look at the net worth graphs along with the investment graphs to determine my overall financial standing.

For investing, you can select Investing > Holdings and see how your portfolio compares to the S&P 500 index or the DOW. Switching time frames also shows the last 6 months, 1 year, etc. to show how it’s comparing to those over time. As long as my investments are equal to or greater than all of these indexes, I’m happy with my investment decisions.

I have about 90% of my accounts invested into index funds, and around 10% in individual stocks in the tech sector and that is reflected in the sector allocation graph. If you are unsure about what sectors your funds are in, you can easily see that with this tool. When I need to rebalance due to being too heavy in one sector, I go to whichever account those investments are in, calculate the % allocation that would bring me back into line with my investment targets every 6 months or so, then exchange the funds.

I’ve noticed a lot of talk about holding cash and waiting for a downturn in other investment blogs and podcasts, but ideally you would have an investment allocation that rarely is in cash so that your money is always gaining value and not losing value due to inflation or missing out on another bull market. If you want to take advantage of market upswings, and downturns, you just need to rebalance to do so. If you had a 20% allocation to bonds, and 80% in stocks, but then the stock market goes down by 10%+, you could re-allocate funds from bonds into stocks to get a discount on stock. However, the opposite is also true. If your stock goes up, your allocation into stock would be over 80%, so you could rebalance again, lock in profits from your stocks by selling out of those and buying more bonds to get that back up to 20% allocation. In this sense, you are keeping money aside in bonds instead of just cash and still hopefully keeping pace with inflation.

I also front-load my investments at the start of the year due to my employer doing a 50% match on all contributions that isn’t limited to a certain percent each paycheck. By front-loading my money is in the market longer and can compound more throughout the year while others dollar cost average instead. So in the first few months of the year my investments are really pushing my account balance up and after 6 months I rebalance depending on how those funds are doing. One thing you can do to also rebalance is to change your allocation in your investments throughout the year if you dollar cost average. If you’re like me and you front-load, you only really need to adjust your allocations a couple times a year in the funds you already have invested.

One thing I’ve noticed with looking at the net worth value, if you have your property included with the Zillow estimate it can really affect the value quite a bit depending on how your real estate market is doing. If selling your property and downsizing into a smaller house is not part of your retirement plan, you might want to skip adding your property to Personal Capital and just track your investments and other debt and cash accounts instead.

Hopefully this was insightful in how I use Personal Capital for investment tracking and rebalancing, and gives you some ideas in what you can do for your investing journey! If you want to try out Personal Capital, please use my referral link!

 

Minimizing Risk in Cryptocurrency Investments

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TL;DR: Invest 1% or less of your portfolio in cryptocurrencies for the long term. Pull out your initial investment after it doubles and let your investment grow on the gains after that. Pull out some gains every 6 months or so to lock in profit for as long as the crypto market keeps going up. If you want to sign up for Coinbase, please use my referral link to get $10 USD in free Bitcoin after you invest $100 USD. I also get $10 in Bitcoin for referrals, so I appreciate it!

The first time I heard about cryptocurrencies was in 2013, when Bitcoin was much cheaper and mining it was still financially feasible to the masses. I had a co-worker that had invested a few hundred into it, and another co-worker a few thousand. I read about people mining it, but didn’t bother to research what that even meant at the time. It was considered to be too new, and not proven, so a high risk investment.

Fast forward to around June of 2017, the cryptocurrency market is much hotter, and is growing at an astounding rate. I talked with some of my co-workers again about it, and most of them were of the mindset that it was  still too risky of an investment due to its volatility day to day. Having a bit more investment research and knowledge than four years ago, I was able to see that the risk, if handled appropriately, was an acceptable one to take with a very small part of my portfolio. Below I will cover my strategy to cryptocurrency investment.

Measuring Risk

If you are planning to get into a high risk, high reward investment like cryptocurrencies, you want to test the waters a bit with a small percent of your portfolio that you are willing to lose and won’t affect your daily life. I took $900 that my spouse and I had agreed beforehand that I could use however I wanted in investments and invested it in a Coinbase account after researching the different exchanges and their pros/cons. The biggest selling point for me on Coinbase was that they were US based, and offered three of the top cryptocurrencies available, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. They also have one of the largest user bases of all exchanges for cryptos.

To mitigate my risk, I split my initial investment to $400 in Bitcoin, $100 in Ethereum, and $400 in Litecoin. My reasoning was that it takes a lot more growth and investment for Bitcoin to grow than it does for Litecoin, which was at a much lower price per coin. The fees in Coinbase are sometimes pretty high, but worth the cost with how much you can potentially gain investing in cryptos.

Setting Goals

My goal with my first investment was to test the exchange to see how it worked, as well as see if it was right for me before investing more. Verifying my identity on account creation took a little while to work out, but I got it to succeed after a few attempts. Buying directly from a bank checking account takes a week before your funds show up in Coinbase, but the purchase of your cryptos goes through at the price you place the order at. This means, that you can’t sell what you purchased for at least a week. Since my goal was to invest for the long term, this wasn’t a problem. If you want to day trade and try to time the market buying low and selling high, then I’d suggest you transfer the funds to your account first before trading. As my account grows or shrinks, I would periodically rebalance the account to make sure that I wasn’t too overweight in one cryptocurrency.

Collecting Reward

Three weeks after my initial investment, Litecoin tripled in value. I now had an account that had $1,200 in Litecoin. At this point, if this were all I wanted to invest in cryptos, I would have pulled out my initial $900, and let the profits ride. However, now that I had proven that my investments could make money, and that Coinbase was reliable enough for longer term investments, I decided to put the remainder of my higher risk funds into the account. After seeing Ethereum rise up over 60% since my initial investment as well, I invested $2,000 more in Ethereum and $2,000 more in Litecoin. Bitcoin had been hovering around the 16K-18K mark and didn’t seem like it was taking off like the other two. Within 3 days of my investment, I had earned another 30% on the account as a whole.

Conclusion

I plan to withdraw my initial investment of $4,900 after my account doubles in value to reduce my risk and let the coins I have left grow in value over the next year. I will keep rebalancing, and invest in new cryptocurrencies as they become available in Coinbase. If I lose the profits at this point, it was a fun experiment that helped me diversify my portfolio and I can tell others that I at least tried to invest in cryptos. If it continues to grow, then I will keep drawing out profits every 6 months or so to lock them in in case this is truly a bubble and not just a rising new currency type that will eventually be more commonly used than country-specific currencies.

If after reading this, you want to try this or a different strategy, please use my referral link to sign up! You receive $10 USD in Bitcoin when you invest $100 or more.

I’d like to hear from you about some of your strategies and outcomes with investing in cryptos.