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Our Bill Pickle

real life with (very) real debt

The most important transaction I make each month

April 18, 2023

Every month, I pay $130 to talk to a therapist about my mental health for an hour.

We meet at the same time (mid-morning, mid-month), in the same way (virtually) and in roughly the same location (always her office, usually my kitchen).

We cover a lot of ground and it always surprises me how quickly the time passes.

The invoice arrives minutes after we disconnect. She doesn’t direct bill, so I pay the $130 out of pocket, then bill it back through insurance. Our coverage is excellent – $150 max per session with no cap on yearly spend so I get it all back a few days later.

It is the most important transaction I make every month.

It’s been a while since I’ve been present in this space. Scratch that. It’s been a while since I’ve been present in any online space. I didn’t intend to disappear — on the contrary, I thought 2022 would be the year I returned.

Here’s what happened instead.

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Posted by Tara 4 Comments
Filed Under: Lifestyle Tagged: mental health, motherhood, personal finance

It feels like we’re moving backwards

January 27, 2022

Ever felt like you're moving backwards on your goals? In this post, I'm sharing my thoughts about going backwards on our financial journey.

Something was off, but it took time to figure it out.

I had a whole other post on the schedule for today. The idea was to talk about some of the ways I plan to take care of myself in 2022. I had the outline, the headings identified and a few sentences drafted.

The last part was my first clue something was wrong. Those sentences…man, they did not come easy.

Of course, writing isn’t always easy. I worked as a reporter at a daily newspaper for almost six years. I’m not stranger to writer’s block.

This was different.

Each day it felt like I made less progress than the day before. Eventually, it got to the point where I found myself avoiding the task altogether, as if doing so would somehow solve the problem I didn’t know how to define.

When I finally figured it out, I felt relieved…until I realized what it meant.

Writing a post about self-care felt disingenuous. Writing a post about…just about anything felt disingenuous. Because if I’m being completely honest: I’ve been struggling lately. And while I wish I could just ignore that fact, I’m finding it hard to move forward as a writer without acknowledging it.

So, in the interest of moving forward — and in keeping with my mission to keep it real in this space — I wanted to take a moment to share some of what’s been going on lately. I’m hopeful writing these things down will remove them from my brain and allow more space for other things.

So here we go.

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Posted by Tara 3 Comments
Filed Under: Lifestyle Tagged: debt-free journey, homeownership, life update, motherhood, personal finance, postpartum

Hi, I’m Tara!

Welcome to Our Bill Pickle, a Canadian personal finance blog. Here, we share the good, the bad and the ugly about real life with (very) real debt.

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