Money, money, money…ain't it funny…
Click to viewIt started out like any other Monday. Then about half an hour into my shift, my manager asked me to come to a conference room. I went more than a little nervously, my "principal's office" instincts acting up…then you could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather when I found out what she wanted.
About a month ago, she'd put me in for some kind of "job progression" thing. I'm not entirely sure what it means, or if there are more responsibilities that come with it, but anyway, the upshot of it is, I'm getting an 11% raise. Without going into specifics, this is going to mean a salary bump in the low hundreds of dollars per month, the low thousands per year, for me. It's also going to mean the scads of overtime hours I'm currently working are going to become even more lucrative. I started working at the higher pay rate today, and will first see it reflected in the paycheck I'll get two weeks from Friday.
I'm still kind of stunned. It feels like I'm finally starting to win at adulting.
For the last few years, I've barely been keeping my head above water. After running up thousands of dollars of credit card debt during a period of unemployment, I finally got a good job at Anthem right when my brother was able to lay down some cash for a condo where I could live. But it's been a long, hard struggle even just trying to get to where it felt like I was breaking even. Up until just a few months ago, I was still living from paycheck to paycheck, and every few weeks having to borrow $100 from a brother or friend until payday to avoid overdrawing. It was kind of like the situation mentioned in that Abba video above.
Then the scooters came along, coupled with 5 hours a week of overtime at work, and suddenly it was more like…
Not only was I keeping my head above water, I was actually in a boat. For the first time since I'm not sure how long, I was able to open a savings account and put money in it. And I'm able to look at a balance in my checking account and not have to cross my fingers that I don't run out of money to live on before payday. (And no more having to borrow money! Now I've got overdraft protection.)
It couldn't have happened at a better time. My desktop computer had just fried itself, leaving me without a Windows box to work on. My super-cheap surround receiver/Blu-ray player conked out a week after I got it from the flea market. I was at the point where I was looking wistfully at all the stuff I wanted to get someday, maybe but having no idea how I could afford it.
Now I've got a decent low-end home theater surround setup downstairs, and my upstairs Windows box has new motherboard, CPU, RAM, video card, and drives. And I've started putting a little money in savings from each paycheck. Now, thanks to the raise, I'll be continuing that, maybe increasing it, and will be bumping up the amount I'm paying my brother on my condo every month. And I'm still keeping a decent balance in my checking account.
Of course, a lot of this rampant largess won't last. The overtime will dry up at the end of the year, and the scooters are already in a decline for the winter. Which is why I'm putting money in savings now; it's possible I may end up needing to rely on it for a while. (At least until the scooters come back.) But the bump from that raise is going to last-and I might even get another, smaller one in March. So I'll be able to tighten my belt and get by, at least until the scooters take off again in the spring.
And I still have most of those rampant credit card debts to pay, which may end up eating up much of my savings. But once the scooters come back, I should hopefully be able to rebuild the savings again.
I suppose that when you get right down to it, I feel…at least 80% wealthy. A lot of people wish they could be wealthy just for all the things they could buy-but for the last few years, I've wished for wealth just so I wouldn't have to worry about living from paycheck to paycheck and not overdrawing. And now, at least for now, I have that. I have the thing that was 80% of what I wished to be wealthy for. So, I guess I'm 80% wealthy.
And it's a rich man's world.