hola amigos! hope you’re all having a fantastic friday or weekend. today’s post is a short one to share three little tidbits:
1. guest post — we’re up today on even steven money with an fi interview. go check it out! if you don’t know even steven, he and and his wife are on an fi journey of their own, which includes crushing some debt along the way. he’s got some super honest posts that are definitely worth the read, like this one.
2. money fail — we just have to share a recent fail with you guys, in part so you can see that we aren’t totally on the ball in every instance, and just because it’s funny (or maybe not so funny). you probably already know that i travel nearly every week for work, since so many of our stories here come from that. well, all that travel means i have to do expense reports to get reimbursed for the expenses. and we’re talking about some expenses that are not insignificant — generally $1,000 to $1,500 per trip, sometimes more. and because of all the travel, i sometimes get behind on submitting my expenses. just so happens that i got behind recently, and this week i caught up, and nearly had a heart attack when i saw the total: $16,000.
holy #$%@.
not like we’re gonna leave credit card bills unpaid, so we’ve been paying those monthly bills and paying the difference out of our “life happens” fund. i’m definitely not happy with myself for giving my company an interest-free loan, but… the upside is that we’ve actually found a way to cash flow a lot of each payment (this is over about four months, not one month — we don’t have that kind of cash flow!), meaning that we don’t “owe” our life happens fund $16,000, we only owe it about $5000. meaning: when i get reimbursed next week, and we pay ourselves back, we’ll have tricked ourselves into saving an additional $11,000 or so. sweet! that’ll help with the year-end goals!
of course we don’t recommend saving this way — that’s a bit like overpaying your taxes on purpose to get a big refund (another zero-interest loan, this time to the government) — but we’re certainly happy to look on the bright side this time around. :-)
3. update on bonus #1 — for those of you who read monday’s post on our upcoming bonuses, i found out about mine yesterday. our company has had a not awesome year, so expectations were low. that said, they beat my very low expectations, and told me that i’ll get a slightly larger raise next year than i was expecting, and that i’ll get “extra credit” next year (which we expect will be a better year), so 2016’s year-end bonus should be a bit better. (also, to address some of the comments, both my bonus and mr. onl’s bonus aren’t true bonuses — they’re really deferred compensation. to help our companies smooth out their own cash flow, senior people in both of our orgs agree to get a chunk of our entitled salary at the end of the year. there is a profit-sharing element of both, which are dependent on the year the companies had, and mr. onl’s has more of a true “bonus” baked in. just wanted to clarify!)
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hope you guys have a fantastic weekend! we’re hoping to sneak in a little skiing, though we are both out of town for work today, and we’ll both turn around and travel again early monday — so it will be a short weekend. but next week is the last work week before our two weeks off for the holidays — woo to the hoo, y’all!
any fun weekend plans to share? any recent money fails you want to confess? we’re all ears!