The Good Life on a Budget

• Posted by JvW on February 27th, 2008 filed in work

Well the last couple of weeks have been crazy, to say the least. Most of the insanity has revolved around my job. Last week I spent a whirlwind two days in New Jersey for a sales conference. In addition to that, I have started taking on a larger workload.

Back in January, my boss asked me if I would like to be considered for a promotion, so like any normal person, I accepted. Once I was in the running, there was a lot to do. I had to complete online courses and tests, which were required to be done on a tight deadline and during non-working hours. This translated into coming home from work and spending 1-2 hours doing the online courses. The after-work time had formerly been referred to as “blogging time”.

Fortunately, my efforts paid off and I will take on my new position starting our second quarter in May! It is still a sales position, so I will continue to be paid with a salary + commission structure, except the salary increases and the commission potential is better.

Since the only portion I can absolutely count on is the salary, I crunched the numbers to determine the difference this will make to our budget. My salary base will increase by $5000, which breaks down to $192.30 per paycheck (I get paid bi-weekly). After taxes, my take-home will be approximately $150 more per paycheck. Pretty sweet!

With the promotion, however, I plan to definitively quit my second job. Long time readers will know that I have wanted to quit for quite some time, but there’s always a good reason to keep at it. Once I have the increased responsibility, I simply won’t have time to do both jobs. So my drop-dead date on the second job is May 1. I am so excited! (Perhaps even more excited about that the the promotion itself!)

At the second job, I take home roughly $600 a month. So in actual hard paycheck figures, I will be taking a pay cut in taking this promotion. The plan, of course, is to make up the difference in commissions and I am confident I will be able to do so. Not to mention my quality of life will increase as well!