Fridays are normally awesome, but this one is a little different. When I leave work for the day I’m officially on a one week furlough from my job as a software engineer. For the week I’m off, I will only be paid 1/3rd my normal salary. This obviously poses quite a challenge to our household budget. We’ve known this was coming for about a month, so luckily we’ve had some time to prepare for it. We have a plan, and believe we have it contained, but it will required us to stick EXACTLY to our budget for the next month. More on that coming in my CareOne post next week.
The good news is that I have all of next week to relax, recharge the batteries, and not think about work at all. Even if I wanted to, I can’t because we’ve been instructed to do nothing work related for the entire week, not even check email.
Hey, I do what I’m told. 🙂 Ok friends, let’s fist pump:
Posts That Make Me Fist Pump
- How Product Parties Make You Spend Money from Money Life and More
- 10 Things Your Spouse Won’t Tell You from Yahoo Finance
- Terrible Emergency Fund Advice From A Banker from Plunged In Debt
- 7 Ways To Get Your Kids Involved In Back To School Shopping from Boomer and Echo
- Budgeting Frustrations: What Stops Us From Using a Budget? from Broke Newlyweds
Shameless Self Promotion
- Why I’m Paying Cash For my New Car! is this week’s post in the CareOne Community
- How To Ease Your Budget Into The Start Of A New School Year is my latest at My Personal Finance Journey
Blog Carnivals
- Carnival of MoneyPros at Master the Heart of Saving
- Carnival of Financial Independence at Reach Financial Independance
- Lifestyle Carnival at Fitnancials
Thanks for mentioning Daisy’s post this week 🙂 hopefully the furlough is just a one time thing…
I hope so too, Lance! This is the first time I’ve ever been affected by or even heard of this by my company – although I guess they’ve done it with different parts of their workforce. The thing I worry about is, once they start doing it, does it open the door to them doing it more often?
Looks like it is an extra frugal week for you, Travis! Nice posts..I have my reading cut out for me.
Not only a frugal week, but several weeks leading up to and for the pay period with the reduced paycheck. I’m confident we’ll make it through!
Thanks so much Travis, I hope you enyoy your well-budgeted week off 😉 6 more months!!!
Great reminder, Catherine – each time I get frustrated with our finances, I remind myself of how close we are to the end. Thanks for stopping by!
Double edged sword, but at least you can relax! Have a great week!
Very true, Cassi….and relax I will! 🙂
I’m guessing that you work for the same company as my hubby – he’s in the hardware development side of things. Our biggest concern is, will this happen again? Is this going to become a quarterly thing to make the numbers “look good”? Like you, the weeks up to the furloughed paycheck were spent revising the budget a few times so that we could keep things on track. It wasn’t as bad as we expected, and I am sure that you guys will get through it just fine.
I’m sorry to hear your husband was furloughed as well, Angie. I hope it doesn’t become a common occurrence – not only for our sake but for the company quite frankly. They do this on a regular basis and I believe they’ll see a mass exodus towards to door. My reduced check shows up on Friday….I think we’ve adequately prepared and will be fine, but I hope there aren’t much in the way of surprises for the rest of the month. 🙂
You can use the extra time and get caught up on some household chores or better yet, just relax and enjoy your time off.
I did a little both, Zimmy – back to work now!