squirreling

I just finished paying myself back for any “borrowing” I did from my savings account since the beginning of the year, and find that I have a nice tidy sum in my savings.

Logically, I know that any extra I have would be good to throw into the second mortgage, but I find that family emergencies come up often enough where I don’t want to have it even slightly inaccessible. Also, I have no sense of how much I’m “saving” when I simply throw extra money in, which I have been doing every payment to a limited amount. What I need to do is to pay in a bulk payment one month, so I know exactly how much I can pull back out of the second mortgage when I need it without feeling like I’m going into further debt. I think I can cut down my monthly interest by about 1/3 if I throw in all the saving I have.

It feels good to feel like I’m being responsible and frugal, while not really sacrificing my “standard of living” (let’s face it, I’m not a big spender to begin with). I feel like I have enough to help plan/pay for the wedding, help my family out, and keep a little in savings for backup, as well as go out and eat some really good food when I want it. Of course, this is heavily dependent on, say, not having any periods of unemployment in the near future. Keeping fingers crossed.

Speaking of employment, my manager told me that he’s been talking to the director and to HR to try to get me a raise because I just passed my year mark with the company on June 1st. 🙂 Even if I don’t get anything, that is a good feeling that he’s going to bat for me.

I’ve been working crazy hours this past week to meet a deadline. In the past, this kind of thing had made me sort of angry with my old job, because it made me feel like they had really unreasonable deadlines that forced me into this mode. But in my current job, this is only because I had a hard time with a couple of bugs I was working on. I had been given plenty of time and not a large amount of pressure to get those done, so it has been ok. I made a breakthrough earlier this week, so I’m down to two bugs, one of which is almost done anyway. I’ve been feeling kind of energized from the workload. I think that I work best under sort of tight, but not impossible deadlines. I get into a zone where I can cruise through complicated problems quickly and come up with alternate strategies for fixing them. If I’m not in the zone, it takes much longer, so it is almost better for me to be slightly overworked than slightly underworked.