Hello Bonus, Goodbye Bonus

I received my bonus in my paycheck this past week. It ended up being close to $5000, but after they took out taxes, it was less than I expected so I wasn't able to pay off as much as I thought I'd be able to. What I was able to pay off is one of our Best Buy cards, our Target card, and I will be paying off all of the purchases that will begin accumulating interest in the coming months from our other Best Buy card. There will be some money leftover, but I'm not sure if I want to put it towards the Best Buy card, or towards one of my interest accruing accounts. I'm waiting to see how much money we have left in the account once everything I paid has cleared the bank.

One of the other major steps that we finally took was buying additional life insurance. Well, we haven't technically bought it, but once I contact my insurance agent on Monday to make the first two months payment, we will have enough life insurance to pay off our debt if something were to happen to either of us, plus a few years of income. My husband actually qualified for preferred rates, since he quit smoking nearly two years ago. It's going to cost us less than $50 a month, and it's a 20 year term policy. We have until 15 years into the policy to convert them to whole life policies based on our current health.

I also had my year end review this past week and found out that I'm getting a raise the first pay of April. My raise ended up being 3.41%, and my manager told me that was the highest raise that the system would let her give me based on the fact that I got a raise last fall. I have been looking at other jobs, just to see what's out there. While I love the people I work with, I'm not sure that I'm comfortable with the direction my current role is headed, and I know that there are positions available that will pay more and may be better suited for me. I'm trying to decide if I want to stay put and start working on my MBA, or if I want to find another job and work towards my MBA. I'm conflicted because we have such a great team and I think it would be hard to find that same chemistry somewhere else.

I'm trying to figure out how to better use this blog than just documenting how much debt we have every month. It doesn't make for very interesting reading when I only update once a month.

Anyway, I will update with February totals once all of my payments process. Until next time.