My husband got a raise! He received a 4.26% raise! It’s the largest raise he has gotten since he has been working for this company. He’s worked for the same company for 12 years and he has gotten a raise every year, but this year was the biggest he has ever gotten.

I’m so happy for him because he works so hard this past year, and he did not feel he was compensated appropriately at work; he wasn’t upset with his salary, but with certain bonuses that were handed out. However, after his 1 on 1 meeting with his boss yesterday and his raise, he feels a lot better about it. He was able to see his boss’s review of him and he feels like his boss really went to bat for him to receive fair compensation. It is always nice to fell appreciated and valued at work!

In a lot of ways we have worked to avoid lifestyle inflation, but I think we are going to fold this raise into our regular budget. We have a lot of upcoming expenses that this money can help us with in addition to debt that we are still trying to pay down!

The Husband has already set his 401k to max out for the year, so we don’t need to add to his retirement. My 403b is not maxed out and we are considering increasing contributions to my retirement account for at least some of the extra money, but we are waiting to see what his actual paycheck looks like before making any changes.

Hopefully, it will be enough of an increase that there will be a little more money we can throw towards debt and a little more money we can put away towards retirement!

We mainly use cash and the envelope system to budget. We do occasionally use credit cards for certain expenses, but we primarily use cash. Starting with our last month’s money, we started taking all our one-dollar bills to use as a small emergency fund.  Since February 1, we have put $125 into our newest envelope.

We put each of our dollar bills in the envelope and then once it reaches $100, we trade it out for a one-hundred-dollar bill and start over. It’s not much, but it will provide another small cushion for when an emergency arises.  On the front of the envelope, we have a square post-it note and each time we add any dollar bills to the envelope, we update the post-it note, that way we have a running tally of how much is in there.

I’m hoping to have close to $1000 by the end of the year.  Regardless of how much money is in there, it will function as another small safety net, at least until we get out of credit card debt.

It’s been fun to watch the numbers grow. Our debt is going down VERY SLOWLY, and it has been hard to keep our motivation up to pay off debt, but this has been something that has made me a little excited about our finances again. It’s a small thing, that is giving us a surprisingly big morale boost.