Wow, What a Day!

Today was payday. I stopped at the bank on my way into work to update my book and got a bit of a shock. My paycheque is direct deposited and the amount that showed up in my account was about twice as big as it should have been! Considering that I had a few hours deducted on my last cheque because I'd been slightly overpaid on two occasions I wasn't about to "wait and see". I got to the office and phoned our accountant.

Guess what? She paid out everybody's 2008 vacation pay, all at once. The amount is right, but I can't just trot off and spend it because I now have 15 days coming to me where I won't get paid! So, what to do?

I'm going to take $750 and move it to my ING account. Whenever I take vacation days, I'll just transfer $50/day back into my regular bank account. The rest of the money goes into this month's pot.

Then I retrieved the messages on my cell from the 2 holiday days (I was too tired to do it last night). Remember in my last post I hinted at something? Well, I've been waiting for the final payout of the insurance claim from the flood we had 2 years ago. It was actually supposed to arrive around the end of February (right about when we were moving in here with my daughter and son-in-law) but it never did. Some other mail, including another cheque, went missing and I had tried a few times to follow up, but messages left on the adjuster's voice mail went unanswered and eventually that progressed to his mailbox being perpetually full, so one day a week or so ago I finally looked up a main number for the insurance company, fought my way through their voice mail system to a live person in the claims department and discovered that my adjuster was no longer working there!

Anyway, I got a call from a nice girl who just had to confirm with her Accounting department that the cheque hadn't been cashed and arrange for a stop payment on it before she could issue a new one. And Monday or Tuesday she called and left a message saying it was ready! Hip hip hooray! I worked for an hour this morning, then went and picked up a cheque for $3,000!

So, how is this cheque going to be spent? Pay off Dell (the laptop I bought to replace the desktop that was fried in the flood), IKEA (furniture we bought to replace stuff that was trashed in the flood), Home Depot (the first of three 0% interest plans we used for our fireplace, lighting, flooring, etc, for the new city place) and some miscellaneous bills that we need to catch up on. I want to use the rest to pay down a chunk on at least one of our 2 major credit cards. Hubby would like to use $300 of it to pay the deductible so we can have our car repaired.

You see, there has been a recurrent problem here in the Lower Mainland with a guy who goes around to parking lots and keys all four doors of every car he can get his hands on. We were actually one of the early victims, before every episode of keying started making it onto the nightly news. He's been arrested, but we'll see what happens to him when the case goes to trial. If he's found guilty maybe several hundred angry car owners can sue him for all the deductibles, but I don't know if he has the money to pay it anyway.

Or we could use $200-$300 to take Dog in for his annual physical, rabies shot, blood tests, etc. He just had his birthday, so the anniversary of when we actually got him and started taking him to the vet will be coming up in August. If we set aside money for that now, we won't be scrambling in 2 months time or whipping out the plastic to pay the vet.

Or I could just go out and buy that $3,000 purse people have been talking about over on The Simple Dollar. Yeah, right.