Brian's employer always has a two-week mandatory shutdown in July. He gets paid weekly and of those two weeks, his employer forces him (and others who have enough vacation accumulated) to use 40 hours of vacation for one of the two weeks (which also means he can't file for unemployment for the second week...because that second week he gets $0 pay).
We know this two weeks is coming. It's like Christmas - it happens every year like clockwork. We had plenty of money in our savings account to "pay" us the week that he didn't get paid and then MURPHY happened (and if you've ever read Dave Ramsey you know who Murphy is). Murphy is that unexpected life happening that comes along when you least can afford it.
This Murphy wasn't TOO bad of a Murphy - we didn't have to access our emergency fund but we did deplete our savings account (that we had planned to use to "pay" us). And we could have accessed our emergency fund to get the money we needed for his paycheck last week but we are ahead in paying bills (the mortgage payment I just made today is for September 1) so I knew we had a two or three weeks that we could make it up.
Well, as soon as the roof job was done (the Murphy that visited us was a leaky roof) Brian listed the extra shingles (the guy doing the job miscalculated) on Craigslist and returned everything that they didn't use to the stores it came from (Lowe's and Kramer's mostly). Those returns and the sale of the shingles brought us $298 - we only needed $227 more to make up Brian's paycheck.
In my job I travel between bank branches and when I do so, I am paid mileage. Those mileage checks go directly into my savings account. There was already some money in there and with my most recent check - it was up to $114 - so then we only needed $184 to get to what we needed.
Well today, my check and Brian's check BOTH had "extra" (money over what we budget that normally goes to the debt snowball) on it and I quickly swept that to the savings account and it gave us $661 - $136 MORE than what we needed! So in just one week's time we were able to make up the check that he missed!
Now...his check had four hours of OT from the week before shutdown (they pay them two checks in one Friday...the one they'd normally get and then another for 40 hours...if they work OT that second week...they don't get it until today), 40 hours of vacation (which was what he was forced to take) and eight hours of holiday pay. I'm SO thankful that it worked out like it did!!!
So I was able to pay everything today and we're all done for the month. Within just a few days I'll be able to tell what all we've paid off in one year's time. I can't wait to see the final number!
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