Thanks for the congrats on my promotion! I still don't know what my raise will be; I'm not sure what my supervisor asked for because I told him that I'd like to request $55,000, but that if he thought a 10% increase was more realistic, he could ask for that. That would be $53,800. Since I haven't heard anything, I feel pretty safe assuming I got one of those two figures. I suppose I could just ask my boss, but I'll find out in a week's time in my paycheck anyway. 
Anyway, the other good news. I wrote a second email to my lawyer's paralegal asking for an estimate on the cost of our estate planning. I'd saved up $2500 for it, but it was so complicated and was taking so long that I was getting pretty nervous. Turns out it will be a $1500 flat fee! So great! Now I can put that extra $1000 I saved toward AS's mom. We can get that situation cleared up much more easily than I thought, and get back to extra debt repayment.
We've been having good luck with our two rental situations: NT's flat and our condo parking spot. His renters moved out, but the management people found new ones right away, and they prepaid for three months! Our parking-spot renters also like prepaying, and they just paid for October-November-December. When I read about how erratic renters can be, I count us very lucky indeed that we haven't had any problems so far.
While I'm writing, I should record that $25 went into the EF. That takes us to $2884.06 in 2011 savings, and our total EF to $11,396.01.
Tonight I'm going to Costco with my friend to stock up on staples as well as buy groceries for this weekend. He and his partner both have birthdays in October, so we used some of our recent influx of extra money to rent a minivan and a cottage about 3 hours away, so we can spend a weekend with them. We leave Friday evening and come back Sunday afternoon/evening. Just a quick little trip away, but those can be a lot of fun.
Good news keeps on coming!
October 6th, 2011 at 04:49 pm
October 6th, 2011 at 05:18 pm 1317921516
Great news all the way around! Have a wonderful weekend getaway!
October 7th, 2011 at 02:54 am 1317956045
October 9th, 2011 at 10:00 pm 1318197638
Jerry