pop goes the weasel

What a week. Work is super super busy. I've just been told that my promotion went through, so I'm now a Systems Engineer (no longer "Associate"), whatever that means. Winter heating bills suck, which is part of why I hate winter so much these days. Next year I think we'll hop on one of those set-billing-rate plans where they estimate your annual gas cost and then distribute it across 12 months, so you end up paying more per month in the spring, summer, and fall, but less in winter (this last gas bill was $300 and I expect January, February, and March to be even worse, even if I am able to get some heating holes patched). So, if I had been smart last summer when they gave me the option to start paying like $168 a month for gas I would have taken it. At the time, comparing $168 to an average gas bill of something like $30-$60, I went for the regular monthly billing because we had the baby and all and, as usual, when iopt for the "mo'money now" it always bites me in the ass later. You wonder how come you've gotten promotions and raises five times in the last two years and still its the beginning of winter and you're scratching out an existence from paycheck to paycheck? Oh, well, while your annual pay has gone up almost 30%, you've also lost the second family income, your monthly housing cost has gone up $1000 a month, and your monthly bills have gone up because you are now paying gas, sewage, water, garbage on top of electric, internet, and phonebill. So, apparently while it LOOKS like I've done a great job of increasing my net worth/earning power I have also increased my cost of living at the same rate. So...its sort of a sad statement.

On the one hand, it helps me rally look forward to warmer weather when we'll have a couple hundred bucks left over after paying bills, and on top of that we'll hopefully have those habits that allowed us to live through the winter, so maybe that extra money will add up somewheres and we can really start planning for our future. So far, we've really just been planning for now, doing for now. We have "plans", but they are really just goals that we're not able to put much substance behind as of yet. I'm still hoping that I'll get an increase at annual review time, which is in the next couple months. The way I see it, the promotion is a reflection of my over-all worth to the company and the expectation of what I will accomplish and an annual review increase is a combination of cost-of-living increase and merit for performance over the previous 12 months.