I Asked for a Raise, and Here’s What Happened.

OK, blogging buddies: Thank you again to everyone (especially Full-Grown Single and Ronnie Ann) who weighed in on my March post, When Do You Deserve a Raise?

I had written it to express my frustration with an employee who wanted, but I didn’t think earned, an increase, and you wrote back with strong instructions for my own future raise-wanting. In my head, I was fully with you, planning to ask for an increase when I hit one year. In the three months since then, though, I’ve grown less sure, as the company struggled and made cutbacks.

Today was my one-year anniversary, so this morning I Googled: How to Ask for a Raise When Times are Tough and found this Forbes article.

Logistically it’s easier to e-mail my boss than meet in person, so I followed the Forbes tips, via print rather than face-to-face. I bulleted my contributions and explained what the median pay rates are in our area for jobs like mine. I said I thought a raise would be fair.

He wrote back immediately and said he totally agreed. He needs a little time but will fight for me.

Stay tuned.

Do People Go into Debt for Wedding Rings?

My out-of-town friend this weekend, in passing, was telling me about her future diamond. “I don’t care if he has to go into debt for it,” she said. “It better be big!”

I laughed, and told her that she better be joking. She was joking, right? She just laughed.

This is something I’ve never even heard in passing, the idea of taking out a loan to pay for an engagement ring. I guess anything’s possible, especially in debt-filled America, but seriously: Do people actually go into debt for wedding rings? Do you know anyone who did?

My Weekend Wallet

The biggest lesson I learned this weekend was more of a reminder: I have got to let go. All weekend, I was thinking how I was spending a lot of money; it just felt like it was really adding up because I was spending so frequently. I ate out 7-8 times, which is a little ridiculous. Yet, it turns out, I managed to keep it at $131 total spending. And that $131 wasn’t all on food: part was that I spent $28 on gifts, $50 on my RX copay and $12 on toiletries.

How do you know when you’ve crossed the line between frugal and psycho? I don’t know. Maybe it’s when you’re worried about spending more than $4 on dinner because you know you’re meeting other friends in an hour, who will also expect you to order something.

Anyway, here’s the approximate breakdown:

Friday night

• $9 dinner, greek pita and ice cream

Saturday

• $5 breakfast, coffee/bagels
• $3 snack, Argo tea
• $15 lunch, pizza & shared dessert (at Spacca Napoli, again!)
• $4 dinner with friends, soup
• $5 dinner with other friends, shared some of what everyone else got
• $28 GIFT, gift card and card for Dad for Father’s Day
• $50 RX, Wal-Mart
• $12.83 tolietries, Wal-Mart (shampoo, conditioner, face wash)

Sunday

• $0 breakfast with family
• $0 lunch/dinner at home

Advice from Dostoevsky

“…a youth of our last epoch– that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. Though these young men fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply ten-fold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal–such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.”

Every day, I am more and more convinced that all of the worthwhile things in life, I mean the really worthwhile ones, take hard work, discipline, faithfulness and TIME. Dostoevsky, back in like 1890, understood something he wished the young people would: sacrificing time now will mean gain later.

In other words:

THE NOW: Working hard, putting my time and effort into a 9-5. Hiring, managing, working, learning. Giving a few years, maybe five or six, to really growing as a writer, editor, manager. Setting aside large amounts of money from every paycheck. Not having my own house or a new car.

MEANS, THE LATER: Skills and experience, and the accompanying benefits. Character. Huge financial savings. The ability to buy my own house or start my own business or whatever (i.e., more options, more freedom).

Inspired by the speaker who shared this quote and who advised the audience to be its own worst boss (setting higher standards for your work quality and job performance than your employers), I am inspired for the future. I’m encouraged that, no matter what I have or haven’t already accomplished, if I’m willing to sacrifice, other things are possible.

In which she digresses, again.

My little brother is graduating from college. He’s doing everything smarter than I did, gaining a degree in a reputable field, finishing summa cum laude, happy to take off a month before worrying about getting his job.

He’s just so, smart. And I’m proud of him.

I think, if the world had more of kids like him finishing college, the world would be a lot nicer place.

He doesn’t know what he’s going to do next, not in the five-step-plan kind of way. But he knows what he likes and doesn’t like and he knows, in his way, what that means. I think he can do anything, sky’s the limit.

2 Quick, Easy Recipes from the Blogging World

At the end of the day, I’m a pretty simple girl. I like food to taste good, and I like it to be easy–whether that means I’m making it quickly or someone else is making it for me. (Remember, pizza is still the meal I love best.)

And lately, I’ve really taken to finding one particular type of recipe: the kind that doesn’t require a trip to the grocery store (in other words: the kind with simple ingredients or, at the very least, the forgiving kind with ingredients that can be substituted). So here, I present to you two quick and easy recipes, brought to you by fellow bloggers:

1) A New Kind of Grilled Cheese, Nutella-Style (pictured above, as shown at kalofagas): The other day, I Stumbled Upon a blog carnival with Nutella-based recipes. Definitely bookmarked a few of those for later because, though I like cooking to be fast and easy, I think baking is a fair exception. This particular find, actually originally made with Merenda, which is the Greek version of Nutella, was something I made right away. Its instructions couldn’t be simpler: butter two slices of bread, coat the insides with Nutella, slap together and grill. Go take a look, and make your own version. It was delicious.

2) Homemade Granola Bars: L @ Spilling Buckets really inspired me with this one, a quick and easy recipe for granola bars. What really interested me was her substitutions: she changed the original recipe by using things already in the house. I followed suit, substituting almost all the honey for molasses (only a tsp of honey was left in the house), using chocolate chips instead of raisins (yum!) and taking out the nuts altogether. While the molasses was noticeable and not my fav and while my bars turned out to be more like squares than rectangles, all in all, I was very pleased. Cheap (no extra shopping!), easy (20 minutes prep time, tops) and tasty.

I’m on the hunt for more easy, fast, frugal recipes like these. Anybody have a suggestion? Do tell!

(This post is part of a Thursday series on frugal food. Go here to see more from the series!)

Who Am I? (and other 20-something reflections)

Sometimes I feel like I’m still trying to figure out my place in the world, like where I fit, which is weirder and weirder as I get older.

City life, country life and suburban life all have strong appeal, and I could see myself doing any of them.

I like Europe and I like America; I like my career but I like the idea of working from home; I like living with my parents yet I think I’d like living on my own.

Is this how it’s supposed to feel to be a grown-up? Or is this a sign that it (the whole adult thing) hasn’t happened to me yet?

I have friends who, I’d swear up and down, feel completely at peace and confident of their life’s decisions. Friends who, for example, grew up knowing she wanted to get married right out of college or sooner and start a family. Friends who knew he would work in marketing and live downtown in a swanky condo. Friends who knew their dreams, all along, and made them happen.

I feel like those people are really blessed, because, at least in my opinion, the idea that you should just know what your real dreams are is a gigantic, enormous delusion that we’re told from childhood. Maybe it happens for some people, like the friends I mentioned, but it seems like a lot more people have to struggle to figure it out, with bumps along the way.

A friend of mine from college works two part-time jobs, both somewhat secretarial, while she holds a degree in linguistics. She is starting, stopping, starting, stopping plans on a daily basis: sending resumes and calling places where she could move and start something different. Thing is, how is she supposed to know what that something different should be, if it should be something?

Right now, I’m saving money, living with my family, working at a job I like and worked hard for. I hold two college degrees and like my resume. I have friends and entertainments and love and true joy. All in all, a very good, very blessed life.

And I can see what today, and tomorrow roughly, look like. It’s good. But ask me what I’ll be doing five years from now? 10? Absolutely no idea. Is this strange?

Then again, there’s a larger part of me that thinks maybe admitting I don’t know what will come is the actually most honest way to live, despite my age/career/income/family/etc. Even if I had a specific life track, a 15-year plan or whatever, I wouldn’t hold the future.

And, now that I think about it, maybe that’s a really valuable thing to learn and hold onto, especially when you’re all of 25.

Job-Hunting while Employed: the other perspective

In the PF-blogging world, they tell you never to let an employer know you have another job offer/possibility unless you’re serious about leaving. This is because you’ll essentially be telling your employers you’re hunting and they’ll assume you’re not that committed to your current position. Makes sense, right? I’ve planned to follow this advice, should the situation every come up where I needed to.

But something I haven’t read a lot about in PF blogs, and something that I’ve not planned a response for, is the flip side of this circumstance: what it’s like to be the manager who finds out your employee is hunting.

Remember my employee-survey idea and how it gave me clues as to what my employees were thinking? As a result, I fought hard to get someone promoted, and my employee was thrilled to take our offer.

So you can imagine my surprise, then, when this same employee told me last week, just days before the transition to full-time (and its accompanying pay increase) took effect, that there was another job possibility now on the table–a job possibility that would be better than ours.

This isn’t an issue of pay, or of work responsibilities, or work environment, or anything that I can control. In fact, it’s a simple issue of the-other-job-is-more-line-with-desires. Less money, but different perks, potentially more prestigious ones.

I’m glad when someone pursues his or her dreams, but I have to admit it’s hard not to resent the way this has panned out. Now, we’re understaffed for the next few weeks until I can find another part-timer to fill in the hours my newly FTer would have been working. Plus, I have a only-somewhat-committed staffer who could up-and-leave at any point.

Times like these, I remind myself that these are the growing pains of experience. There’s a lot you can plan and prepare for, a lot you can do to motivate and encourage. But when push comes to shove, you’re not in control of other people or their motivations/desires.

You do the best you can, and you come out wiser for it. For now, I’m preparing for the worst, hoping for the best, hiring again (ugh) and making new plans, albeit penciled ones. I think that’s all you can do.

Weekend Buys

$140 Clothing: Because I believe in buying quality over quantity and because I’ve been very, very good about clothing purchases over the last few months, I splurged at Nordstrom’s this weekend:

• Deep blue dress by Lush, $44
• Black t-shirt dress by Lush, $40
• White 3/4-length jacket, $30

$0 Entertainment: Didn’t spend a dime and still had one of the best weekends in a long time.

• Attended a free film festival Saturday night, put on by the very talented students in DePaul University’s theatre school, in Lincoln Park. Very late evening, but fun.
• Watched free streaming shows at www.surfthechannel.com. Have you seen this site? It takes some time to buffer, which is annoying, and there are Chinese subtitles. But it’s totally free.

$24 Gift: Wedding gift & Starbucks for my co-workers

• Target Brita water pitcher (cost split with my brother): $17
• Starbucks for my Saturday staff (we have a bug infestation; I felt bad for them and stopped by): $6.20

$28 Food: My brother paid me back for his portion of the wedding gift by covering meals out, but I’m counting the $17 as from my food budget, so I’m recording it here:

• Chicken pita at the Patio ($5)
• Ice cream at Andy’s frozen custard ($2)
• Saturday lunch at Maggiano’s ($11)
• I paid for lunch Sunday, $12, at the Patio again

Summary: I spent more than usual for a weekend, but I really enjoyed myself, and it’s all within my budget.

Now and Later, Biblically

2 Corinthians 9:6

The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.