The Weight of Money

The partner and I got an unexpected date night last night since the daughter wanted to hang out at a free movie event at our local library. We stopped at a local yarn store and chatted with the owner and some of the other ladies before heading over to a yummy dinner of thai food. Even though we took our time at each stop, we were still early in picking up the daughter from her event and ended up parking in library lot waiting for her to get out.

This was the perfect opportunity to talk about anything and everything without losing sleep - usually these discussions take place as we’re both drifting off to sleep. The partner reveal another upcoming change with his company’s 401K program. It sounds like his company continues to struggle financially and is still cutting corners here, there, and everywhere to stay afloat. The partner is expecting that the newest announcement, only alluded to at this point, will address the account fees associated with the 401K accounts. He expects that the company, in addition to dropping their matching program and tacking on a lengthly vestment clause for previously contributed dollars, will also stop covering the fees charged by the 401K company and will be passing those charges on to participating members. To me, this is just another kick in the shins from the company at this point.

The partner is currently on is 3rd years with this small start up company. The past year has been full of lay offs, cut backs, scaling down of options, and other negative financial steps (negative from the employee’s perspective at least). What was a nice company to work with has really drained away to just some job this past year. The other draw back is that this company doesn’t pay that well to start with, so the few perks (most of which were not financial) it offered, made a big difference in employee satisfaction. All of that has been stripped away this past year or so. I’m sad to see this change since it was a very family-focused company that seemed to go out of it’s way to support it’s staff in recognition that it’s financial support wasn’t the greatest. At the same time, I’ve hoped that these changes would prompt the partner to look elsewhere for employment, and while there have been days that he’s lost all patience with the company, he’s still pretty loyal to sticking around longer.

During our parking lot discussion, the partner mentioned just stopping all retirement contributions. This would put a few more dollars in our pockets each month, but would it be worth it? I don’t think so. Retirement is something that is going to happen - having a couple more dollars more a month might ease our financial stress a little bit, but not to the point to put future retirement in jeopardy. Since we’re already not seeing that money, I support continuing with contributions, even if we’re paying all the fees to make it happen.

This past year of making no financial progress is taking it’s toll on the partner as well - he wants to see debt going down, savings increasing, or equity growing. I understand the feeling, I want to see those things happening too - but we’re just not there yet. In fact, I’ve been anxiously waiting to hear what his raise is going to be and am starting to worry that one won’t be happening at all since his company has been struggling so much and we’re already entering the third week of July and there has been no word about this year’s raises (they usually go in effect July 1). I also struggle with the fact that the he chooses to stay with a company that limits his earning potential. In my mind, if he really wants to see progress in those areas, he’d be making the effort to apply for other positions that are available to him at this point and would come with a decent pay increase as well. But that’s not a fun argument to make and is one area that I’ve finally learned to not push too hard - but it’s difficult to not push when I see that as one of the only positive steps to reducing our financial struggles.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 8:37 am and is filed under relationships, savings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.