Finally breathing a sigh of relief over here. My husband received his official, written job offer yesterday! I feel so thankful for this opportunity through Hiring Our Heroes. It's truly a wonderful thing for our transitioning servicemembers. He would have never landed even an interview with this company, nevermind the job he got. He successfully negotiated the salary he wanted to get, even though it was $20,000 above the initial offer. He aimed high and they went for it! Know your worth everyone! Ask for what you deserve!
No change to our savings numbers, although we did find out he will be paid weekly, which will be an adjustment for me, accounting wise. His weekly amount should be steady, though, since he will be working a full 40 with no overtime or anything. As a contracted employee he is not authorized overtime, but expected to put in 40 hrs per week. It will be nice to have those months with "extra" paydays, though! He starts April 10, but will continue collecting his full active duty pay through June 1, so my plan for all those paychecks is just straight into the emergency fund.
I did decide to take my kids to WDW this summer. My oldest graduated last year and he asked for this trip as a graduation present, but we were very nervous about spending money on a big trip with so much uncertainty surrounding this transition, along with our savings not being where we wanted it to be, along with covid still being an issue. So, we postponed it and now I finally feel settled enough to go for it.
I used Disney Rewards points for our one night room deposit at the Beach Club (and I scored 40% off the room, which was awesome). I booked our flights yesterday after having watched them for several weeks. They were hovering around $700 per person, and yesterday went WAY down to $422 each, so I jumped on it! Flying out of my favorite airport, SNA, on Delta. Used up $300 in flight credit that I had since a cancelled trip in 2020. At checkout was presented with an offer of a $400 statement credit if I applied and got approved for the Amex Platinum Sky Miles credit card, and after reading about the perks, went ahead and applied and was approved. The card will give us free checked bags for our trip which will save us an additional $180. And my husband needs to apply for Precheck, so this card will also credit that fee. The card came with a 90,000 point bonus offer, which is worth about $630 in cash or close to $1300 when redeemed for travel, so that's amazing. I basically got our airfare for free! The annual fee of $250 will be waived the first year since DH is still active duty. Got in right under the wire on that one!
Now all I have to do is buy our tickets on base and keep an eye on rental car prices. I have an SUV booked for around $750 for 9 days, but hope that goes lower as we get closer. If not, it's all good. We will need the car regardless so it is what it is.
Still have about $250 left on our Disney Rewards card. May use that to buy our Magicband+ for the trip, so we can try them out at DL before we go.
I was really indecisive on a closet kit, looking at what Home Depot had. I took so long I just relented to putting in the poles for clothes, as that's all he wanted up. One side we already had built in shelves. We had a blank slate in our closet to play with because we walled off another half closet next to it that used to open from the bathroom, and combined it into one instead.
but we had way too much hanging space and almost no shelves/ drawers. Closet stuff is overwhelming and so pricy though
).
