u/No-Chicken-1067

My spouse and I are making a decent amount of money, but I just can’t seem to get a handle on keeping a budget. I make one, and then things end up being more expensive than they used to be or something breaks and it blows the budget. I feel like making the amount of money we are now that we should be much better off than we are. We have worked our way up here from nothing. 15 years ago we were sharing a car and making minimum wage, 10 years ago we were skipping meals because it was rent or eating, and even 5 years ago we had to apply for utility assistance because we couldn’t afford our bills and were considering bankruptcy because we couldn’t afford our student loan payments. This income level is pretty new to us. I want to start putting more money in retirement, but it seems impossible to do that and still be able to pay down our debt and afford things we need like clothes and kids activities. I will say my spouse is also pretty terrible with spending too so that is an issue.

We make 200k, we take home about 11,500 monthly. After bills we have about 3100 left over. $1000 goes to general savings and then another $500 is split between eating out, kids activities savings, and clothes. We then have 1600 left. I am trying to pay down debt though. We have a disgusting amount in student loans, 2 car payments one car has 12k left on the loan and the other has 20k, and about $2k in credit card bills. I’ve been trying to pay down debt with extra money. This large salary is new btw. We both started new jobs in the last 10 months and have doubled our income. We weren’t really able to save before so I’m trying to build up our savings for emergencies. I do plan to lower the amount I put in savings once we have one month of income in savings and then lower the amount im saving monthly. I’m just not sure how to split the 1600 extra between retirement, saving for the kids college, saving for any big purchases and paying down debt.

My spouse and I have recently gotten huge raises and are starting to pay off debt. We have about 200k in debt (not including mortgage) which is a majority student loans. After all our bills are paid and money budgeted for fun/kids stuff/ extras, we have $3800 a month left. We usually send $1k of that to savings and then another $500 as an extra payment to one of our cars (which will be fully paid off beginning of next year) and then another extra $500-1000 to the highest interest student loan (we are snowballing those). I am also 5 years into PSLF so I just make minimum payments on those which account for like 60k of that debt. We usually have an extra $1800-1300 left over every month that we just allocate to our savings or retirement accounts.

We both work remotely now and are considering moving to a neighboring state that has a lower cost of living in the next 2 years. Our house is a fixer upper and we hadn’t been able to make much movement on renovating because inflation kind of killed us. We have 250k in equity in our home and are looking to do a HELOC. We need to renovate kitchen and bathrooms that are stuck in the 80’s and replace all flooring. We got some quotes and decided to have someone else take care of demo and things like drywall repair and other things we cannot do ourselves. We estimated everything and we will probably need about 30-40k to do these things. Nothing too crazy. We are going pretty basic with everything for the most part. We don’t have that saved and will need to get a loan. We’ve got a quote for our mortgage company on a HELOC and would be looking at a payment of $300 a month which we would obviously pay more on. We’ve been living paycheck to paycheck for so long that this feels super irresponsible to take on another payment while also trying to pay off debt. However we also cannot sell our house in the state it is in now.

I need all the tips for introducing my reactive dog to our new 3 month old puppy. Our cat recently passed and they had been together my dogs whole life, 11 years. She has been really sad and down since, trying to leave out the door with us and crying everytime we leave. We have been considering a second dog for many years and decided to go with it.

My dog is reactive mostly based on anxiety. She used to play with other dogs regularly. Then was attacked once and run up on once by unfriendly, off leash dogs. She’s been super nervous about people and dogs since. She’s never actually bitten anyone or any dogs, but she does growl and snap. We tried adopting a shelter dog a few years ago and the shelter gave us bad guidance. The other dog was also reactive and resource guarding us and ended up attacking and injuring my dog. My dog just let the attack happen and didn’t fight back. Our trainer and vet told us to just give the adopted dog back. We worked for 3 months and weren’t able to change the behavior and my dog was seriously injured. We had just completed the foster to adopt the week prior. The advice we recieved was either another male or a puppy.

We waited 3 years and signed up with a rescue this time. We had extensive conversations and they matched us with a puppy. The meet went fine, but my dog was also anxious in a new place. We went through with it. My dog did a lot of sniffing on the ride home, but wasn’t aggressive at all. We let my dog outside as soon as we got home. Let her do her thing and then fed both dinner separately. Then took both outside and let them sniff. My reactive dog was very aggressively sniffing the new puppy, but no growling or anything. We had to separate them a bit because I think she was upsetting the puppy. Then we brought them in, and gave them both treats and put the puppy in her pen. Reactive dog then circled the pen multiple times sniffing and growling till she tired herself out and laid on the couch. Took the puppy up to my room so she could run around and stretch her legs. Then crated her for bed time. Reactive dog sniffed around the crate very concerned that the puppy was crying and then retreated to her hiding spot.

It seems like things went well so far. I know I probably got us in to such a big responsibility, but I also think our dog needed the companionship. I’m just so nervous it won’t work out and we can’t give another dog back, I need this to work.

I ruminate over every decision I make and I wanted to get others opinions on this. I have been getting assigned work by my PM that another coworkers keeps claiming they have no time to do. That’s fine. I have no problem helping out to make sure things get done when they need to. I’ve never done this coworkers work before and it was not explained well to me by the PM. So I’m having to search for hours to figure out how to do it. I also have a ton of my own work that I’m trying to get done. Coworker who claims to have no time sent me a teams message to brag that they are all caught up on their work and have nothing to do so they are excited to have chill time. I was not happy about this. Especially because when I reached out to this person for clarification on their work they were away for 2 hours and when they came back, still didn’t help. Coworker is already problematic in other ways and I have reached my breaking point with them.

Coworker 2 reached out to me to get help with something and we got to talking and I found out they also willingly took over some of our other coworkers work. Coworker 2 gave the work back to the other person. I was considering complaining about it to my manager and coworker 2 agreed I should do it.

I reached out to manager about the PM assigning me work that another coworker didn’t have time to do, but the other coworker is now bragging to me about having no work to do. Meanwhile I’m getting more of my own work thrown at me I’m trying to keep up with AND doing the work of someone who supposedly had no time to do it. I let my manager know I absolutely have no problem taking on extra work and learning new things, but during crunch time in a project is not the time for that. It makes no sense for me to be assigned this work and have to research how to do it if they have nothing to do. My manager agreed and is going to do something about it.

My DH told me I may sound like I am complaining about having to do extra work and now I am feeling like I made a bad choice. I’m absolutely not complaining about doing extra work. I never mind helping out. I’m upset and already lazy coworker who I constantly pick up slack for already is bragging about having nothing to do while I’m drowning. Did I make the right call bringing this issue up? I’ve never had an issue with a coworker before and this is my first time complaining.