cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Guy de Maupessant I'm in a bad situation. Every year at work I have a certain portion of my income that is given in the form of a particular bonus rather than being part of regular salary. The point of this is to use the bonus to purchase shares of the company. In this manner, a partner and I are slowly buying the whole thing. We have done this for the last 8 years or so. Last year since the economy was so bad, instead of a larger bonus for stock purchase, I negotiated a smaller bonus with stock purchase suspended that year. This was in lieu of a larger bonus that would otherwise have been given for stock. That was $10k that I got last year. So this year there was trouble. 3 months elapses between when the bonus is given and when the stock can be purchased. During this period of time, my wife contrived to spend about $5,000 of it on God only knows what. Now about $1,000 of that was actually necessary, because we needed heating oil and the prices were outrageously high and we had no other money and one does what one has to do when it is 15 degrees outside and one has small children to keep alive. But $1,000 I could have scraped up last week to cover this. The problem is that she spent another $4,000 beyond that on random shit. Just buying whatever looked good at the grocery store without regard to cost. Plus random shit on eBay. And just pissing money away in every direction behind my back. So when it was time for me to write a check for $12,000 last week, I couldn't. I was $5k short. Regretfully, I explained the situation and offered to either pay it later or to skip stock purchase. The proposal I was given for dealing with this was that we would just revert to last year's approach and I would return the difference between last year's $10k bonus and this year's $12k one and I would skip stock purchasing this year. Great. Perfect. This was an ideal solution. I left a check for the $2,000 difference on my father's desk and emailed Trish, telling her that everything is cool now. And since there was money left over, she should use that to pay off some other debts immediately. Which she did - our 2 credit cards were paid off within an hour. For the rest of the day, I'm thinking that everything is great. Then on my out of the office at the end of the day I was informed that there had been a miscommunication. He hadn't really meant the difference between $12k and $10k. He meant the difference between $19k and $10k. Because the *gross* amount that was used to produce a $12k bonus for stock purchase this year was actually $19k, before taxes and shit. Wheras last year's different situation saw a $10k *net* bonus for $7k or whatever gross. What. The. Fuck. Why would someone talk about the difference between 2 amounts in the same sentence, using gross for one number and net for the other without making that clear? So now I am totally and utterly fucked. I'm far worse off now than I was yesterday morning (and I was pretty fucked yesterday morning) because I went ahead and used $4,000 or whatever to pay off those credit cards. I am now something like $7k short rather than 'only' $5k short. At this point, I see 2 ways out. Suicide or quitting. Neither is very appealing. If cooperating with this stock purchase program is a condition of my employment then I have no choice but to quit. Literally, the money just is not there. Even if I could find some place to borrow it from, the interest rates for unsecured loans are so high that I couldn't manage the monthly payments. There would literally be no money left for food or gas. Except that the eceonomy is trashed and I have no idea whether I could find a new job in this area that would pay the bills. Relocating is not much of an option, because in this market I would not be able to sell my house and it's in such shitty condition that I couldn't rent it for any meaningful sum of money either. The tough part of suicide is that Trish and the kids would be completely screwed if I was gone, since I am their sole means of support. Other options could include robbery or selling some type of organ. A kidney is out since I only have the one. I'm not sure that Trish quite realizes the gravity of the situation that she has put me in. Literally, by the end of the week I could be unemployed. There was some talk of possibly stopping the amount out of my pay for however long it takes, but again I could not afford to survive on a reduced income like that. We would either starve or lose the house or go bankrupt or all 3. In which case I would probably be better off by quitting the job, because at the very least it is possible that the company would buy out my 14% of the total shares once I was gone. It would be very awkward for them to have someone no longer associated with the company having ownership in it. If they bought me out, that would be between $80k-$100k, which would certainly float me through the next year or 2 even on a reduced salary working outside of my field until the economy recovers and I can get paid what I'm actually worth again. I've managed really very well through this whole recession. Held things together and not missed any bill payments or fucked anything up. It has been tough, but I've kept all of our shit together. This, I am afraid, is a financial blow that I can not withstand in this weakened state. It is looking more and more like this matter of the missing money is possibly turning into something with a ripple effect that utterly ruins my life. This looks to be 'The Necklace' and I think I am pretty well doomed. The one possible, maybe, potential out would be clearing the amount from my SEP IRA. I am so fucked. 9:22 a.m. - 2009-03-11 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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