January 11, 2010

It is getting exciting.  I only have three days left.  I am wrapping things up as well as I can at work.  Today was the last Monday, although my coworkers didn’t seem to appreciate my enthusiasm for my last Monday.  Things are going pretty well.

We came to an odd realization.  While we had targeted getting into the new year for financial reasons, we hadn’t really done all of the math.  We could have quit earlier, but we talked ourselves into getting into 2010 for tax reasons and to pad our finances just a little more.  As we started figuring out what the final paychecks should look like including vacation payouts, we realized that our 2010 income should exceed our 2010 planned expenses.  If only we could work two weeks every year and pay for all of our expenses.  It is an odd feeling to be excited about our financial situation at a time that we should be worried about it.  Things seem better than we planned.

And the market isn’t hurting.  It continues its slow climb.  As an indicator of our improved economy, my former employer in Ohio appears to be restoring its dividend payments.  While this isn’t too important in a general sense, it does make a difference to a holder of preferred stock.  The terms of the preferred stock are that any missed dividends have to be made up prior to paying any dividend to the rest of the stockholder population.  So yesterday I received one check in the mail with no explanation.  Then today I received two more.  This appears to correspond to the three missed quarters.  While we knew these back payments would likely show up at some point, it was nice to get them in my last week of work.