Saturday, November 20, 2010

maternity leave...spud days.


All of this planning may sound crazy, but I love planning!! I am a list maker, if that wasn't already obvious. So of course I am planning my maternity leave. I know it will be absolutely the hardest thing to go back to school and work with our new spud at home. It is not ideal, but it has to happen. But the time off I do have has to be realistic. We need to find a balance between the amount of money we need to live on and how precious our time is being new parents. Fortunately I do get maternity leave- due to the family and medical leave act. Yay!
 I get to have 3 months of un-paid leave regardless for giving birth to a child, then half of that time off is 66 2/3% of my base salary paid leave (tiny amount, but we can make do)...so that's 6 weeks of partial pay. Then if I want the other 6 weeks paid I need to save up my PTO (paid time off) I accrue every paycheck. Because I work a different number of hours every week (36-50 hrs) I get a different amount of PTO each paycheck, its unreliable and rather difficult to figure out. So I made a spreadsheet to keep me on track with how many hours I am accruing and to encourage me to save them for a worthy cause... spud days!!
So here is my spreadsheet in excel that I threw together. I have time to start saving the hours, but also with the holidays I know I need to use some PTO before next year. The total number of hours I need for fulltime pay for 6 weeks is 216 hours!! I have about one year to save hours, each month has 2-3 paychecks (thus paycheck #1,2,3 for each month), then a column for hours I used that month, then the grand total.
I think I can get close, even though I am at a daunting 24 hrs as of yet, however if I have a ton of stressful test weeks next semester or morning sickness days it may throw off my accumulation efforts :( I also plan on working right up until the day I deliver, working in a hospital there is no safer place to do that. Then all of my time off can be with the spud! So we shall see if I get a say in all of this. Anyone have a plan that works? How do you plan to save money?

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