Big Day on the Ol' Calendar

I've literally been dancing in my chair at work (and at the gym, and while I brush my teeth, and...) to one of my Christmas presents from B...Hairspray! the soundtrack. And yes, you must use an exclamation point in the title, because calling it simply "Hairspray" would be, well, dumb.

Point is, I'm already thisclose to being too chipper to stand, and now I've just looked at my calendar and realized two wonderful things. One, the wedding is exactly four months away! (And yes, Moms, that is wonderful, I promise.) And two, this is my three-year anniversary at work. Go me!

One reason I love the business-side of my office is that the count the time that I worked as an intern or a temporary employee toward my "total time" in office. Why does this matter? In the small sense, not much. No cake or Champagne for me today. However (and this is how I know I'm getting older), it does mean that I'm 20% more vested today than I was yesterday with my retirement plan. Granted, I couldn't contribute for the first 18 months (intern, temp), but still I'll take what I can get. And today, that's 60%.

What that means, so far as I can tell, is because my company matches each dollar, up to a certain percentage, with 66.66(6666R) cents of their own. I get all of that up front each time I contribute. However, if I leave before my 5th anniversary (the Big Day when you're fully vested), then I only get a certain percentage of that, scaled by year, so today, it's 60%. Got that? I knew I had this math stuff down.

Ready for some real fun with math? The money I have in my retirement fund has slowly declined, meaning that while I once had 100% of the money I put in there, the news tells me it's something more like 70% now. (I don't look myself. Can't. Too painful.) So assuming both trains left the station at the same time, how much of that 66.66(6666R) am I actually going to see if I were to check out, say, at year four?

The answer? Marry someone who has completed an entire tax on class, because that means he must be good enough with numbers to figure this bad boy out. Whew! Didn't even need scrap paper.

So that's my wonderful day in numbers. It's Friday (not a number). My three-year work anniversary. Four months until I marry B (um, the thought that kept me up from 6:22 this morning until 8:42 when I got out of bed to get ready for work). And already 2pm. Back to Hairspray!(.)