We’re on pins and needles in the Lazy Man household. Two days ago the Million Dollar Email (MDE) had a 33% of arriving. Yesterday it had a 50%. Today, it has a 100% chance of arriving. Well maybe 99.9% chance, just in case the internet goes down.
I’m getting ahead myself. What’s this Million Dollar Email about, right?
For the last 7 years, the end of June has become “the wait.” That’s when the military promotion list comes out.
My wife has been up for promotion 7 times and each year it has ended in disappointment. At her level, almost no one gets it the first time. Each year the promotion board has come back with new recommendations. One year it’s “Get a certification.” The next year it is “Get an MBA (to add to your Pharm.D).” The next year it is “Lead an organization.” The next year it is, “Not the top pharmacy organization of thousands of people, but a military one.” The year after that it is, “Vice President of the top military organization isn’t enough. Do better.” One year it is, “Deploy more, we don’t care that your boss rejects your deployments.” Another year it is, “Get more awards, we don’t care that we gave you the top award and later sent you an email that it was taken away.”
This year she’s President of the organization. She deployed a lot last year. The awards… well… the promotion board can still ding her for that.
In any case, this is for all the marbles. She’s made it no small secret that she’s done jumping through hoops. If she gets the promotion, she’ll consider continuing to work without all the second job of hoop-jumping. If she doesn’t get the promotion, she’s O-U-T with her military pension.
With the promotion, the following happens:
- Continuing to work at a six-figure salary, with an increase of $1500 a month.
- A pension that is worth $12K more a year for life
- Kids’ private school continues to honor the military discount, a “savings” of $12,500 a year. (This is our luxury item, please don’t judge too much.)
Does that add up to a million dollars? I’m going to fall back on my Lazy Man moniker and not do the math completely. A back-of-the-envelope calculation says it may be $500K in pension. I think the other 500K can come from working at the high salary, the raise, and the kids’ school discount. Maybe it isn’t a million dollars, but I think it’s close.
Without the promotion, she can break away from the “one more year” hamster wheel that she’s been on. That might be worth it alone. I suppose that either way, our life will significantly change.
The reason for the suspense is that the promotion list has to come out in June as it has done for the last 20+ years (maybe decades longer). If it doesn’t the payroll for July first becomes a mess (from my understanding.)
As I write this, June has less than 12 hours left in it… tick, tick, tick.
Update: She didn’t get the promotion, so it looks like she might retire over the next year. They only promoted 9% of the eligible people. It used to be 30%, then it was 25% and was 12% before. I guess few pharmacists did anything worthy over the last year…. /sarcasm.