A Raise - or Not

As I'd mentioned previously, my husband won't be getting a raise for the upcoming year. We were originally hoping that the salary freeze was temporary, perhaps only a few months - but we found out that it will stay in place for an entire year. 

Unfortunately, we also just received notice that only a nominal raise is anticipated for next year, probably around 1%. I guess I shouldn't complain much, since it's better than nothing, but 1% seems like such a tiny amount. Increases in the cost of living due to inflation are surely going to outpace that! 

Unless we can free up more money by paying off debt, we're going to have to make some big decisions about our budget. Best case scenario, it'll take us at least 4 years to pay off the credit cards, auto loans, and student loans. But we'd like to buy a bigger home, and start a family - both things that will divert a significant amount of money from our debt snowball. 

Sometimes it feels like all this debt is never going to be gone.

Salary Freeze

My husband's employer just sent out a company-wide email announcing
that they would be enacting a pay freeze, effective immediately.

He usually gets a 3-4% raise every year (which covers cost-of-living
increase and a small merit raise), which would have amounted to about
$100/month after taxes. We had expected that the raise would be
smaller than usual, perhaps only 2%, but we hadn't expected the freeze.

In the past we both typically find out what our raises are around
Thanksgiving, and we see the increased checks after the first of the
year.

Although we don't usually re-do our budget until the end of December,
we had already incorporated the anticipated increase into plans for
next year. We know that we'll have some major out-of-pocket expenses
for an elective medical procedure (LASIK vision correction), so now we
will need to re-evaluate whether to delay that surgery or make other
changes to our budget to compensate.

I wonder what my company will do about raises this year...