Finally got my promotion salary info

• My raise was 13%.  I think that’s the 10% regular bump and a 3% merit increase (I got a lot of pubs and killed myself on service last year).
• That means that for a brief time, I will be making slightly more than DH (he was making slightly more than I was before this raise).
• DH’s company is supposed to be doing raises soon.  I hope he out-earns me again, because that means we both will be bringing in more money.
• I never thought I’d be the type to just have completely shared finances, but it works with DH.  He says he likes it because he doesn’t have to think about money stuff and can just let me take care of it.  I also find it easier to manage.  This is all possible because DH gives himself an allowance and we’re making enough that we don’t have to sweat the small money stuff anymore.  Also it means that his larger salary is also my larger income.  :D  He likes it when I get raises too, though it doesn’t actually affect him much these days (see allowance and not sweating the small stuff already).  But it makes me happy.  #bagladysyndrome
• I am now making more than 2x what my starting salary was.
• If DH were making what I’m making, he would be making more than 3x his starting salary #trailingspouse
• My house is also worth a little more than 2x what it was when we bought it, according to our property taxes that are updated every year.
• According to an inflation calculator, total inflation has been 47% during that time.  So I guess we’re beating inflation, which is good.
• We’re supposed to have annual merit increases, but that’s kind of broken because we’ve had so many years with no pay raise.  Sensible departments do raises on a 3-5 year scale, but ours only has a one year look-back period, so it’s easy to get bad luck with publication timing.
• The crazy thing is, I’m still underpaid for an economist with my record.  I guess that’s what happens when you don’t get outside offers.
• The good thing about having a lower than expected salary is that I am more movable in the eyes of other departments.  The bad thing is that it might lead to lower salaries even if I’m movable because they figure they don’t have to bump me up as much to get me.
• When I was talking with people this summer about, “My salary is X, will my salary be a problem/would I have to take a paycut if I moved” nobody blinked an eye.  One person was like, yeah, we pay our untenured research faculty (which you could be) more than that, even prorated to 9 months.
• This was the last big bump I was eligible for.  I’m hoping so hard that my salary won’t matter that much because I will be going someplace else next year.
• My bursary seems to have completely disappeared.  I got denied a $50 reimbursement (Desk rejection means half price submission fees) because of insufficient funds.  Nobody seems to be able to tell me what is going on– they won’t even respond to my emails to acknowledge that they have gotten the question.  I have another fund to draw from, but it is going to run out in a year and I kind of have all that money ear-marked for research purposes.  (It also hasn’t refilled for this year, but I have some of last year’s money left because I did so little travel.)
• More digging and more emails– they have confirmed that I have zero bursary this year.  Which is bad because I have made travel and RA and research commitments that involve having a bursary.  Seems like they could have told me something about it before I started getting payments denied.
• More emails.  Apparently my bursary was tied to being an associate professor and when I became a full professor I lost it.  And like, nobody noticed I had no bursary.  Well, technically the people denying my reimbursement requests noticed, but they didn’t flag it as being unusual even though *everyone* has some kind of bursary.  (This loss was not the case for anybody else in this history of our department or our closest sister department– every single other person who has gone up for full has had an endowed chair.  I’m the only one without.  This is not because my research record is worse or because I have less service, because neither of those are true.)  They are in the process of restoring my bursary with unmarked funds, but it may take a while.  At some point it’s going to be too late for me to not request travel permissions, so hopefully it will be figured out before then.  In the mean time I guess I float reimbursements.
• I applied for a job in the midwest that’s close to DH’s family.  Even though there’s a supercreep on the faculty.  (He preys on female freshmen and was fired from another institution for doing so.  He will tell you this proudly if you ever meet him.  He likes to say that they’re legal and he won his wrongful termination lawsuit.)