foolm0r0n posted...
You realize the flaw in this strategy right
no?
I make enough from 40 hours that I can just comfortably afford to pay all the necessary bills. My wife has an income as well teaching in a Special Education classroom, but it's not as much and we spend a portion of her income on
wants
and typically save the rest. So the savings builds up fairly quickly, between buying a car 2 years ago and the down payment 2 months ago we've all but cleaned it out for the moment. Our ideal monthly budget will involve continuing to save a sizeable chunk of her income while my income covers the rest.
my take home has essentially been temporarily doubled these past 8-9 weeks over working overtime which is 8-9 weeks of extra bills that I'll be able to cover if I get RIF'd. Because the customer service employees seem poised to get RIF'd later in the process than other IRS departments it's likely I won't know until mid to late May so that's at least another month at this pace, but it's money I can't afford to leave on the table. Once the RIF is done I can go back to weighing the usefulness of the extra $ against the physical, mental and personal stress caused by working twice as much.
Unless the point you were getting as is that they won't want to keep me if I'm not working overtime? But that's an area where govt jobs do not resemble the private sector. You hear about offices and CEOs who say they need all their employees to be putting in those crazy hours to show their "dedication to the job", but in govt they couldn't give two shits about who is working the OT and who isn't. Every couple weeks they post a list of how much OT you're allowed to work if you want to and which positions/departments have it available and you either work it, or you don't. If anything by choosing to work it you are simply costing more money to do the same work that someone else could be assigned to do as part of a regular shift. If they have 4000 hours of overtime being worked each week they would save a lot of money each week by having 100 extra employees being paid regular work rates versus paying 50% more for those same hours of effort.