Posts Tagged ‘money’

Last month, I wrote about how I had increased my income significantly by switching jobs.

This isn’t always the case though. Indeed, Business Insider recently published an article suggesting that people who hop from job to job to climb the corporate ladder actually earn less money.

In their figures, people who stayed in the same job for five years experienced pay increases of around 8% on average, compared to 5% for those who changed jobs regularly. This may be unrepresentative of the wider market as it was a survey of those in Silicon Valley, though this should actually make it more comparable to my figures.

As I discussed recently, we’re all basically rats trapped in a system where we have to sell our time, and our bodies, for the resources we need to keep us alive. So it makes sense we try and play the system as best as we can.

I won’t claim to be a researcher in the psychology of employment, but here are some suggestions from my anecdotal experience (you know, anecdote, the singular of data 😉 ).

Move to a different company

As I wrote about recently, in the years where I moved jobs, I managed to obtain pay increases of at least double what I managed to obtain when I didn’t. While this is more pronounced in the IT industry, it seems to apply across the whole job market.

Work in IT

Even through the global recession, I never struggled to get a job, or achieve large pay rises year in, year out. The financial crisis simply never touched the IT industry, and as a recruiting manager at the time, I can tell you that neither love nor money could bring in enough software developers. It certainly isn’t going away anytime soon, so why not switch careers?

Work in IT, especially if you’re a woman

The sad reality of society today is that it still does not provide equal opportunities. This is especially true in IT where being a woman is an absolutely enormous advantage. Employers will discriminate against men – I’ve sat in meetings where better candidates have been passed up in favour of female candidates. Why not use this to your advantage?

Be very arrogant

I once went for a £70,000 a year job with a well known mobile phone operator based in the UK. A lot of people suggest you shouldn’t be arrogant, so I toned my arrogance down for the interview. I didn’t get the job.

Two months later, I went for an even higher paid job and this time I toned my arrogance up (as unbelievable as that might be). I got it.

The lesson is that employers want to have confidence that you can do the job and they will select a candidate who shows that, over a candidate who doesn’t, even if they get caught bullshitting once or twice. Don’t lie, it’s OK to say “I don’t know”, but don’t be afraid to really push how great you are and how much you know – even if they catch you out, you’ve still put across the right attitude, and once in the job, you’ll be able to show them you’re worth the money anyway.

Tackle an interviewer’s concerns head on

When it comes to your turn to ask questions in the interview, just ask the interviewer “do you have any reservations about employing me?” I end every interview with that question now. If they do, you can try and answer their concerns there and then. If not, you’ve put it into their mind that they literally have no reason not to offer you the job.

Hold out for more money

I’ve never been offered a job, only for it to fall through on pay negotiations. Once and employer has decided they want you, they won’t quibble over an extra thousand or two a year to get your signature on the dotted line. Try to have a couple of things lined up at the same time so you can legitimately say “I’m considering some other offers.” That will scare them into thinking they will lose you, and they’ll cough up the extra cash.

Tell your employer you’re going to leave

A good friend of mine who worked for a certain other mobile phone operator based in the UK, decided that he was fed up with his job and announced to the world that he was looking for a new challenge. His employer soon found out and decided that he was worth keeping, so offered to train him up in a whole different part of the company, and bump him up a few pay grades too! If your company likes you, they’ll do what they can to make you stay – if not, then they were probably going to get rid of you at some point anyway, so you have nothing to lose.

How can they possibly manufacture, ship and sell a doormat, at a profit, for 99p?

Banks are a joke. While most shops are offering increasingly extended opening hours, most banks continue to open 10-5 on weekdays, preventing anyone with a job, and therefore money, the very thing the banks are after, actually being able to go there and use it.

Luckily, this is gradually, very gradually, starting to change. The HSBC in the city centre now opens on a Saturday.

So last Saturday I headed down there to pay some money in for CWF.

However, when I arrived, I found all the counters closed. So I asked the customer service person standing on the door, how I was to go about paying money in. “I’m sorry sir, we don’t offer that facility on a Saturday. It’s only Monday to Friday.”

Apparently, because I had some coins to pay in, and they don’t operate a counter service on a weekend, I couldn’t actually pay any money into the bank account, despite the bank being open. You couldn’t make it up…

Hosting the Olympics has been a harsh affair. We’ve had to temporarily (hopefully!) transformed into a semi-totalitarian state.

But on the flip side, we get to go to the Olympics. Or do we?

The Olympic Stadium holds 80,000 people. So even if you allocate a rather large amount of 800 tickets to sponsors and other interests in the private sector, that still means we can sell 99% of tickets to the generic public. But apparently not. Only 75% of the tickets have gone on sale to the general public. When it comes to the high profile events, that already rather low number of 75% drops to 35%!

But, of course, you have to give some to the private sector. They’re paying for the games after all. Otherwise, the tax payer would have to foot the bill. But, as it turns out, and we all knew already, we are footing the bill.

According to the Guardian, sponsors have contributed £1 billion of funding. They’ve made the data available for free too. The Guardian is actually being generous here – a report by Parliament puts the figure even lower.

Meanwhile, the total cost was reported to the House of Parliament as being around £12 billion. Jules Boykoff points out this isn’t entirely accurate though and, indeed, according to Sky Sports, the figure is actually around the £24 billion mark.

So do the maths on that one. We’re footing 92% to 96% of the cost, yet we’re getting 35% – 75% of the tickets.

John Rentoul recently published an article on The Independent’s website, pointing to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies showing that the recession had actually reduced income inequality.

Key findings in the report highlight that the turn of the decade marked the biggest drop in income inequality since 1962 based upon the Gini coefficient (one of the many ways you can measure income inequality). Contrary to popular belief, it is actually the wealth that have seen the biggest percentage slashed off their income, at least according to the report.

If it is the case, then while income fails are never a good thing, it is positive that we are moving towards a more equal society – of course there is no guarantee such a trend will remain when economic times are brighter.

Total spending on religious construction is down to almost a third of what it was a decade ago.

Data Source: FRED, Federal Reserve Economic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: Total Construction Spending: Religious (TLRELCONS).

In February, I went to Paris.

However, despite having paid for reserved seating on my flight out there, we ended up getting moved to a different part of the plane to balance out the weight. It didn’t exactly fill me with confidence that a jet airliner could be so fragility held in the sky that someone sitting in the wrong place could bring it down, but I went with it.

That said, I was rather aggrieved that I had paid for reserved seating and not been given it. So, on my return I wrote a letter of complaint to Jet2 as they don’t seem to have email and I would need to take a personal loan out to fund phoning their premium rate customer service line. So I went old school and wrote a letter.

I’m pleased to say that a month later I have received a letter back from them saying that they will be refunding the money I paid for allocated seating, within the next two weeks.

At CWF we want to make sure that as many people as possible can get access to our events and resources. Because of this, we are today launching the CWF inclusively programme. This will enable those suffering from financial hardship to apply for relief on costs such as event tickets and registration fees so that those would could not normally afford to attend our events are still able to come. This will begin with our Sunrise Conference for which applications are now open.

Ever wondered what a £50 note looks like?

It has been a good day for cash intake lol. Our landlord refunded the money he owed us. Seriously though, who carries around £50 notes in their wallet?