Boost Your Income and Career: Negotiating Salary, Navigating Promotions and More
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What are the best strategies for increasing your income?
Hey folks, Sean here. We are taking the week off for the Thanksgiving holiday, so please enjoy this episode from our archives. In the meantime, we hope you all have a wonderful, relaxing, food-filled week. We'll be back soon with brand new episodes for you. Enjoy. You've heard it one million times. Just cut out the daily Starbucks run and you'll be rich. But more often than not, your financial situation is going to be better aided by fixing what's coming into your budget versus what's going out.
If you're, say, 35 years old and you negotiate an extra $5,000 for your job, it's not just $5,000 because in lifetime earnings, that's several hundred thousand dollars in lifetime earnings. And if you invested that difference, it's even more.
Welcome to NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast. I'm Sean Piles.
And I'm Alana Benson.
This episode kicks off our nerdy deep dive into what we're calling investing in your income. Another way to say that is investing in yourself by seeking out more ways to make more money.
Yeah, Sean, you alluded to this at the beginning, but there's just so much advice out there giving people flack for spending on like straight up normal stuff like going to Starbucks or like getting some tacos at a food truck instead of making them in your kitchen. And like, yes, technically, all of these things can have a negative impact on your bottom line. But like you have to live.
Absolutely. And I mean, we've had a foot in this camp on the show, advising people to take a hard look at their expenses and see what they can pare back in an effort to get themselves to a better financial situation. We haven't told people to forego a morning latte, but there certainly is a time and place for examining your spending habits. That said, there is another way to affect that bottom line.
Exactly. And that is to just make more money.
Yes. Okay. So Alana, you pitched this series to us. What prompted you to start thinking about this?
I've talked about this on here before, but before I started working at NerdWallet, I worked at a small company where I was making less than $30,000 a year with no benefits. So I actually tried to negotiate to $32,500 and I was told that I was greedy and selfish.
Wow. The gall you must have had.
I know. How dare I?
To ask for that much more money. Yeah.
But it messed me up for like a long time. And to any listeners who have been told something similar, I want to tell you right now that you are not any of those things. I had to check my bank account like every time before I went grocery shopping at that job. And I felt stressed about money all the time. And then when I finally started working at NerdWallet, overnight, I went from that stressed out lifestyle to being able to save for retirement and a down payment on a house, which was just like a fever dream before then. And then it was a reality.
Right. Well, we wish everyone could work for NerdWallet, but for those who are looking for other ways to have that kind of income jump, let's talk about what they need to be considering.
Yeah, Sean. And this is not to say that this is easy. These are a little more difficult. They may not happen overnight, but there are some really critical factors that make increasing your income almost imperative if you want to meet particular financial goals. If that's buying a house, if you're making a college fund, investing for retirement, these are all the things that you usually do after you fill out your emergency fund or you pay down high interest debt and cover your day-to-day expenses. And by those metrics, it just makes it really hard for a lot of people to ever get to the point where they can afford to save and invest for those long-term goals. And for a lot of folks, increasing their income is literally the only way they're going to be able to afford to invest for retirement.
Right, and increasing your income can also be far more effective than reducing expenses, particularly for those who don't have many expenses left to cut.
Yeah, exactly. So here's an example. If you're making $50,000 a year, the money you actually get on your paycheck after taxes, and generally this is without state taxes and Everyone's tax situation is different, but that would come to about $42,000 a year or $3,495 per month. The average monthly mortgage payment in the US is $1,768.
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