Money Walks

When you get your first job offer, how will you know if the salary is reasonable? The first thing you need to do before you enter the job market, whether it’s your first job fresh out of college or a new step into a career path, you need to research what the going rate or salary is in your area that also matches your education and skills.

When it comes to negotiating salary and benefits, most of it just boils down to knowing how much you’re worth in the marketplace. You need to identify which benefits are important to you and associate these benefits with a price tag offered by the employer so that you can evaluate the real value of the offer. The total compensation encompasses much more than just a salary, but also benefits and bonuses such as relocation package and signing bonuses.

When negotiating with your prospective employers, you need to find out what benefits and bonuses the company offers to employees in the position that you’re applying for, what the average pay increase is, and what benefits might be added later.

As far as when to discuss salary negotiations, you should delay any questions or requests until you’re well into the interviewing process and you also want to avoid telling your interviewers how much you currently make. You shouldn’t be thrown into a salary range that’s lower than your current going rates just because you were underpaid at your previous job, and discussing your salary too early in the game can take you out of the running if your current salary is too high. The main goal here is to have enough time interacting with the managers and interviewers to have a chance to “sell yourself” and to convince them why you’re the right person for the job before going into discussion about salary.

Keep in mind, the objective of them asking your current salary or the salary you’re looking for is generally to pay you as little as possible. Employers, for the most part, will always offer less than what they can afford. So the general rule of thumb is this, whatever the offer, always ask for 12%-15% more than what they give you. The reason for this is because when they put together your initial offer, they compose the letter assuming that you will ask for an increase. The employer usually allocates 15% higher than the initial offer for their budget on you, so if you don’t ask for the increase, then the company is more than happy to give you your base pay since they were able to reel you in with their minimum offer. When asking for the 12-15% increase, you might not always get the exact 12-15% but any increase is better than nothing. In the worse case scenario, they say no and that’s it. They’re not going to retract their offer because you asked for an increase, it can’t hurt to ask.

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Remember that you cannot deduct expenses that are for personal purposes, but you can deduct travel expenses that are the ordinary and necessary expenses of traveling away from home for your business or job.You may also deduct travel expenses, including meals and lodging, you had in looking for a new job in your present trade or business. You may not deduct these expenses if you had them while looking for work in a new trade or business or while looking for work for the first time. If you are unemployed and there is a substantial break between the time of your past work and your looking for new work, you may not deduct these expenses, even if the new work is in the same trade or business as your previous work.

With that being said, here are some tips to maximize tax deductions for travel:

• Do not prorate travel costs of getting to and from your business destination.
• Allocate travel expenses between business and non-business. Prorate your business and non-business expenses to identify the business expenses that are tax-deductible.
• Deduct costs associated with travel outside the United States. If you did not want to spend your entire time on business, you can still deduct the entire cost of your travel outside the United States.
• Deduct travel expenses for another individual. Yes, you can deduct the travel expenses for another individual who travels with you as long as its a business trip and he/she is an employee of your business.
• Deduct the cost of travel associated with your attending a business convention. You can deduct your travel expenses when you attend a convention as long as you can show that your attendance benefits your business.
• Deduct up to $2,000 each year for attending cruise ship conventions that are directly related to your business. As long as you meet the following conditions: The ship must be registered in the US, All ports must be in the US, You must submit two supporting statements with your tax return, and you must spend at least 51 percent of your time attending the seminar.
• Qualify a day as a business day. You can do this if your primary activity was business. A good rule of thumb is that your business activity be at least four hours in length during normal working hours.

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In today’s society, it is really easy for employees to sue their employers and whats worse is that many employers do not realize until after they are sued that a lawsuit could have been prevented. Although “good intentions” goes a long way, they are in many cases not enough when it comes to a lawsuit.

So the key is to combine good intentions with the necessary legal/management skills and you will experience increased productivity, happier employees and a thriving workplace. Follow these 5 tips for protecting yourself from employee lawsuits:

1. Hire carefully. You should look for people with strong work ethics and avoid hiring those who feel life owes them something.
2. Keep good records on employee mistakes, even when they’re not firing offenses. Document your own actions and the reasons behind your employment decisions.
3. Consider buying an employment practices liability insurance (EPLI).
4. Do not discriminate in hiring, or permit sexual harassment.
5. Have strong employment policies. Communicate them clearly to employees and enforce them.

Also, you want to listen very carefully and patiently to what the employee has to say, especially when dealing with any complaints that they may have. Last thing you want to do is to argue with them. Just simply say that you are sorry for not coming to an agreement. It’s better to let down your pride for a minute than to lose your business.

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Heres an interesting fact. In the year 1900, there were only about 5,000 millionaires in America. By the end of 2000, there were more than 5 million millionaires, and more than 300 billionaires and multi-billionaires. Almost all of these guys began with nothing and accumulated their fortunes in the course of a single working lifetime.

We all know that education is very important and crucial to obtaining a job these days but there are those few who were able to make it to the top without the complete aid of college education. These self made billionaires suggest that rather than a college education, that talent, hard work, attitude, consistency, and also along with a great deal of luck are the key ingredients of success. Here is a list of billionaires who all dropped of college, and some even high school. (not in any particular order)

*Bill Gates

*Li Ka-Shing

*Larry Ellison

*Roman Abramovich

*Sheldon Adelson

*Paul Allen

*Amancio Ortega

*Michael Dell

*Kirk Kerkorian

*Carl Icahn

*Stanley Ho

*Donald Newhouse

*François Pinault

*YC Wang

*Jack Taylor

*David Geffen

*David Murdock

*Steve Jobs

*Ralph Lauren

*Henry Fok

*Richard Branson

It’s a pretty long list here. Now before you consider dropping out of school, keep in mind that these people are the exception. For the most part, it’s probably like a million to one ratio for those who make it big. So the chances of dropping out and hitting the jackpot are pretty slim, something I wouldn’t recommend. Stick with the lottery. Although the chances of winning one of those are ridiculously slim, at least you’re not bartering your education.

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Welcome to the 13th edition of the Carnival of Money Stories! This week we had a little over 30 great article submissions, however since majority of the submissions did not have a personal story or experience behind it, I had to omit most of it. Remember guys, Carnival of Money Stories is strictly dedicated to articles with some kind of personal story and/or experience involving finance so if your article did not have either or, then it was not included in the carnival. For awesome articles that does not fit the Money Stories, there is the Carnival of Personal Finance.

For this edition, I’ve decided to take the popular “Chicken Soup for the Soul” idea as my theme but instead filled with money stories with pictures. There is a total of 14 great stories and I put them each into their own perspective chapters or topics. In order to get to the story, just click on the picture. Anyway, without further delay, I present to you the Carnival of Money Stories #13 :Chicken Soup for the Financial Soul.

Chapter One: Real Estate

Trent from The Simple Dollar

Silicon Valley Blogger from The Digerati Life

Cap from Mint

Chapter Two: Customer Service

Mr Medicated Money from Medicated Money

Fire Finance from FireFinance

Chapter Three: Financial Mistakes

Bret from The Frugal Law Student

Mr Credit Card from Ask Mr Credit Card

Chapter Four: Credit Cards

FundZine

The Credit and Credit Card Blog

Matthew from Getting Green

Skilled Investor from The Skilled Investor Blog

Chapter Five: Career

Nina from QueerCents

FreeMoneyFinance

Chapter Six: Retirement

Stop Swimming

So that concluded this weeks Carnival of Money Stories. I want to thank all the contributors for their great work.

The next edition of Money Stories will be hosted Monday over at Frugal Law Student, don’t miss it! You can submit your money stories here.

Do you want to make six figures? Ofcourse you do! There’s a list of 10 actually on Forbes.com but I figured since we’re dealing with six figure jobs that I pick six out of the ten. While a nice degree in business would help, I found some pretty neat jobs here that doesn’t even require one. Check em out.

1. Court Reporter. If you’re able to type 200+ words a minute, then this may be your job.
2. Mine manager. This profession has a median salary of 106,000 bucks a year and is said that a college degree is not always required. Okay, Claustrophobia aside, if you got the project management skills you could be making six figures!
3. Sales person. This job is actually considered as one of the easiest high paying jobs out there, and I don’t know why. But if you got the communcation skills and can handle rejections, you’ll make big bucks.
4. Truck drivers. This is definitely my favorite one. I never knew that they made so much. Looks like this profession requires you to be out on the road for weeks at a time, but hey this job can pull in 100,000+ and that’s not including benefits.
5. Tech writers. For those of you that are able to write about tech relating issues with the ability to write them in a way to make the majority understand, then you could be making big bucks. Just like john chows techcrunch eh?
6. Elementary principles. The national median salary for this job is actually 76,000 a year but if you live in those higher income areas, then you’re good to go.

Now here I am in school, studying computer science to become a software engineer. What was I thinking, I should just drop out of school right now so that I could become a truck driver and be making 100k, right? WRONG! Well, salaries aside, I think that people take the income part too seriously. You have to keep in mind that money can’t buy everything and that it’s really over rated. If I could chose between a high paying job that’s gonna make me miserable or a job that I enjoy that’s gonna hit me for about 50-55k a year, I’ll take my comp sci degree anyday. I’m gonna be working for at least the next 20 years of my life so I expect to enjoy it. Now don’t get me wrong, I would love to make 6 figures. And eventually I expect to, all I’m saying is I wouldn’t trade it for something that I woultn’t enjoy doing.