depressing work stuff

Today my research* focused on Early Retirement Extreme, which I found through a review on The Simple Dollar. Through those two things I discovered Your Money or Your Life.

From the first review of the book on Amazon:

* STEP 2: Since money is something we choose to trade our life energy for (central idea of the book), determine how much money you truly get for doing your job, including the fact that you have to spend money in commuting, clothing, meals at work, etc. and start to keep track of every penny that you earn and spend. Just to illustrate the power of this step, I found myself making 25% (hourly rate) less than I thought I was by doing this exercise, and that takes into account the fact that I live 20 minutes away from my work and I half the time I bring my food from home.

I thought it would be interesting to try this exercise. So I did it.

It was so depressing.

First order of depressingness is that if I just subtract taxes from my income, I make 24% less than I do on paper.

But that was just the beginning.

I also discovered that I literally work 5.5 days out of every 20 just to get to work. As in, I spend 20% of my time at work just paying for Metro fare and the gas to get to the Metro. Wow.

I went through my costs associated with actually attending my job, as in being physically present to work, and it was pretty depressing. I factored in my commute costs, money spent on clothes and food for work. I also factored in my commute time, since my boss doesn't allow any "new" hires to work from home under any circumstances. I'm expected to work an 8-hour day, but since I have to actually get to work to put in that 8-hour day, my 8-hour day is really almost 10 hours when you include my mandatory commute.

I also factored in tithing, since that's a fixed expense.

When it comes down to it, and all those things are taken into account, I make less than 1/3 as much as I thought I did, that I can spend on rent, food, non-work clothes, utilities, and anything else. If you factor in the hours I am unproductive during the rest of the day because I am stressing/destressing from work, the number per hour is even lower--by a substantial amount.

That's really depressing.

I went ahead after that and factored in the cost of child care, for when I come back from maternity leave in September. Yeah, that will put my hourly wage at ~$2/hour.

This information makes me kind of a sad camper. Just going to work costs me over 2/3 of my salary.

There has to be a better way!!!!!!

Sigh. I guess there's no answer except bacon sandwiches. Better go make some.





*Every day I try to fit in a few hours of high quality research on something interesting.