Money Crashers: How Much Does Your Job Really Pay?

My latest Money Crashers article was inspired largely by two pieces out of Amy Dacyczyn's Complete Tightwad Gazette (all hail the Frugal Zealot!). In the first piece, called "The Time and Money Chart," she talks about how to figure out which money-saving tasks are most worth the effort, based on how much money they save you (and how much satisfaction they provide in other ways) for each hour you spend on them. For instance, she calculates that making two homemade pizzas takes 20 minutes and costs about $2, while having two similar pizzas delivered would cost about $18 (remember, this was nearly 30 years ago). That's a savings of $16 for 20 minutes of work, or $48 per hour, making this a task that's definitely worth the time. Canning pears, by contrast, is a labor-intensive task that saves only $1 per hour of work compared to buying canned pears at the store.

One of the most interesting items in this chart appears at the bottom, where she claims that going back to work as a graphic designer would yield only $3.33 per hour. She reaches this figure by calculating that, while she could nominally earn $15 per hour, after taxes and expenses for child care, wardrobe, and transportation, her pay would be "whittled down to $5 per hour." Moreover, her nominal 40-hour week would really require 60 hours of effort counting "additional dressing and grooming time, dropping kids at a sitter's, the lost lunch hour, commuting and after-work-crash-from-exhaustion time," bringing the actual hourly wage to a mere $3.33, far below many of the other frugal tasks she does every day.

She makes the same point again in the second article, "Trend Reversal," talking about the "nationwide trend" of women dropping out of the work force to stay home with their kids. She cites a study saying that the "percentage of women under age 30 in the workforce peaked in 1989 at 75 percent" and had fallen by 3 to 4 percent by the early nineties, and speculates that this is partly because many mothers don't find it worth their while financially to work. She points to a Labor Department study showing that "about 80 percent of working mothers' incomes is absorbed by job-related expenses such as child care, clothing, transportation, and meals away from home." She also makes a point of noting that this same strategy could work for stay-at-home dads as well, but she couldn't find any data on whether their numbers were increasing.

Putting these two ideas together, I wrote a piece for Money Crashers called "How Much Does Your Job Really Pay? – Calculating Your Hourly Wage," which replaced an older article called "Quit Your Job to Save Money" (which I thought was a bit of an overstatement). The main point of the new article is that, if you're staying at a job you don't like much because you need the money, it's worth calculating how much you actually make for each hour you devote to the job, and how much you could potentially make doing something else you might like more—whether that's a different job, freelance work, or staying home with kids. For anyone who's ever wished they could afford to quit their job, it's worth a read.