You can’t bang and type simultaneously? You must be a generous lover.
Principal Financial-Remote work
- Thread starter pfgemployee
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Its IT, remote IT sucks. It is just one of those jobs that needs to be in person like a widget maker. I can see someone who processes insurance claims all day or something like that, but sometimes you got to be able to access the hardware.
- Mar 27, 2006
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Depends on what IT job it is. If you're desktop support, then sure, it's good to be onsite. But that's a really small part of IT, anymore. If you're on the infrastructure, development , or security side, at many companies, almost none of the systems that you're working with reside on physical hardware in the office, anymore. It's all in the cloud or at remote data centers. As an IT manager, I can't keep a straight face telling my team that they HAVE to be in the office, to support systems that are remote by their very nature.
I’m a software developer, no need for me to access hardware. It’s in Amazon’s data centers anyways.
My old company offshored their desktop support before Covid. Getting the guys upstairs to remote in to view your issue would have been an upgrade. It was a rare site to get one of them to your physical desk
In my first, gut-reaction analysis I think anyone that would take this that would be shortsightedly foolish.
Wording is important. The hypothetical says that you have to work this job until you die. So, no retirement to look forward to.
No mention of time off. Maybe 2 weeks per year since that is the standard starting point for an office job?
There would be no raises. So, inflation would whittle away your spending power way faster than most people would realize when thinking this over.
According to the 2022 US Census the median household income is $74,580.
This offer is to have a salary of $83,200 which is 11.6% higher than the median.
Let's do a little research. Warning, nerd alert!
Go back 50 years to 1974 when the median household income was $11,100.
What if someone offered you an even better deal than what is proposed here?
Let's do 17.1% above the median since that gets us to a nice and even
$500 every 2 weeks to get to $13,000 per year. Pretty dang good if you're just thinking about a few years of time. Adjusted for the historical inflation, that salary is really close to this scenario as show by the inflation calculator on Smart Asset. $13,000 in 1974 has close to the same purchasing power as $83,000 does today.
How about a quick case study?
A 22 year old gets offered this deal in 1974. Would they be able to have "enough"?
Crossing from 1990 to 1991 would be the time that an income of $13,000 would put you below the federal poverty level for a family of 4.
Let's set a goal of staying above that poverty level as it increases over the years.
To achieve that would require aggressively saving for 17 years to build up a stash of cash to act as a supplement to the $13,000 salary.
According to a calculator I found that uses the historical performance of the S&P 500, if someone had invested $500 per month starting in January 1974 (this is 50% of the gross income in our hypothetical) they get to a portfolio valued at $325,000 in December 1990 thanks to an annualized return of over 12% for this time period. This is before capital gains taxes, and is not factoring in any broker or fund fees.
Next, I found a retirement calculator template that allowed me to fill in custom, additional withdrawals per month. This way I could quickly calculate what the supplemental spending need would be from the savings, and fill that in.
It came out to $33.33 per month in 1991, $79.17 per month in 1992, $112.50 per month in 1993, etc.
I put in an assumption of a 2.5% inflation rate and returns of 4.5% (yes very conservative).
If our friend stays the course, by the time 2024 is in full swing they would be withdrawing $1,516.67 per month from their portfolio which would be valued at $1,000,000 which is snowballing out of control at this point unless spending gets multiplied by a significant amount.
This is kind of feeling like a mini advertisement for the FIRE movement at this point.
If someone saves large chunks of money in their early working career they can easily downshift and "barista FIRE" if their expenses are low.
In this particular example, however, the person would also be 72 years old and would have worked at least 125,000 hours in the same, soul-crushing job (50 hours worked minimum per week x 50 weeks per year x 50 years) while living at the poverty level (or below it during the last years of aggressive saving in the late 1980s).
Sure, they could have adjusted their spending at whatever point they decided. Maybe a mid-life crisis Corvette purchase when they were 45? They would be just fine financially in the long run.
Yet they would still be driving to the same, dreary place. Over and over. Forever.
Knowing that I would have to work doing the same mundane job until I die would not be sustainable.
TLDR:
Committing to saving is very important if your future earning power is going to be handicapped for any reason.
TLDR 2:
If a job is going to take over 50 hours per week of your time, it needs to be about more than the money in order for your happiness and fulfillment to not crater.
YMMV
TLDR 3:
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Just got notice from Uncle John D we all have to return to the office for a minimum of 4 days a week starting March 4th. I can't wait to go into the office in Waterloo so I can spend 6 hours a day on the phone with my team that sits in Fargo, Des Moines, Moline, Dubuque, Cary, Mannheim and Pune. That seems like productivity and collaborative accomplishments are going to skyrocket.
Broken record but again, based on what data. What METRICS are they looking to improve? Retention? Employee engagement qualitative data? Where is the data? It always comes back to control and the illogical emotions of inept "leadership".
I wonder what would happen if your production metrics fell after going back
It'd be a crying shame if the numbers showed a more productive (and happier?) WFH employee vs forced office time
My spouse's company went from remote/office as people wish, to 10 days a month and employee engagement numbers dropped on the next survey. So now they are going to 3 days a month, 4 for higher level. So these companies are doubling down.
Just reading between the lines it sure sounds like they're going to start tracking badge scans of how much time we're actually spending in the office. If that's really what's going on I'm done calling into early morning meetings from my house. If the they want me to call into a meeting with the teams on the other side of the world it'll have to be after 7:30AM since it's not going to count towards my day if I'm not in the office, or if I have to be there, I'm coming in and leaving at 2.
Do you mean to say that your spouse's company was allowing their employees 10 days a month remote? The moved to 3 days remote?
Is that where they make the John D steamrollers?
Sorry, they in 2021 publicly stated that they were moving to remote only. Committed to remote. People moved, sold cars, changed childcare based on this. Almost all positions were advertised as remote.
Changed leadership in early 2022, restated committment to remote. By late summer it came out that you needed to be in the office 10 days a month. Now that has moved to 3-4 days in office.
Dumbasses just keep moving it instead of researching what works. I guess trial and error mixed with middle management ego.
Household is 74k, if married that means each spouse averages 37k. This is one person.In my first, gut-reaction analysis I think anyone that would take this that would be shortsightedly foolish.
Wording is important. The hypothetical says that you have to work this job until you die. So, no retirement to look forward to.
No mention of time off. Maybe 2 weeks per year since that is the standard starting point for an office job?
There would be no raises. So, inflation would whittle away your spending power way faster than most people would realize when thinking this over.
According to the 2022 US Census the median household income is $74,580.
This offer is to have a salary of $83,200 which is 11.6% higher than the median.
Let's do a little research. Warning, nerd alert!
Go back 50 years to 1974 when the median household income was $11,100.
What if someone offered you an even better deal than what is proposed here?
Let's do 17.1% above the median since that gets us to a nice and even
$500 every 2 weeks to get to $13,000 per year. Pretty dang good if you're just thinking about a few years of time. Adjusted for the historical inflation, that salary is really close to this scenario as show by the inflation calculator on Smart Asset. $13,000 in 1974 has close to the same purchasing power as $83,000 does today.
How about a quick case study?
A 22 year old gets offered this deal in 1974. Would they be able to have "enough"?
Crossing from 1990 to 1991 would be the time that an income of $13,000 would put you below the federal poverty level for a family of 4.
Let's set a goal of staying above that poverty level as it increases over the years.
To achieve that would require aggressively saving for 17 years to build up a stash of cash to act as a supplement to the $13,000 salary.
According to a calculator I found that uses the historical performance of the S&P 500, if someone had invested $500 per month starting in January 1974 (this is 50% of the gross income in our hypothetical) they get to a portfolio valued at $325,000 in December 1990 thanks to an annualized return of over 12% for this time period. This is before capital gains taxes, and is not factoring in any broker or fund fees.
Next, I found a retirement calculator template that allowed me to fill in custom, additional withdrawals per month. This way I could quickly calculate what the supplemental spending need would be from the savings, and fill that in.
It came out to $33.33 per month in 1991, $79.17 per month in 1992, $112.50 per month in 1993, etc.
I put in an assumption of a 2.5% inflation rate and returns of 4.5% (yes very conservative).
If our friend stays the course, by the time 2024 is in full swing they would be withdrawing $1,516.67 per month from their portfolio which would be valued at $1,000,000 which is snowballing out of control at this point unless spending gets multiplied by a significant amount.
This is kind of feeling like a mini advertisement for the FIRE movement at this point.
If someone saves large chunks of money in their early working career they can easily downshift and "barista FIRE" if their expenses are low.
In this particular example, however, the person would also be 72 years old and would have worked at least 125,000 hours in the same, soul-crushing job (50 hours worked minimum per week x 50 weeks per year x 50 years) while living at the poverty level (or below it during the last years of aggressive saving in the late 1980s).
Sure, they could have adjusted their spending at whatever point they decided. Maybe a mid-life crisis Corvette purchase when they were 45? They would be just fine financially in the long run.
Yet they would still be driving the same, dreary place. Over and over. Forever.
Knowing that I would have to work doing the same mundane job until I die would not be sustainable.
TLDR:
Committing to saving is very important if your future earning power is going to be handicapped for any reason.
TLDR 2:
If a job is going to take over 50 hours per week of your time, it needs to be about more than the money in order for your happiness and fulfillment to not crater.
YMMV
TLDR 3:
