{"id":631,"date":"2010-07-02T09:21:25","date_gmt":"2010-07-02T16:21:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/?p=631"},"modified":"2010-07-02T09:21:29","modified_gmt":"2010-07-02T16:21:29","slug":"reflections-on-salary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/2010\/07\/02\/reflections-on-salary\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on Salary"},"content":{"rendered":"

My first job out of college paid an annual salary of S<\/cite>. (The actual amount S<\/cite> represents is unimportant.)<\/p>\n

For a brief period of time, that was more money than I could imagine. (We didn’t discuss money in my family, but I have reason to believe that my dad supported us–four kids, mom, and himself–on less than that amount.) Two years later, when I moved to Bell Labs, I also “right-sized” my salary to 140% of S<\/cite>. Then S<\/cite> didn’t seem so impressive.<\/p>\n

What’s interesting is that my 1984 salary is 70% of what I make now, 26 years later, according to the measuringworth.com<\/a> web site. (Actually, they provide a bunch of estimates, ranging from 71% to 140%. I picked the lowest one.)<\/p>\n

Now, that was in Albuquerque, which is cheaper to live in than Yucca Valley. According to the cost-of-living comparison<\/a> at Sperling’s BestPlaces<\/a>, a dollar there buys as much as $1.06 does here.<\/p>\n

So my first job out of college paid effectively 75% of my current salary. And I only had one car and three less mouths to feed. But what’s really amazing is that within two years of graduation, I had run up more than 10% of my salary in credit card debt. To be sure, I do have a mortgage today, but (so far!) we’re paying our bills and living within our means.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My first job out of college paid an annual salary of S. (The actual amount S represents is unimportant.) For a brief period of time, that was more money than I could imagine. (We didn’t discuss money in my family, but I have reason to believe that my dad supported us–four kids, mom, and himself–on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23],"tags":[89,91,87,88,90,92,93],"class_list":["post-631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-biography","tag-compensation","tag-economics","tag-history-2","tag-job","tag-salary","tag-spending"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRqpr-ab","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}