I thought my earnings progression over my 33 year career was pretty good until I read this thread. I guess I was just an average slacker. My starting salary out of college was $22.5K in 1982. When I retired in 2015, it was $190K. That is only 8.4 times what I started with. It does not include the benefits package or the 401K matching or the pension or the free tuition for my masters degree. I guess I am a bit of a dinosaur, since I spent my entire career with the same company. Maybe I could have done better if I had job-hopped a few times but it never seemed worth it to me.
+1
I agree with the message of investing in yourself and recall a column Pete wrote about that a while back (making the similar point that before you have financial assets, you have skills and abilities, and so the best thing you can do is work your ass off to increase those skills and abilities and make yourself valuable and earn more, which gives you both better pay/job security at your current job and better options if you want to look elsewhere). This is the advice I've given my DD, who's graduating college this spring -- she has a job offer from a company that provides incredible training and opportunities for free classes at a nearby university, and she's at a time in life with no other commitments (financial or personal), so I'm telling her to both throw herself into the job and throw her money into investments/savings, as that combo will put her in a powerful position in a couple of years.
The problem with the ROI approach, of course, is that it assumes that the career is the top priority. At my highest pay, I made about 8x my starting salary. But there are a bunch of things that played into that:
- I'm a lawyer, so my starting salary was higher than most, and something I "earned" by an unpaid 3-year "internship" (i.e., getting a JD). A more accurate comparison is probably what I could have made right out of college, which would have been less than half that.
- There have been several times over the past 30-ish years when Bad Things happened that hit my income to the tune of 30-50%. Like DH losing jobs and me having to find what I could get in the new area, or me having to telecommute very part-time because the job I found sucked.
- Probably most importantly, I have never prioritized maximizing my income. I have never, ever been the highest biller at any firm I've been with, and honestly I've probably never been in the top 50%, except maybe one year; even before I had kids, I vowed that I'd never work weekends unless it was truly necessary (vs. putting in weekend work to hit some hours target), and I have stuck to that rule. I chose a lower-paid job in a MCOL city vs. a higher-paid job in a HCOL city because even though the overalll $$ was lower, the lifestyle was way better (commute/housing prices/etc.), and I think I did better overall with COL/savings. But the biggest impact has been choosing to be part-time for a lot of years so I could have time with my DH and kids and still cook dinner and not pull my hair out with all the stress of trying to fit a 60-hr/week job in with everything else.
And yet even with all that, I'm still at around 8x over 30 years. Because when I was at work, I focused my entire brain power on it and put out good stuff -- and my clients and bosses could see that I was committed to their issues and to getting things right. And when circumstances required, I did work my ass off, including 2-3AM nights and one 108-billable-hour week. The funny thing is that I didn't even think of myself as having a work ethic, because my mom works even harder! But in retrospect, it was that commitment to the work that allowed me to increase 8x while still having a pretty fucking awesome lifestyle along the way (at least compared to most lawyers!).