Savvy Saving Bytes

For the past few years my renters insurance premiums have seen pretty steep increases, but this year’s 2012 bill catapulted my blood pressure to the top of the charts. The insurance company I’ve been with for years upped my annual bill by 20%! The reason? Not a single one on my end. Last year not one circumstance in my apartment, building or neighborhood changed an iota to warrant this hefty increase.

There was no way I was going to pay for the over-the-top new premium. Nor had I any intention of speaking with the company in an attempt to lower their bill. Their price hikes had been getting out of hand for awhile, but this newest increase was out of the stratosphere as far as I was concerned.

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While working on staff at two different companies, I was startled when documents listing employee’s salaries somehow suddenly crossed my desk. Wow! Here I’d been wondering how much money coworkers were making and shazam – there were the numbers in crisp black and white. Twice!

Both financial documents were enlightening, but the larger company’s payroll turned out to be even more instructive.

The biggest surprise was the whopping salaries paid to the big cheeses. I knew of course they were paid a lot — way more than the peasants below them, but the disparity was just enormous. The gigantic salary of my own department head made me glad I had stuck to my guns and not accepted the lower compensation he had first offered me. Even though we immediately clicked and I sensed working with him would be enjoyable, something had made me hold out for bigger bucks than his initial offers. Indeed, If I had swallowed his lamentations of limited budgets and resources along with that lesser salary I would now have been ticked off in spades.

The next big surprise was the pitifully low salaries paid to employees at the lowest end of the totem pole. Yes, many had probably started close to minimum wage, but even workers who had been around for ten years plus had barely risen above that level. Which suggested they had not been receiving timely cost of living raises. Loyal and hard working, they certainly deserved those same increases that higher level employees were receiving. Yet not having received these raises, those employees had apparently not stepped forward and requested them either.

I was also unsettled by the much lower salary paid to some older, highly experienced employees versus young new hires with limited experience. Here again, a lack of raises seemed to be a factor. And in fact an older bookkeeper that was being replaced by a young “financial officer” at a much higher salary woefully lamented that her employer “knew all along” her position was worth a lot more than her low salary. True, but if the bookkeeper did not speak up for herself and point out her own value, management had apparently felt no obligation to reward her silent modesty.

Prior to glancing at this financial info, I had never given any thought to monetary wage differences between creative and sales departments. This difference turned out to be considerable. The higher ups in sales were being paid way more than higher up creatives. In the creative department myself, I felt no envy. In a way I felt it was almost a just distribution. The creatives got all the exhilaration and fun of conceiving and producing company products. All sales got for their efforts in selling that product was mere money.

And then we came to the same old inequity: male employees were being paid more (sometimes much more) than their female counterparts. It appeared too that men heavy in the chutzpah department were also ending up with more change in their pockets.  Nothing surprising there. But the important question was — when was the inequality going to end? When were men and women finally going to receive equal pay for equal work?

To find out how your salary stacks up to the national average in your field, check out Salary.com.

More Career Tales:

• When does an Internship Become a Slave Ship?
• Rake in Over $400,00 a Year – Be a Stagehand
• A flub, a Flare-up and a Firing!
• An Illegal Mexican makes it Big in the Wine World
• Fired! Again!
• Does Beauty Boost a Resumé to top of the Pile?
• Hey Mom, Guess What — I Got a Press Card!

Is there anything more dreamily delicious than a gorgeous chocolate dessert? For me, no! It would also be nice if my chocolate treat didn’t have enough calories to sink a tanker and I could whip it together one-two-three. With that in mind I did some research and voila — here are a few chocolate dessert collections that will gratify your deepest chocolate longings with a minimum of calories and cooking time.

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I’m halfway into the first paragraph when IT slides across the screen aiming straight for the spot where I’m reading. Then zip – it’s there! Another freaking online survey covering up and obliterating the article I’m trying to read.  NO, for the millionth time! I will NOT take a “few minutes” to answer a “few brief” questions. Yeah, yeah, my feedback is “valuable” to you, a great help to “improve” your services. But guess what — I consider my time to be a mite more valuable than this trillionth survey asking questions ultimately designed to boost your bottom line.

This survey barrage is happening everywhere. Surveys arrive by mail too. From the hospital after an X-ray: “How many minutes did you wait for your X-ray?” the survey inquires. Like I keep track of that kind of stuff?

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Along with all the Valentine’s Day chocolates, amorous greeting cards and bouquets of red roses, here are some quotes on love and money:

“Money is like love; it kills slowly and painfully the one who withholds it, and enlivens the other who turns it on his fellow man.” ~ Kahlil Gibran

“Money will buy you a fine dog, but only love can make it wag its tail.” ~ Richard Friedman

“Money isn’t everything but it sure keeps you in touch with your children.” ~ J. Paul Getty

“Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt.” ~ Henrik Ibsen

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According to a post written by a young hiring manager at BI, sending handwritten Thank You Notes after job interviews felt “old” to her. “Ancient!” So not 2012!

In an earlier post she stated the biggest mistake job applicants made was not sending her a Thank You Note after she interviewed them for job openings. This omission led her to surmise candidates really didn’t want the job or were disorganized and weak in follow up. Additionally she said she would forget them quicker than those who thanked her.  Her comments ignited a barrage of hostile replies. Thank You Notes, some said, were strictly ass kissing, demeaning,  for suck-ups and emotionally needy managers.  She also came under fire for her “arrogance, petty expectations” and “moronic ego”” Why, asked another reader, didn’t she simply ask job applicants to “jump through flaming hoops” for her.

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Here’s the scenario: on my deck are huge, weighty wooden planters of flowers, the cause my landlord suspects, of flooding in the apartment below. He wants those monster planters off my deck and OUT of there. Swell. If I were a guy, I’d simply flex a muscle or two and haul those babies downstairs. But I’m not; I’m an average size female. Not weak, but nowhere near strong enough for getting the job done in this century. Lugging all that dirt in manageable amounts down four flights would take forever and as for the thick wooden planters themselves – forget it. Even when empty, I could barely budge the things.

So once more, the building superintendent gets another job making him richer and me poorer. In the past I’ve paid him paid to haul away god knows how many defunct air conditioners, TV’s and computer monitors (lifting my first 80’s monitor was like lifting a Volkswagen).

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Like many New Yorkers, I’ll stand in long lines patiently waiting to buy food in only one food market and that’s Trader Joe’s. Why? What does Trader Joe’s have that countless other food stores don’t have? And what can that master food merchant teach us about presenting our own products, services or even ourselves to today’s sharp-in-the-know audiences?

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There is no small talk during an IRS  tax audit. No chatting. No smiles. It’s been many years since my first (and only) tax audit but I well remember the deadening atmosphere of that IRS office. Up till then I had been in and out of the colorful offices of newspapers, publishing houses, advertising agencies and art departments. The contrast between those places of high energy and creativity and the drab, silent IRS office — so devoid of personality and personal effects — unnerved me.

I was there alone. The IRS letter said I could have someone represent or accompany me, presumably meaning my tax preparer, a man I thought best to keep out of the IRS spotlight.   He had been recommended to me by a magazine art director, how or why I can’t imagine. His office on 42nd Street was closet-size, a cluttered, dusty space he shared with another man sitting at a facing desk. A noisy breather, my tax preparer worked in pencil, the better to make numerous erasures as he filled in my first Schedule C tax form.  I had just gone freelance and he was explaining all the deductions the self-employed could claim, many of which I was hearing for the first time. So needless to say I had not saved any receipts for those deductions. No problem, he claimed. Just estimate your expenditures.  My memory for numbers is none too sparkling, so back and forth we went, me struggling to remember and him spurring me on to spin ever higher figures.

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It turns out Kashi wasn’t the only “natural” cereal brand kicked out of Green Grocers because it contained genetically engineered grains (GMOs) and pesticide residues. Three other cereal brands also got the boot at the Portsmouth, RI natural foods retailer: Barbara’s Bakery, Peace and Bear Naked.

Their banishment started with Cereal Crimes, a report produced by the Cornucopia Institute, a non-profit group supporting small organic farmers. This report explored the growing trend toward labeling conventional foods as “natural,” a marketing ploy designed to blur the line between natural and organic foods with the aim of extracting bigger profits from consumers. After checking the cereal ratings and discovering these four brands contained carcinogenic ingredients along with surprisingly high levels of GMOs, the Owner of Green Grocer pulled the plug and put up signs on his shelves explaining why. A photo of the Kashi sign swiftly went viral on the internet. Customers, furious about being duped by Kashi’s pure “natural” stance and the presence of genetically engineered ingredients in their cereals, stampeded Kashi’s Facebook page with complaints. (If they’ve been scrubbed, not to worry. Cornucopia made a copy.)

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