Love Is Not Enough: A Smart Woman’s Guide to Money. Merryn Webb Somerset
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– don’t be the last person in your office to learn new IT skills; be the first, for example.
But if you like your job you will also accrue value as an employee informally – being engaged and enthusiastic makes you of more worth to your employers than being bored and disengaged from your work. So ask yourself this. Do you like your job? Does it make you happy? Do you actually want to do it? Too many of us just drift into our first jobs and then end up stuck in them or variations of them for ever whether we like them or not and whether we are particularly good at them or not. This makes us disconnected, something that stops us learning or moving ahead – who wants to promote someone who is clearly bored with her career? If you take a job you are genuinely interested in, however, you should find that you are excited by it, that you learn and grow on the job, that you understand how the company you work for operates and what it needs from you. This makes you valuable and it makes you promotable. The upshot? If you do something you enjoy you are more likely to become good at it and hence to be paid more for doing it. So think about the bits of your job that you really like, do more of them, do them better and make sure everyone knows you’ve done them better. A rising salary should be the reward for that time and effort.
Three other ways to make more money
Changing career
What if you’ve done everything you can to get paid the going rate in your current job and you still don’t feel that your income is high enough? The obvious thing to do is to change jobs. When someone offers you a new job they usually offer you 5–10% more than you are currently earning (otherwise, unless you were deeply unhappy in your old job for non-financial reasons, why would you bother moving?), which not only bumps up your current salary but bumps up the base from which it will be increased in future pay rounds. But more promising as a long-term tactic than moving jobs within your industry might be to consider changing the kind of job you do.
For all the wrong reasons much work remains effectively divided into women’s work and men’s work. Women are nurses, child carers, beauticians, primary school teachers and shop assistants. Men are plumbers, train drivers and construction workers. And guess what? Yes, all the traditional male jobs pay significantly more than the traditional female jobs despite the fact that the skill levels required can’t be considered that different. Do you need more skills to drive a train than to teach a class full of 30 five-year-olds? To build a wall than to take blood from an elderly cancer sufferer? I don’t think so. None the less this kind of pay discrimination exists right up to the top of the career tree: an article in the Financial Times recently pointed out that the work of (mostly female) clinical psychologists and (mostly male) psychiatrists overlaps significantly, yet the former are generally paid less than the latter.
What they earn
Cherie Blair (lawyer): £ 200,000
Lily Cole (supermodel): £ 2 million
Anna Wintour (editor of Vogue): $ 1 million
Stella McCartney (fashion designer): £ 669,000
Davina McCall (TV presenter): £ 1 million
Kirsty Young (newsreader): £ 500,000
Laura King (beauty therapist): £ 11,000
Louise Hitch (personal trainer): £ 20,000
Inge Mecke (trainee solicitor): £ 29,000
Alessandra Sartore (executive PA): £ 35,000
Rachel Dodd (care assistant): £ 13,000
Zoe Baglin (occupational therapist): £ 18,500
Helen Pike (teacher): £ 37,000
SOURCE: Grazia
You’ll clearly be fighting a losing battle if you are a beautician (paid around £18,000) and want your employer to pay you a construction worker’s salary (more like £35,000), so the best way to earn more is simply to switch over. There is currently a huge shortage of skilled labour – bricklayers, decorators and carpenters, for example – in central London, yet there are so few women in the business (around 1% nationwide) that when an all-women team turned up working in the capital the story merited a full-page article in London’s Evening Standard (headline: ‘CHICKS AND MORTAR’). I’m not suggesting that we all take plumbing courses, just that we look around us and wonder if the industry we are working in is the best one for us over the long term.
Getting a second job
The other obvious way to boost your income in a hurry is to get a second job. Second jobs are usually low paid and boring – waitressing, Saturday shop assisting, cleaning and the like – but if you pick them right they can also occasionally offer you experience that can take your career to another level. One of my first jobs was working as a researcher at a Japanese television station. My fellow researcher (Riko) had a second job doing the same at MTV in the evening. She ended up becoming an MTV video jockey specializing in hip-hop music and then a bigwig at a large record company. Still, that kind of thing doesn’t happen very often and for most of us the main problems with a second job are not, as they were with Riko, hoping that our main employers don’t see us on TV and fending off fans when out for dinner, but getting enough sleep and making sure our tax affairs are in order.
The tax thing is boring but important. You will need to tell both your current employer and the Inland Revenue that you have a second job so that both your income tax and your national insurance can be correctly calculated. There is, for example, a limit on how much national insurance anyone has to pay on their salary so with two jobs – and two employers deducting it on behalf of the government – you could find yourself paying too much and then having to claim it back by filling in your own tax return. You also need to make sure you are paying the right amount of income tax. You get a personal allowance (an amount of income you don’t have to pay tax on) every year (£5,035 in 2006/7) but if you don’t let your employers know about each other you may find that they both give you the allowance, leaving you with a large bill to pay to the Inland Revenue later. If your second job means your total income is high enough to make you a higher rate income tax payer yet both your employers are only collecting lower rate payments the same could also be true. Make sure your employers know about each other and get you the right tax codes if you want to avoid any difficulties (see the Inland Revenue’s website, www.hmrc.gov.uk, for more on this).
Finally, before you take on a second job do make sure it is both possible and really worth it. Working two jobs isn’t easy so ask yourself a few things before you commit yourself to it. Will your main employer allow it? Many companies explicitly say in their contracts that employees are not allowed to take on any outside work at all, so, while you may think you can get away with it simply by not telling your main employer, taking on a second job might put your first one at risk. Do the sums really add up? You may need childcare, which could eat up much of the extra income, and if you are on any benefits you will find that as your income rises they fall. Making your own money rather than relying on the state (and effectively the largesse of other tax payers) sounds good in theory, but in practice it can be a tad exhausting. So check what will happen to any benefits or tax credits before you head out to work a second job.
Then you might think about whether you could look at your income equation the other way around. A study from Liverpool Victoria last year showed that over 40% of those with second jobs had taken them not to pay off debts or save for something special but just to meet their living expenses. However, perhaps instead of boosting your income to meet those expenses you could simply reduce the expenses. You probably think you can’t cut down, but most of us overspend, be it on shoes or insurance. A little time spent concentrating on cutting our costs can improve life immeasurably more than spending Friday and Saturday nights stuck behind a bar – and usually a lot faster too. See the next chapter for more on this.
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