Monday, January 28, 2008

31 Days To Fix Your Finances, Day 6

31 Days To Fix Your Finances, Day 6: Your True Hourly Wage

Okay, today we take the last 2 days and use them to figure our true hourly wage.

So mine is - $21,905/1,700.5 hours = $12.88/hour

Mr. Gaia's is - $31,740/2,562 hours = $12.39/hour

I find it interesting that our wages work out the way they do. A lot of it is his commute and the fact that he takes an hour long lunch. I'm not sure that I think the hour long lunch should necessarily be included since he uses his lunch hour to do shopping and run errands, stuff one of us would have to do anyway, but for the purposes of this exercise, I'll leave it as it is.

Our combined hourly wage is - $53,645/4,262.5 = $12.59/hour

2 comments:

badmomgoodmom said...

"Your money or your life" has the same exercise.

I am very impressed with your honesty. I mentally did the calculation for our family. At first, I was like, whoa, how can they live on so little? But then I factored in the tax bracket and housing costs, and the differences go way down.

Our total tax bite is nearly a third of our income. This sounds great compared to some countries, but they get health care, old age pensions and their kids' educations for their measly 45%. What do we get for our 31%?

Gaia said...

I love "Your Money or Your Life". I'm contemplating checking it out from the library again. I think actually going through this exercise will help me to appreciate the book even more.

It is cheap to live here. We bring home a lot more than the median income for our county. I know I posted our budget some time back and not much has changed (some debt has been repaid, but we've just been putting it toward other debt).

I know what you mean about the tax bite. People say "well Canada takes 50% of your income to taxes to pay for that healthcare". I look at them and say "have you done the math to see how much you're paying in taxes and insurance?" I know that I have and it's well over 50%.