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Money
Sources of Money
| Start | Stop | What | How Much
|
|---|
| spring 2012 | present
| programming at Google
|
| salary | 4/2012- | $105k annualized
| | | 1/2013- | $110k annualized
| | | 6/2013- | $125k annualized
| | | 1/2014- | $129k annualized
| | | 1/2015- | $138k annualized
| | | 1/2016- | $149k annualized
| | | 6/2016- | $159k annualized
| | donation matching | 2012 | $12k
| | | 2013 | $12k
| | | 2014 | $6k
| | | 2015 | $6k
| | bonus | 2012 | $3k
| | | 2013 | $16k
| | | 2014 | $28.2k
| | | 1/2015 | $24.5k
| | | 1/2016 | $30.7k
| | oncall | 2012 | $0.5k
| | | 2013 | $2.4k
| | | 2014 | $2.6k
| | 401k match | 2012 | $8k
| | | 2013 | $8.5k
| | | 2014 | $8.5k
| | | 2015 | $9k
| | stock
| 2013 | $68.9k
| | | 2014 | $65k
|
As of 2014-12-31 total compensation received has been
$527k over 32 months which annualizes to $198k/year.
Plus they pay ~90% of my and Julia's health insurance
and give me lots of free food.
|
| fall 2010 | spring 2012
| programming at CogoLabs
| $67k (2010-2011), $72k (2011-2012)
+ $15k in bonus total
+ 734 shares equity I value (risk-neutrally) at about $40k.
(As of 2012-12-11 my shares of CogoLabs are still hard to do
anything with.)
Plus they paid ~90% of my and Julia's health insurance, and paid
for my T-pass.
|
| fall 2008 | fall 2010
| programming at BBN
| $65k (2008), $67k (2009), $71k (2010)
+ approximately 20% more in bonuses and matching 401k contributions.
Plus they paid ~90% of my and Julia's health insurance, and paid
for my T-pass.
|
| summer 2008 | -
| dishwasher at pinewoods
| $250/week plus room and board
|
| senior year | -
| student work | 20hr/week @ $8.56/hr
|
| junior summer | -
| work as billing tech | 40hr/week @ $12/hr
|
| junior year | -
| student work | ~15hr/week @ $8.01/hr
|
| sophmore year | -
| student work | ~10hr/week @ $7.56/hr
|
| freshman year | -
| student work | ~10hr/week @ $7.20/hr
|
| 9th grade | 12th grade
| allowance | $10/week
|
| 2nd grade | 8th grade
| allowance | $1/week
|
Donations
See the donations page.
Thinking about money over time
Intuitive Saving
From when I was about 8 and started getting a $1 a week allowance
from my parents, through graduation of college, my basic approach
was saving. I remember trading in my saved singles for a $5, and
then a $20, and then a $100. I basically kept all of it. I
followed the same approach with Halloween candy, where I would save
it for a special occasion that never came until it went bad or my
sisters snuck in and ate it. My parents were paying for food,
housing, education, health-care, and clothing, so pretty much
everything left was optional.
In college I started paying part of my tuition. Only about
$800/semester, but the amount that the financial aid people expected
to come from me. I still had no independent expenses. Then, near
the end of sophomore year, I started going to a lot of contra
dances. I didn't really consider money in this. Admission to
dances, as well as travel to them pretty quickly became my largest
expense after my share of tuition. I continued to have enough
money, but not so much as to be unsure of what to do with it.
The summer before my last year of college and then during senior
year I was working more but not spending more and so had more left
over. I wasn't sure what to do with it, but then I learned that
Julia had student loan debt. So money went to pay that off. Later
that year I realized that I ought to pay back the student loan debt
my parents had taken on in my name. So I started paying that back,
finishing in early 2009.
My automatically holding on to money had by then come around to a
'reasoned' justification for the same behavior: I did not want debt,
and I didn't want to be a burden to others, so I would save all I
could against future need. While this 'need' was primarily my own,
I also wanted to be able to help friends or family members if
they needed money.
Julia's Influence
Also in 2008 I was needing to pay more attention to how to deal with
that Julia and I were getting married and would presumably be
combining finances. Julia's view was:
- There are people in extremely poor circumstances.
- Valuing yourself and those around you over those you've never
met may seem natural but is immoral.
- So giving away any money not needed to survive is the moral
decision.
At the time I wasn't convinced in this direction and was mostly
concerned with trying to figure out how I could practically live with someone who wanted to donate much
more than I did and how I could keep Julia's approach from
making her very unhappy. (The amount of money needed to survive is a
pretty low bar.) This led to a financial compromise:
- All money Julia earned would be hers to do what she wanted
with, which would mean donating.
- All money Jeff earned would go to supporting the two of us,
with most of the rest saved.
- We would each have $30/week of discretionary spending, which
was to cover all optional expenses, such as clothes and
entertainment. This money could not be saved or donated.
It could be used to buy presents, but only for people known
personally.
The prohibition on donation of discretionary spending was to keep
Julia from feeling guilty about spending it. We've been using it
for about four years now, as of 2012-09-18, and it seems to be working
well.
Donating
In December 2008, after talking with Julia for months and reading
some of Peter Singer's writing,
I decided to give away half of what I make. At the end of 2009
after seeing how much of our money was going to taxes I decided to
lower that fraction to 1/3 of my income. The question of how much I
am morally obligated to give is one that I am not sure on, and if I continue to earn
more money I'll probably raise the fraction again.
Last modified by Jeff Kaufman: Tue Jun 7, 2016