I’ve come to a horrifying and fascinating realization: the less you care, the more you get. And this new truth makes me SO mad 🙂 because I care too much. I always have. I’ve always gone above and beyond on school projects…even when I attended a Montessori middle school that didn’t give grades.
I always tried to do more than necessary on my high school projects (that did earn grades) and at times received a perfect score or even 110% for the effort. Recently, in my retired life, a recruiter reached out to me (despite my LinkedIn message saying I am taking time off) and asked me to take on a role ASAP!
And for the first time in my life, because I truly did not care about the role for myself, I had no fear. I didn’t care about what they thought of me. I didn’t worry about how a question would be perceived or if I would be deviating against the standard script. Statistically, in the past, I knew that my race and gender (I’m a black woman) were working against me to get a job and, as a result, when I needed money to pay rent I was scared to push the status quo.
So when this recruiter reached out to me, I didn’t play the game. I just had the interaction I had always dreamed of. And during it I asked point blank: “How much does this position pay?” And to my shock and awe, she told me. I thought “Why didn’t I ask this every time?!”…but I knew the answer: Fear.
This interaction made me think of a similar interaction that happened years ago. It is how I increased my potential salary by $13,000 or 25% with an email. I’ve always tried to push for the appropriate market salary for my position. At times, my only prospect responded “No.” At other times they said “That’s too high” and I refused to budge so we went our separate ways. This story I’m about to tell you taught me that even declared salaries have wiggle room – sometimes a lot of wiggle room 😉 .
The year was 2013. I had two years of work experience under my belt at respected ad agencies working for some of the biggest tech companies in the world…and then I was laid off 🙂 . I was shockingly happy about it because I was getting bored (as I usually did after 6 months or so). So I was thrust back into the job search pool along with a few thousand other people from my company.
At first, I was excited. I had lots of travel lined up and would get to see my far away friends for the first time in years. I also had several interviews scheduled, but would soon discover that everything wasn’t as it seemed. After a month or so, I had a new job with an awesome new boss at a cool, small new company.
But then, after getting a new fancy apartment near Wall Street because it was walking distance to my work, I was laid off again after only 3 weeks. Ah the joys of working in the inherent instability of ad agencies 🙂 . Despite the client agreeing to hire me, they then dropped the bomb that they had decided to leave the entire ad agency…before even meeting me 🙂 . Anyway, at this point I was fed up.
I had gotten what looked like a dream job only to have it snatched out from under me soon after. So I texted my friends and emailed some acquaintances in a “Can you believe this?!” type fashion. I didn’t expect that these ‘blowing off steam’ interactions would lead to a job offer.
But it did. A woman I had had coffee with at my cousin’s recommendation, had become a pretty good friend of mine. She responded to my email with disbelief and then a casual, “Want to work at my agency?” The next thing I knew, the head of HR was offering me an interview for a contract position there. I interviewed and it seemed to go ok.
Then they asked for my terms. The position I was just laid off from paid $65,000 a year, so I asked for the same plus some padding to pay for my own (NYC) health insurance since I would be a contractor. I asked to be paid $65,000 + $13,000 (the health insurance estimate from NYC’s exchange) = $78,000. HR responded saying they had only budgeted $52,000 for the position.
In the end, I asked if we could “meet in the middle” and we agreed to $65,000 a year, which as a contractor, cut into my health insurance premium. However, a month after I started as a contractor, I mentioned that my old boss had asked me to come back to her company (which was true). Suddenly this new company wanted to take me from a contractor to a full-time employee immediately 😉 so I was making $65,000 + benefits and the price was no longer cutting into my bottom line.
So with a simple email, I countered this company’s offer and increased my salary by 25%. Overall, here’s what I’ve learned from this experience:
1. Aim High
I always ask for a higher salary than I actually want. I can’t properly remember the term from my Intro to Psych class in college, but asking for a higher number both allows room for negotiation and makes the other party think they’re getting a deal or in some way ‘winning’ if they get you to agree to a lower number…but they’re not the only one ‘winning’ if that’s what you intended all along 😉 .
However, my “aim high” number is usually not that much higher than what I actually want, so I don’t turn people off who have a similar budget to my goal salary. And if they have way less budget than that, I know that wasn’t the job for me. To find out what a specific position should pay, I use sites like Glassdoor and PayScale.
2. Have A Back Up Plan (aka DGAF)
I can’t actually tell you not to give a fuck since I am so bad at that 🙂 . But, one of the big differences between the situation I described above and my other salary negotiations is that I had a backup plan and that’s why I was so blasé about this interaction.
It didn’t feel like I was begging for a job or even hopeful about it. I literally didn’t care if I got this job. I was planning to take the summer off and enjoy myself before looking for my next position, but instead this opportunity came up and I knew that if they weren’t willing to make it monetarily worth my while, that I had a awesome summer in the sun to look forward to instead 🙂 . Having a backup plan allowed me to not give a fuck about the outcome.
3. Be Willing To Walk Away
When I declared the salary I want in interviews, I often heard that “that’s over our budget” and if they were not willing to budge, I would end negotiations. Friends have told me that this has happened to them, but instead, they still accept the lower pay, even if it’s a decrease from their last position because they need the job and are worried about paying their bills.
This is another great example of why trying to pursue financial independence can be a benefit in any situation. Anyway, because of the savings I have accumulated throughout my career and my knowledge of how to quickly get another job, I have never compromised and accepted less than market rate for a position.
So like all other similar situations in the past, I expected “that’s over our budget” to be the end of this discussion, but instead because of my DGAF status, we reached an agreement that was $13K or 25% higher than their original offer 🙂 . I was willing and even happy to walk away and as a result received more money than I was expecting.
Conclusion
There are so many things that I’ve learned over my career that I wish I had known in the beginning, but I am also aware that even if I knew them (such as the tips above) that I probably wouldn’t have used them. It took slowly being in a more stable financial position and seeing that I was damn good at my job and could easily find another one to have the confidence to put these things into practice. It’s been a long road, but I’m happy where it ended up 😉 .
Have you negotiated a higher salary for a position? If so, how did you do it?
I appreciate this post. As a Black woman myself, I’ve always struggled to ask for more than what’s offered at my jobs. That comes from feeling like I should be happy that I even got a seat at the table, and not wanting to push the limit. The job search is more difficult for me already, so I often sell myself short. Add to this, I work in the k-12 education system, a system that rationalizes not paying adequately because it’s women-dominated. So even if I am upfront, I am afraid of the BS response I’ve heard used so often on my peers, “don’t you care about the kids? It’s not about the money, it’s about them!”. It’s frustrating. If I could go back in time, I’d tell my college self not to go into education, sad but true.
The only time I effectively negotiated was when I already had a job, so if I didn’t get this one, I’d still be fine. I think HR feels the difference between desperate energy and self-assured energy, and they respond in kind. My goal this year is to meet with HR and at the very least attempt to negotiate a raise. In the FI community we talk about side hustles so much, but if we just did our 9-5’s well and asked for promotions, we could instantly make tens of thousands more without doing any more work!
Ugh that sounds like a horrible negotiation environment – I’m sorry. “It’s about the kids”…seriously?! It’s not if the teachers can’t pay their bills! That’s interesting about desperate vs self-assured energy. Love the goal – let me know how it goes!
And I totally agree – I’ve never had a side hustle myself and just job hopped and negotiated to increase my salary. It can take years to see any ‘fruit’ from a side hustle and it’s not guaranteed. I much prefer being paid more for similar work and having my evening hours be my own 😉 .
Great advice Purple, and so few people actually do this. It constantly amazes me that while you and I come from such different backgrounds we learned a lot of the same tricks in the corporate world and used them to our advantage. I was in a field that was way undersupplied for most of my career. So I got offers frequently, maybe once a month or more to go to a similar job for more money. I loved my job but I’d pass on what other companies thought I was worth. Not confrontationally, just providing them facts they could use to decide what to pay me. I racked up raises frequently that way. I was a white male so I didn’t have those unfair invisible barriers that you did, but I realized that it was still a high stakes game. But if a company wanted to fire me because I knew what the market paid, well I didn’t want to work for a company like that anyway. Great post as usual!
Yeah – fear is a powerful thing 🙂 . It held me back a lot personally. And yeah that’s awesome we came to the same conclusions and super cool you used those offers to get raises at the job you already had! Thank you 🙂 .
Good thoughts. Each time I’ve tried to negotiate, I’ve gotten a no but I work in healthcare and I’ve gotten a lot of “well this is what we pay people for x experience so…” and I admit, I wanted the job so I let it go.
I am “gaming” the system a little bit in that they give raises based on your performance evaluation and compa-ratio. Not sure if you’ve heard of a compa-ratio (I hadn’t before I took my job) but they compare your salary on a scale and years of experience. So someone who is brand new out of college would get paid at 80% range whereas someone who comes in with 5-10 years experience would be at the 100%. Your raises are higher if your compa-ratio is lower, if that makes sense. I’m at the 101% now (started at the 90% when I joined the company) and if I get the top rating then I get a 5% pay raise. But once I get past 107% I only get a 4% pay raise with the top rating and just a 3% if I get the leading performance rating or the regular solid rating.
Basically if I just do my job I’ll always get “solid” rating (i.e. 3%) so I’m leveraging getting “top” ratings now until I get to the 107%. This will take a couple of years (they also adjust the salary by about 2% each year for inflations, so if I get a 5% pay raise I only go up 3% on the compa-ratio scale).
My feeling is- more work and raises now = more money later overall in my career. Which seems a bit odd to talk with someone who has broken free from the workforce, lol. But I think that’s what great about FI is that we all have our own unique circumstances. I love reading about your life even though it’s very different than mine. My FI plan is to get enough $$ to move down to a 0.6 FTE position. This works out to 1×24 hour shift per week. 4 days of work a month for full benefits and a decent salary are golden handcuffs I’m not quite ready to break free from yet, lol.
Awesome job gaming the system and I love the plan! You do you 🙂 . And thank you for explaining how your compensation works – I had no idea!
I did this! I was making 60k as a team member and was asked to apply to be the team manager, even though I didn’t really want to go into management and didn’t really respect the person I’d be reporting to. But the team manager was leaving and they needed a replacement.
When I applied, the portal asked my range and I said 75-85, and then they offered me the job at 70. I replied that my stated range was 75-85, and they eventually offered me 75. This was a CHEAP ASS software company in the bay area that notoriously underpaid for the region and the industry. I felt like a BOSS getting a 25% raise for a job I didn’t even want.
I kept the job for maybe 2 years before changing roles and then leaving the company altogether, but that was a big step on my path to making 6 figures.
THAT’S AMAZING!!! Also awesome job reminding them of your state range after they ignored it 😉 .
I said it on Twitter but I’ll say it again here. It’s so important to not care in negotiations as the one who cares more usually loses. These days, if a recruiter reaches out to me, I directly ask them what the salary is. If they refuse to say, I move on. If they say and it doesn’t meet my standards, I move on.
The power of not caring is amazing!
It is indeed amazing. I just wish I knew how to not care when I was still working 😉 .
When I was job searching — getting out of gov — I told the HR person at Company 1 what my salary requirement was. Which was market value (gov was underpaid) and a raise of more than $10K. They asked what I was getting paid in gov though which I did tell them. Then they offered me like $2K more than my gov salary… for waaay less in terms of benefits. I was so mad I literally almost hung up on the HR rep when she made the offer… I didn’t quite hang up though so when I got a competing offer I used Company 1 to work Company 2 up to an above-market offer because Company 1 was dead in my book regardless. Another recruiter from Company 1 called me a couple of years later and I explained that I would need a 20% raise to even consider them which they wouldn’t meet and it saved everyone some time.
Ugh I’m sorry that happened, but am so happy to hear you worked it in your favor. One of my rules is that I never told anyone how much I used to make. The question is now illegal in NY state because it help perpetuate the gender and racial pay gap. And woohoo on saying what you want upfront and saving everyone time 😉 .
Hi Purple,
Great, timely article. I currently have a job in HR. It’s the best job I’ve had with a great company but I could not shake the feeling that I am underpaid – 75k. I started looking for a job that would finally earn me the salary that I want for the work I’m doing. They offered me more than I asked for today. I still can’t believe it. I got a 40k base increase w/ 17k bonus potential. It was your journey that has inspired me to not settle. I’m so glad I found this blog last year.
I’m hoping this will be the job I retire early from. I start on the 8th! Thanks for all that you share. Wish me luck!
Symonne
Hi Symonne – That’s AMAZING!!! It warms my heart to hear that so thank you for telling me 🙂 . Good luck!
I did at my current job! I was working with a recruiter and when she offered me the jobs, I said I’d like to make X, $10k more. She seemed shocked and I was the one nudging her to ask for me, reminding her my interviews went well. Long story short she got me the extra coins and yesterday when I got promoted and they upped my salary by 10%, all I could think about is how much money I would have left on the table had I started at the lower salary
That’s amazing!! Congratulations on your new promotion and salary 🙂 !
It’s funny how just not caring can be construed (and perhaps misconstrued?) as confidence. You’re right though, one of those secret tricks to life is realizing that not caring—however paradoxical it might seem—is a way to overachieve and get what you want.
You certainly free yourself from a label that can really drive a wedge between what you want and yourself: being a tryhard. That’s something people can identify and see from a distance. And when they do, it makes them question why…are they covering something up?
Not caring disarms other people. It lets them relax a little too. Instead of questioning you, they accept you’re being real.
And they’re real too.
Congrats. 🙂
That’s an interesting way to look at it 🙂 .
It’s become hard to care about a new job since being FIRE, because all jobs now pay something that isn’t actually that interesting. They all take away time, something that is finite, versus giving money which is something we already have.
The sole purpose to look at a job now, is either because the money being paid really moves the needle (unlikely, since why would someone pay you 2-3x more when you aren’t in the job market anymore), or because the job is super interesting, and basically aligned with something you would do for free. Surprise, most to all jobs I’ve found that I could actually do, don’t seem that interesting…
So the conundrum, I’ve got a lot of free time, and finding something that is super interesting or pays 2-3x to be well rewarding is becoming a difficult task =)
Yeah it would take a ridiculous amount of money paired with a unicorn job situation to get me back into it and I’ve never seen those two things co-exist so I think I’m home free 😉 .
I too suffer somewhat from caring too much.
It seems almost foolish or unnatural to not care about something you are going to commit your time too, but it does seem to be the case that this is usually the type of behaviour that will actually pay off.
In a given situation, I’ve noticed that typically the person who is most invested in something, will come off worse because of it. (which goes back to caring too much).
Strange one but I would like to be able to have a bit more of this approach in the future; it’s blatantly beneficial!
It does seem unnatural to mea as well, but sadly it is regarded so I wish I didn’t care as much haha. Good luck!