Is this supposed “labor shortage” limited to just certain sectors?
Anecdotal evidence, but holy crap is this the furthest thing from my reality. I’m not super actively looking for a new job, but have put in a few applications to jobs that I am easily qualified for and haven’t gotten anywhere. And the lower level jobs similar to where I started have pay rates that are abysmal and haven’t moved at all in the last few years.
Can’t imagine it applies to $75k+ white collar jobs. I’m guessing it’s mostly blue collar and the service industry. I work in manufacturing and we have raised the base pay quite a bit to attract workers.
I’m white collar, but under that pay level.
But even pay grades significantly lower than me haven’t budged in the university job listings for science positions.
My guess is people in good jobs aren’t really looking as tons and tons of people are thrilled with work from home and have the opportunity to continue doing that, limiting mobility.
Also, lol bosses. Worker productivity is at an all time high with widespread work from home but bosses are still demanding people come into an office so they can try to justify their useless role of “managing people” errrrrr wasting everyone’s time and taking credit for any success.
I think it’s in the white collar world as well, at least a little bit. My firm (“professional services”) has expedited the year-end performance evaluation and raise/bonus process (and is promising good numbers; we’ll know the truth in two weeks) I believe in response to very high turnover over the past year. Even after announcing the earlier and bigger raises we’ve still seen quite a few folks leave.
Today is the two year anniversary of when I became worth nothing! i.e. assets == liabilities. Have added quite bit to the assets column in those two years since, but it’s nice having some milestones like that tracked so I can reflect upon them. I will be drinking an extra fancy beer tonight in celebration.
Doing well at personal finance is incredibly hard!
It is not rewarding at all to max out a 401k when you’re under 40. You can’t even touch the money for at least 20 years, and the balance never seems to grow meaningfully, even when markets are good. It takes a couple decades for the magic of compounding to really kick in.
We all know the math, that $x00 per month invested at 7% return for 30+ years becomes a fuckton of money, but it is so unsatisfying at the beginning. Not to mention, you might die and never spend it, or markets could go full Japan for 20 years.
Oh yeah, you’re also supposed to just somehow deal with not affording a house in a nice neighborhood or having a hard time paying for a family.
Related to this point, I set up a spreadsheet for college savings when we had our first kid 15 years ago. I knew that it was going to be massively expensive to pay for college, with huge error bars around any estimate. But I wanted to have some general sense for roughly how much I should at least try to save.
I made estimates about:
And I found that process to be incredibly helpful in saying “I need to try to set aside this amount each month in a fund that is earmarked for college”. As @Riverman alluded to, it can be very intimidating to save for a tidal wave of tuition costs with small monthly drips of savings. Why even bother? But seeing how those small monthly amounts would grow over the decades really helped me believe that I could save a material amount.
This is a good comment, I think that you need to look at the “drips turning into oceans” data with the right mindset. I think the benefit of doing that work is to make is feel like the little amounts set aside each paycheck actually matter. It’s probably a mistake to look at it regularly because as @Riverman says you’ll get the feeling that you aren’t making progress. However if you don’t do the spreadsheet work you’ll never convince yourself that saving a small amount per paycheck is even worth it. It’s a conundrum.
Wow. You just went full Riverman here.
I put the max 6% match into my 401k. I did this in the beginning and then forgot about it completely until recently. Never even noticed the money missing because I did it from the get-go.
I had this crazy good profit sharing program at my first company where I regrettably contributed the minimum (not like they paid enough to afford to be able to put in more) for almost 15 years. It’s nearly 100k now. Gonna just leave it in there.
I’m 32, and want to retire by 60. I think I’m making good progress but it’s really tough to determine how much I’ll really need. I’m thinking just assume I live to 85 (virtually no chance I live that long). That’s like 2+ million though :/ Anything left goes to kids or charity if I don’t have kids.
Only putting 6% for the match seems kind of low in your situation. Why not the full $19.5k… Unless that is the full amount then GG.
I’m saving at least that much per year - the rest is just going to other places right now. I have a vanguard account a lot of it is going into.
What are the benefits of just dumping 100% of my savings into 401k?
Huge tax benefits. Don’t do taxable investing until you’ve maxed out 401k, Roth (backdoor if necessary) and HSA (if available).
I don’t have any kids but I would probably lean this way if I did. I mean I’d help them out but just straight up paying for college seems weird to me. I think I’d rather give or help them out with a down payment for a house.
For an example of what I’m talking about, here are two jobs on the university website:
Summary: Provide technical and administrative assistance and perform data management functions in support of University research projects. At the direction of the Principal Investigator, curate genomic and neuroimaging datasets.
Minimum requirements: Bachelor’s degree in related field and one to three years’ related experience required.
Desirable qualifications: Familiarity with Unix and shell scripting desirable. Programming background including familiarity with R, python, or specialty neuroimaging software (e.g. AFNI, FSL Freesurfer) or specialty genomics software (e.g. PLINK, MACH) highly desirable.
Summary: We are seeking a manager for maintaining our mouse colony and contributing to molecular and cellular research studies. This position includes breeding mice, weaning, tail biopsy for genotyping, tissue preparation, coordinating the animal research studies with investigators, training and advising new animal users in the laboratory. Responsibilities also include molecular and cellular assays and cell culture studies. The manager will both perform and provide functional supervision for all in vivo experiments by students and lab investigators. Animal care will include anesthesia, analgesia, radiography, drug dosing, and surgical procedures with post-treatment monitoring. Manager also serves as primary contact for all animal-related research, such as ordering mice and necessary supplies for mouse studies and maintaining accurate electronic mouse records.
Minimum requirements: Bachelor’s Degree in animal, biological or biomedical science with three years of related experience that includes animal research experience.
Desirable qualifications: Experience that includes performing mouse genotyping of litters, oral gavage, blood drawing, injections at subcutaneous, intra-peritoneal, mammary fat pad and intra-tibial sites, and molecular and cellular analysis.
Job 1 is listed at about $30k/year. Job 2 is about $35k/year.
While the cost of living here isn’t SF Bay Area or NYC levels, it ain’t cheap either. Housing prices by most estimates are about 30 to 50% above the national average. Minimum wage is $11.75/hour.
Either job would be a pay cut for me, so I’m not even considering them, but I’d be absolutely screwed if I lost my job right now. But if the low level jobs require this much and pay so shitty, I don’t know how I’m ever going to get a bump in pay any time soon.
I haven’t seen a good job market in my field and location in over 15 years.
If you have programming experience with Python you can certainly do better than $35k/yr.
Guessing here that he’s more academic, and those guys get hosed for pay.
I don’t seem to have my original spreadsheet, but I remember ballparking tuition inflation at 5% per year. The version I have right now goes back to 2012, and the inflation since then is running at about a compounded 3.4% per year. (That’s just for the one school I use as a benchmark - the University of Chicago.)
Yup, my current projection for my youngest’s first year in college is $118k. It’s wild.
Edit: Of course I have no idea where my kids are going to go to college and, therefore, how much it will actually cost. I intentionally chose UChicago because it’s a really expensive school, so it’s kind of an upper bound. If I overshoot in saving, it just means I’ll have some extra vacation money. And in shocking news, I’m actually not adequately saved for sending all 3 of my kids to UChicago.
College costs are straight up insane. I would say this can’t continue, but health care is already 1/6 of the entire economy and costs just keep going up up up there, so who knows. Whenever the consumer is divorced from paying, weird shit happens.
It seems legit crazy to go to a private college as an upper middle class kid if you get into an in state public school. $200,000 difference, come on.