I know, I know, I’m a PF blogger

what am I doing with all this mess? Eh, I got fussy and wanted to have something with a bit of my personality. BoyDucky was nice enough to put up with HOURS of my laboring over the code trying to learn color codes and html to customize this so that it wasn’t too dark to read and my incessant “ok, NOW what do you think? wait wait wait, it’s publishing. ok, now go!” That can get old, fast, but he stuck it out! What a trooper.

January 18, 2007

Operacion Repo!

Seen on the back of a bus yesterday:

Si no puedes pagar, no lo debes comprar!

Ahhh …. truth in any language … !! 🙂

# – Item Might be FSA Eligible

It’s the beginning of the year and time to start or reinforce good financial habits. Remember to save all your receipts from the doctor’s, pharmacist’s, dentist’s, orthodontist’s, or drugstore with any qualifying purchases to claim your FSA money! Most drugstores like Walgreen’s, Longs, Sav-on, etc. will have a handy dandy marker symbol next to the product that most likely qualifies as an FSA purchase, so pay attention to your receipts!

And those receipts will do you no good if you never send them in or use them to track your claims if you use an FSA debit card, so either submit your claims on a regular basis (I try to do them right away so that I don’t forget, and then file them until I have a receipt for the credited amount), or keep an organized file for your reference.

January 13, 2007

Saturday mornings used to be way better

Ugh, I keep trying to post but either work or this thrice be-durned cold keeps getting worse! So here I am, unable to sleep in on a Saturday morning, which is arguably my most favorite thing to do, because I’ve coughed up one lung and am working on the other. Cough? Check. Headache? Check. Tissues up the nose? Check.

How pleasant.

The other thing keeping me up is this post by Mapgirl about her raise and being lowballed by her company. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m really being underpaid for the work I do. I have two years of experience in the job now, and it’s not just your basic, run of the mill, entry level experience. In two years’ time, I’ve taken over quite a spectrum of responsibilities and supposedly impressed both my bosses no end. But I really feel like my raises haven’t reflected that. Or am I expecting too much?

I came into this job with no real experience at all so I know my salary started out around the bottom. Since then, I’ve received a 6% raise in the first year, and a delayed 12% raise at the end of the second year. Even with my bonus, if I run a basic unpersonalized Salary.com check, I don’t even register on their chart for a basic definition of the position I hold. My actual responsibilities are far greater than listed on the site. I mean, I could understand being on the low end because our company is a non-profit and only has about 9 employees, but seriously, I don’t even come CLOSE to registering at the 10th percentile end of the range!

Maybe it’s time to initiate that conversation. Maybe I need to ask how our salaries are determined and how it would be possible for me to earn at least general market value. The Fairness Patrol in my mind always holds me back because I know we’re working under the double constraints of being a non-profit within the structure of a university that lives and dies by their pay grades, but I often wonder why I keep looking out for the company’s interests before mine? It may seem a futile effort that will just create ill-will on Little Boss’s part, but I hope that if I handle it well … well, I just hope I handle it well. Perhaps I need to take the stress out of it by viewing this as a factfinding mission, first.

I always always hate the necessity of trying to negotiate when I don’t feel like the table is even in the room, but I hate feeling ignorant and possibly gypped just as much!! Hello, rock. Hello, hard place. How are y’all doin?

And I wonder if it would be worth the cost of buying an actual personalized Salary.com report?

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