Originally Posted by
ThePenIsMightier
A small update to what essentially started this thread (not that you have been sitting on the edge of your seats, LoL!)
So she has taken the plunge to another job going from (what I thought was) a Contractor to a salaried employee. The screwy thing is that apparently she wasn't really a "contractor" but actually a strange version of "hourly employee". I swore she was a Contractor, but under this weird system she was in, she made $75/hr and got zero benefits of any kind, at all. No vacation and no stat's. Nothing. She was expected to take 5 weeks of vacation a year and with the ~10 stats a full-time year for her was $135k which she was fine with when it was FTE but when it dropped lower, she realized she was exposed to the risk of a Contractor without the benefits because she couldn't fill her time with other clients or have any biz write-offs or pay herself in dividends etc.
Her new salaried employee role is for about 25% less at $102k in terms of salary. But now she gets up to 5% RRSP matching, 4 weeks vacation, flex spending (tiny), travel insurance, all sorts of life/LTD/ADD/etc insurances, and reasonable dental for her and her family. Plus the increased "stability" of FTE for as long as that lasts in our complex economy. (For killy - It doesn't look like she's high enough on the totem pole for incentive plans, etc).
So, I think she did reasonably well... not excellent, but certainly decent. If she was FTE at the old place, I could see this being less attractive, but she said she was dropping below 0.75FTE for a few months, so this seems like an easier decision. Would you agree?
The new company considers their benefits plan to be "worth 30%" and I have a tough time with that. There are some intangibles, but I always find myself asking "for every extra $10k someone handed me at my job, how much of it would I spend on bulking up life insurance policies that would vapourize when I quit or retired?" The amount of life insurance in some of these benefits plans is crazy. I think it was Buster that said something like "the only thing that is more money is more money."
So back to the quantifying game, if she was still consistently getting $135k at the first place, would you take the 25% hit for the added benefits and stability? It's a Hell of a lot better than the 30%-40% that some folks were talking about earlier.