Read What Color Is Your Parachute? Online
Authors: Richard N. Bolles
What Color Is Your Parachute? (48 page)
One who works in tandem with one other partner
One who works alone, either as an employee or as a consultant to an organization, or as a one-person business
Enter a two- or three-word summary of your answer, on the Level of Responsibility and Salary petal of your Flower Diagram,
here
.
2. The second question here is what salary would you like to be aiming for?
Here you have to think in terms of minimum or maximum.
Minimum
is what you would need to make, if you were just barely “getting by.” And you need to know this
before
you go in for a job interview with anyone
(or before you form your own business, and need to know how much profit you must make, just to survive).
Maximum
could be any astronomical figure you can think of, but it is more useful here to put down the salary you realistically think you could make, with your present competency and experience, were you working for a real,
but generous
, boss. (If this maximum figure is still
depressingly low, then put down the salary you would like to be making five years from now.)
Make out a detailed outline of your estimated expenses
now
, listing what you need
monthly
in the following categories:
3
| Housing | |
| Rent or mortgage payments | $________ |
| Electricity/gas | $________ |
| Water | $________ |
| Telephone | $________ |
| Garbage removal | $________ |
| Cleaning, maintenance, repairs 4 | $________ |
| Food | |
| What you spend at the supermarket and/or meat market, etc. | $________ |
| Eating out | $________ |
| Clothing | |
| Purchase of new or used clothing | $________ |
| Cleaning, dry cleaning, laundry | $________ |
| Automobile/transportation | |
| Car payments | $________ |
| Gas (who knows?) 5 | $________ |
| Repairs | $________ |
| Public transportation ( bus, train, plane ) | $________ |
| Insurance | |
| Car | $________ |
| Medical or health care | $________ |
| House and personal possessions | $________ |
| Life | $________ |
| Medical expenses | |
| Doctors’ visits | $________ |
| Prescriptions | $________ |
| Fitness costs | $________ |
| Support for other family members | |
| Child-care costs ( if you have children ) | $________ |
| Child-support ( if you’re paying that ) | $________ |
| Support for your parents ( if you’re helping out ) | $________ |
| Charity giving/tithe ( to help others ) | $________ |
| School/learning | |
| Children’s costs ( if you have children in school ) | $________ |
| Your learning costs ( adult education, job-hunting classes, etc. ) | $________ |
| Pet care ( if you have pets ) | $________ |
| Bills and debts ( usual monthly payments ) | |
| Credit cards | $________ |
| Local stores | $________ |
| Other obligations you pay off monthly | $________ |
| Taxes | |
| Federal 6 ( next April’s due, divided by months remaining until then ) | $________ |
| State ( likewise ) | $________ |
| Local/property ( next amount due, divided by months remaining until then ) | $________ |
| Tax-help ( if you ever use an accountant, pay a friend to help you with taxes, etc. ) | $________ |
| Savings | $________ |
| Retirement (Keogh, IRA, SEP, etc.) | $________ |
| Amusement/discretionary spending | |
| Movies, video rentals, etc. | $________ |
| Other kinds of entertainment | $________ |
| Reading, newspapers, magazines, books | $________ |
| Gifts (birthday, Christmas, etc.) | $________ |
| Vacations | $________ |
| | |
| Total Amount You Need Each Month | $________ |
Multiply the total amount you need each month by 12, to get the yearly figure. Divide the yearly figure by 2,000, and you will be reasonably near the
minimum
hourly wage that you need. Thus, if you need $3,333 per month, multiplied by 12 that’s $40,000 a year, and then divided by 2,000, that’s $20 an hour.
Parenthetically, you may want to prepare two different versions of the above budget:
one
with the expenses you’d ideally
like
to make, and
the other
a minimum budget, which will give you what you are looking for, here: the floor, below which you simply cannot afford to go.
Enter the maximum, and minimum, on your Level of Responsibility and Salary petal on the Flower Diagram,
here
.
Click
here
to view a PDF version of the Optional Exercise.
The Point of This Step:
To answer this question:
to the degree you have a choice—now or down the line—where would you most like to live?
Why This Is Important for You to Know:
Human beings are like flowers. Our soul flourishes in some environs, but withers and dies—or at least becomes extremely unhappy—in others.
What You Want to Beware Of:
Thinking that where you live is not important. Or thinking, if you have a partner, and you each want to live in different places, that one of you can get their way, but the other is going to have to give up
their
dream. Nonsense! If this were part of a course about Thinking, what would the Lesson be? The subject of the Lesson would be: how can two partners, who initially disagree, learn to agree on a place where both get what they want?
In case you haven’t got a clue, there is an interesting exercise you can do. It begins with your past (
the places where you used to live
), and extracts from it some information that is tremendously useful in plotting your future.
It is particularly useful when you have a partner, and the two of you haven’t yet been able to agree on where you want to live.
1. Copy the chart that follows, onto a larger (
e.g.,
24 by 36-inch) piece of paper or cardboard, which you can obtain from any arts and crafts store or supermarket, in your town or city. If you are doing this exercise with a partner, make a copy for them too, so that each of you is working on a clean copy of your own, and can follow these instructions independently.
2. In
Column 1
, each of you should list all the places where you have ever lived.
3. In
Column 2,
each of you should list all the factors you disliked
(and still dislike) about each place. The factors do not have to be put exactly opposite the name in
Column 1.
The names in
Column 1
exist simply to jog your memory.
If, as you go, you remember some good things about any place, put
those
factors at the bottom of the next column,
Column 3.
If the same factors keep repeating, just put a checkmark after the first listing of that factor, every time it repeats.
Keep going until you have listed all the factors you disliked or hated about each and every place you named in
Column 1.
Now, in effect, throw away
Column 1;
discard it from your thoughts. The negative factors were what you were after.
Column 1
has served its purpose.
4. In
Column 3,
you look at the negative factors you listed in
Column 2
and try to list each one’s opposite. For example, “the sun never shone, there” would, in
Column 3,
be turned into “mostly sunny, all year ’round.” It will not always be
the exact opposite.
For example, the negative factor “rains all the time” does not necessarily translate into the positive “sunny all the time.” It might be something like “sunny at least 200 days a year.” It’s your call. Keep going, until every negative factor in
Column 2
is turned into its opposite, a positive factor, in
Column 3.
At the bottom, note the positive factors you already listed there, when you were working on
Column 2.
