Over at CBS MoneyWatch, Stacey Bradford describes hearing a stranger boast that he has too much money and not enough time to spend it.
Anyone besides me want to smack that guy two or three times?
Startled by this casual braggadocio, Bradford consulted an etiquette expert and was told that no, you really shouldn’t talk about what you earn. Or about how much you spent on your car, earned on your home sale, lost/gained on your investment portfolio or shell out each year to the private schools your kids attend.
A couple of the commenters didn’t agree. One suggested that salary secretiveness could be considered “crass” and that the “level of detail you provide” should be based on the relationship you have with the listener.
Another reader said that if there is “a perception that you are doing well financially” and you don’t want to talk about money, “people think you’re rude or snobbish.”
Is there no such thing as privacy any longer? Are we required to tell everything?
Myself, I’d sooner talk about my sex life than my salary – and I believe that either one would be an overshare.
Generational, or just good manners?
Maybe it’s because I’m in my 50s and am thus of a different generation than our current tell-all culture. I was raised not to talk about money and certainly never to brag about what you have.
As for it being “rude or snobbish” not to talk about your success: That’s the listener’s issue, not mine. I’m supposed to divulge personal information to make someone else feel better? Sorry. I won’t do that.
I’m told that young people are increasingly open about sharing salary info. The theory is that you don’t know what you’re worth unless you hear what other people are earning.
The corollary, I suppose, is that when you find out what Joe two desks down is getting you may feel either (a) incredibly irritated or (b) emboldened enough to ask for a raise.
Quick aside: A site called Get Raised will tell you whether you’re being shortchanged. It uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, regionally specific job listings and other info to give you the answer for free. (It will also sell you a “custom raise request” for $20, with the promise to refund your money if you don’t get your salary hike within six months of asking.)
My net worth is MINE, not yours
More than a few people have asked how much I earned for writing the Living With Less column over at MSN Money. My response is a polite, “I don’t discuss my salary.”
Usually that takes care of it. Occasionally a clueless human will burble, “Why not?”
My reply is along the lines of “I earn it and pay taxes on it, so I’m the only person besides Uncle Sam who needs to know about it.”
No one has taken it beyond that point. If it ever happens, my reply might be “I won’t bore you with the details of my personal finances” or the old reliable “I’ll forgive you for asking that question if you’ll forgive me for not answering.”
And if the questioning continued? I might just have to say, “That is none of your business. Let’s talk about religion or politics.”
Yes, a lot of PF bloggers routinely post net worth statements. That doesn’t mean I have to follow suit.
Personal finance is exactly that: personal. No one needs to know what I earn or how much my 401(k) lost in the crash. It’s bad enough that people can Google my home address. I don’t want to give away any additional details of my private life.
That is, unless you’re willing to pay my taxes. At that point we can talk business.
Related reading:
- What do we want to be? A few thoughts on labor.
- 4 ways to think about money.
- Think you’re broke? You probably aren’t.
- The (financial) monster under the bed.
When speaking with strangers, I follow your suit and don’t disclose my salary.
However — and this wasn’t at all what your post was about, but I feel like sharing — I do think it’s essential to “talk money” with my (someday-to-exist) children. When I was growing up, my parents operated under the assumption that discussing finances was uncouth. As a result, I grew up knowing very little about my parents’ financial situation. Looking back, it would have been quite useful to hear about the intricacies of their mortgage or business loans. (Whether I would have enjoyed such discussions at the time is another matter entirely.) I’m sure a mention of their respective salaries at the time would have factored into such a discussion, and I don’t see any problem with a disclosure in that sort of situation.
Anyway, this all goes to say that I agree with you, when dealing with strangers. Great post, per usual!
@Charlotte: Funny — that’s a topic I cover in my upcoming Living With Less column over at MSN Money, “things kids need to know before they leave the nest.” Parents need to let their kids know not just what is earned, but how it’s spent. The problem with money is that it’s become pretty much invisible.
I’ll post the URL when it runs.
Thanks for reading, and for leaving a comment.
Bravo, Donna! Well put. I also agree with Charlotte and you about sharing info with kids. I never had a clue what my parents made. Money was/is in someways a very touchy subject with my extended family, as in ‘when so and so passed on, who got how much/what.’ Totally tacky in my opinion, but wow, did it cause some hard feelings.
In our family unit (parents/kids) we discuss earnings, savings, and expenditures. I don’t want my immediate family to be in a situation that if something happened to me, they had no clue of our financial affairs.
Love the post. I don’t necessarily agree with not letting your children not know what the family income is however. Do agree that they should know how it is spent. The best birthday gift my parents gave to me and my siblings was that on our 13th birthday we spent the entire year paying the bills with Dad. He would bring home his check and lay out the bills and we would have to figure out how to spend it on who. We’d make a list for the payees, Mom & Dad would go over it . Dad would carfully explain the concequenses of our list and then suggest corrections. After everything on the list was either agreed to or pushed back to another pay period, We would write out the checks & envelopes, Mom & Dad would sign them , and it was our responsibilty to get the right check into the correct envelope and mail them. It did teach us that money does not grow on trees . : )
I worked in the corporate world for 3 decades, and one of the ways they would keep us in line was this taboo against discussing salaries with one another. I could have been doing the same job as the fellow int he next cubicle, and doing it just as well or better, but he might be making 20% or 30% or 50% more than I was making. I had no way to know.
If I were a public servant, I’d have to come to terms with the fact that my paycheck is publicly funded. But I’m not, and it isn’t. It’s my bidness.
Once a PF blogger asked what I earned because he was thinking of bringing on staffers to do a couple of posts each month and he wondered what he should pay them. But this was comparing apples to oranges in a big, big way. I have a quarter of a century of professional writing experience (newspapers, magazines) and was at that time writing three pieces per week for the MSN Money Smart Spending blog. Additionally, I was responsible for reading five partner blogs and pulling guest pieces, and for running the Smart Spending message board (which I still do), and for tromping around the blogosphere to leave comments in order to promote Smart Spending.
Would it have helped him at ALL to know what I earned? Nope. Completely different animal. Also: No one’s business but mine.
@Funny: When I worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer a new reporter was brought in from another big paper. One day she unwisely left her paycheck — her OPENED paycheck — on her desk. Some snoopy co-worker peeked inside the envelope and the fertilizer hit the ventilator. She was making a lot more than some of the other reporters. The thing is, they’d courted HER and apparently she asked for a lot and apparently she got it.
I don’t have a beef with discussing salaries — I just don’t want to be EXPECTED to discuss money. Everyone else, from PF bloggers to the guy who delivers my newspaper, is free to talk about it all day long.
Thanks for all the input, folks.
I don’t mind seeing income/net worth etc. info from anonymous bloggers.
My salary is public information. Anybody can look it up by calling specific state libraries. Very few people do. Recently someone sent around a spreadsheet making that info easily accessible and I see that if I got an outside offer I could probably boost my salary 20-30K based on what my colleagues who have done that are getting.
Like Sharon, I do think it is important for people in the same workplace or same field to be able to discuss salary openly. I do discuss salary ranges with the women in my graduating class of graduate school. It is helpful to know what salary level various schools start at and if I need to go on the market because I’m relatively underpaid (currently I am, but I will put it off for a few years). I also know which small liberal arts colleges pay reasonable salaries and which are not worth even thinking about. There are surveys that give average salary information, but they’re only relevant as a floor because of our educational background.
My mother was benefited when someone looked at the salaries in her department and found that all of the women were making considerably less than all of the men. It is easier to discriminate in silence. (I remember first reading about this happening in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn… and think if Lily Ledbetter had found out about the discrimination against her in time to sue… there might not be a Lily Ledbetter act.)
I can see why someone would like to know how much a columnist gig pays. I bet many people would be happy with the answer that, “from my knowledge, columnists can receive $0 to $X, and are paid piece rate/salary, etc.” They ask about the specific income but are more interested in the general information even though they don’t realize it.
So I dunno, I don’t discuss my salary in polite company, or even on my blog (other than the admission that I do not make 6 figures… I may have even said I make less than my much younger baby sister who doesn’t have any post-college degrees), and especially not with people with humanities PhDs… but I do think the subject is not and should not be completely taboo.
I’m with Nicole on this. The whole idea that it’s bad manners to talk about money feels Victorian to me. You know, at one time discussing food was considered bad manners — any part of the alimentary process was regarded as gross. People from generations not far by-gone would be shocked at today’s open and exuberant talk of recipes, diets, and good eating. What we think is low-class to discuss is a cultural matter, and it changes over time.
My salary also is public knowledge. As long as I was working for GDU, all you had to do is walk into the library and ask to see the state budget. My salary was listed, right next to my name. The Arizona Republic published much of this information, and it still resides on the Repulsive’s online site. And anyone who asks will know that adjunct community college faculty earn $2,400 per class, with no benefits. If one’s salary is private, why should municipal, state, and federal employees be subjected to an invasion of privacy, by law?
Whether you’re in public or private service, it’s crucial to know what your counterparts are earning. When you’re working in the dark, you have no way of negotiating a better salary.
Semi-Demi-Exboyfriend was a multi-award-winning investigative journalist. He came to Arizona, cutting short a very promising career and taking a job at the Republic, to care for his ailing father, who needed to live in a relatively warm climate. At the paper, everyone genteelly avoided discussing each others’ salaries. SDXB, however, expected to earn a living wage — something rarely seen in these parts — and so every time he would win another award or go in for another glowing annual review, he would ask for a raise.
When the Guild tried to organize the Republic, his colleagues discovered, to their amazement, that he was the highest-paid reporter in the paper’s history. Old-timers were horrified to learn that despite years of service and their own award-winning work, they were earning a fraction of what he earned.
The reason they were earning that fraction? Because they were too polite to compare notes and had no idea either what their coworkers here and on other metropolitan dailies were earning for the same work or what they should have been paid for their work.
And as Nicole points out, discrimination thrives in silence. When women don’t know what men earn for the same skills and the same pay, they have no idea what they’re worth in the marketplace. IMHO, to this day that is one reason women still earn less than men.
For that matter, it’s a major reason–possibly the main reason–freelancers are underpaid. Who KNOWS what a fair rate of pay is? What we do know is that inexperienced, and sometimes even more experienced, freelance writers and editors will work for peanuts. I had a client who expected me and my business partner to take a contract for pay that worked out to less than minimum wage…and she found someone who would do it. Maybe if that someone had a clue what her skills were worth, she would have held out for a decent rate of pay — and all of us would earning a living wage from our contract work.
My salary is public information, and anyone hired close to the same time as I was earns about the same amount (in my district, not in the field overall), so it’s not a big deal to me to talk about my salary.
What I charge for personal training is on my website, though that’s not actually what I earn per session (see: taxes and overhead).
There are so many people with financial difficulties. I think we might be a little better off if we were more open about what we earn. It would take the edge off of the “keeping up with the Joneses” I think, since it would be more obvious when people are living within their means. If I knew which of my friends was making a killing in the stock market (haha), I would know who to talk to for advice in that regard.
(I think the same is true about sex, FWIW — an openness to a degree about what is really going on would make a lot of people feel a lot more normal.)
Hi, Donna! Many salaries are public information now, and not just those in public service. If you go to Guidestar.org and do a search for any registered nonprofit in the U.S., for example, you can usually get their latest 990, which is the extensive tax return they must submit to the IRS each year. Generally the most recent ones are about 2 years behind, but the important thing is that they must include the salaries of their highest paid employees and whatever compensation they give their board members for service. With some of the largest organizations you can get the salaries of at least the executive staff and management.
I agree that the salary taboo is antiquated, but more importantly, I also think that it’s been historically used to control labor. By making it seem like a horrible breach of etiquette, it reinforces the silence that keeps wage laborers from determining and therefore earning their worth. Now, granted, one can make the argument that salaries are more than just about titles and responsibilities — two people may have the same VP title in the same company, but one has an MBA and more seniority and therefore “deserves” more — but on the other hand, if they really do have the exact same responsibility, then one could argue that in a merit-based society, they should have the same salary as well.
Women in particular have been hurt by these outdated notions of money being “crass” and inappropriate subjects of conversation. If we can’t learn from each other, then how can we help each other succeed? I love what Nell Merlino is doing with her “Make Mine a Million” project, encouraging women to get over this notion that somehow wanting more money, more security, more financial success, is unfeminine. Men have been networking and sharing financial tips and advice for millenia — why can’t we do the same?
Having said that, I can also understand if someone doesn’t want to disclose their personal financial information. I would never ask someone their salary, nor would I ever push for that information. I do, however, discuss money and revenue and business financials with my mentors/informal “board members.” They’ve been wonderful about being supportive and inspiring me to be more money-savvy in my business.
Cheers,
Marjorie
@Marjorie: I like the idea of those programs because it’s true that people can be vastly underpaid if they don’t know what they’re worth. Networking or professional sharing of info is great as long as it’s voluntary.
Five years ago I had the chance to edit a privately published diary and had no idea what to charge. I called a friend who is a professional freelance writer and asked for advice. She said, “If you charge a penny under $50 an hour I’ll never speak to you again.” She at the time was making $75 an hour to edit but had more experience than I did. It seemed like way too much but I asked for it and I got it. Left to my own devices, who knows what I would have gotten?
Recently a friend of mine recently had the chance to edit a textbook and was going to ask for $25 an hour. I said, “Ask for $100 an hour.” [No, no, that’s too much! They’ll show me the door!] “All right, then. Ask for $75.” [I’ll ask for $50, but that still sounds like too much.] “Trust me: Ask for $75. They can always beat you back down to $50.” With great trepidation my friend proposed $75 an hour — and got it, instantly. I said, “They’re probably saying, ‘Whew! We thought we were going to have to pay $125!'”
I am enjoying all this feedback, folks. Keep it coming!
I totally agree! I was also raised knowing that it’s rude to discuss your salary or ask others how much they make. I’m 31 and still feel this way. It just doesn’t matter to me, and not only that, but people will make assumptions if they know how much or how little you make. Just because a job might pay well, doesn’t mean you have a lot of money. I knew a woman who was always talking about big purchases, or how much they got back on their tax return, whatever. It drove me nuts. For one, I didn’t care, and second it was like she was bragging. I’m not friends with her anymore.
I have a friend who lived in Montreal and he seemed to say it was normal there to share such details, but it’s not where I am from. Maybe where I am from it’s rude, but not in other parts of Canada (or USA).
I think the big etiquette problem is if it is being used for purposes of bragging or to show someone’s worth. That is not acceptable in polite society no matter the measure (body size, sexual prowess, IQ score etc. etc. etc.)
For informational purposes, in the context of fair compensation (as talked about earlier) or whether it is worth pursuing a new career (a reader may not be as cool as Donna Freedman YET, but he may aspire to her heights someday) etc. That’s not really about bragging or judging, it’s about information gathering.
I think that’s the big difference. With etiquette we aspire to never make the other party feel uncomfortable (unless they deserve it…).
“We aspire never to make the other party feel uncomfortable (unless they deserve it)” — ha! I like that.
And I agree that bragging about one’s salary, or one’s IQ, is uncouth.
ICAM with Donna. Bragging about one’s salary and/or IQ, is uncouth.
And no way would I EVER tell my kids what I make. Then again, I also would never tell them who I voted for. They should vote for who(m) they want to. NOT for who(m) I did. I detest the sheep mentality that is prevalent in our country.
Hmm, my mind is swirling now. There are so many layers to this thought. First, I wish my parents would have discussed money with me in more detail, and I wish I would have done a better job of sharing details and educating my own children about money.
I once went to work for a company that a friend of mine had worked for. She had been there several years before me and when we compared salaries she discovered I made several thousand dollars per year more than her. She asked how I managed that and I said I negotiated for it. We found out she had never promoted herself to the district and regional managers while I went to my interview telling them what an assett I would be. It worked.
Details are not neccesary unless we want to share. It seems rude to just email someone and ask what they make. However, some good points were raised in above comments about wage inequities.
They have a sign in the hallway where I work that says people caught discussing their pay rate will be terminated. I find this funny because the paychecks come in loose in one big envelope and I hand them out so I know what everyone makes.
I agree that it’s nobody else’s bidness but my own if I don’t want to discuss my salary. HA! Not quite sure what to call it nowadays, it seems more like an insult. Excuse me, where was I?
The one time I made the mistake of telling a co-worker how much I made (she’d been a close friend for several years when I came to work at the same company), she raised HELL about it with our boss and proceeded to treat me like manure. It ruined our friendship. Of course, I realize now it was no big loss but at the time I was devastated. Several months later, she left for another job and I never saw here again.
Anyway, I don’t get into salary specifics with co-workers anymore. If it caused morale problems for management, I’d get fired at my current company. My employer before this one fired people for salary discussions. Saw it happen right before my eyes during my first year. That particular company no longer exists. Boo hoo. ;oD
Consider this: the cost of living varies quite a bit from one community to the next.
We had moved to Monroe MI from another town only an hour away, but found family / household expenses here to be a completely different formula than what we were used to. We found less income taxes, more property taxes, higher car insurance, higher rent, higher home prices, more retail stores close by where one can shop for bargains, and more free and low-cost community services.
If my relatives and friends who live an hour away have such a different set of parameters to work with, I can’t expect anybody except the local readers to understand the local cost of living.
So, I don’t discuss my exact finances on my blog. There’s no point.
Interesting topic, and one that we’ve hotly debated around our office for years.
I’m actually the Lead Scientist over at GetRaised.com (the ones that Donna nods to as giving you your salary – we use BLS data as well as a mashup of open local job postings and user data), which is really code for “behavioral psychologist”, which we just don’t put on my card because it scares people. =]
I actually got the “discussing salary” question a lot in relation to our previous company, JustThrive.com. Many people asked us to include a feature that would allow them to compare their income to others, and internally within the team, we discussed it often. Ultimately, I decided not to take the product in that direction for one simple reason: according to all the evidence that we have from psychology, comparing salaries really just ends up making people miserable.
Social comparison is, in general, a losing game. If you compare and find yourself lacking (which most people do, as the tendency is to compare upwards: to select people that you are making less than, rather than your peers or people who are making less), it is obvious why that might make you feel unhappy. Some have argued that provides motivation to act and to pursue higher salary, but given that above a relatively low threshold, more money does not bring much additional happiness, that doesn’t seem like a worthwhile pursuit.
This discussion is actually part of what led us to create GetRaised, which breaks the rule we made at Thrive. But for a very specific reason:
Knowing your salary in relation to others is critical to getting a raise. When we talk about “market rate”, we imply that other people, collectively, are making around a certain amount of money. And that’s the benchmark we use for changing your compensation.
That said, there is a big difference between knowing your market rate in general, and knowing what specific peers make. And having a private compensation conversation with your boss is a whole lot different than having a public one with your friends.
And one of the important reasons that we use market rates is specifically for women. In general, according to a number of studies, women don’t know their market rate nearly as well as men tend to, and they ask for raises much less often. Part of helping women ask for raises, and closing the wage gap between men and women, is showing them in as strong a way as possible that they are underpaid. We try to do it in a way that isn’t about comparison, but about information, and we’re always looking for new ways to discourage social comparison, but it is a risk we’re willing to run to narrow the gender wage gap with GetRaised.
So here’s my rule of thumb, backed up by psychology: the only people that should know your salary are the ones that need to know (coincidentally, the ones that discourage comparison and keeping up with Dick and Jane). Significant other, boss, kids that are old enough to understand and participate in family finances, the IRS, and that’s really about it. Know your market rate, but don’t dwell on it – trust me when I say that there are much better things to do!
I think we have a society now that overshares. I was raised to not “tell all your business”. Im not very old but was raised by an old school mom. I hear all sorts of info at work. Its crazy.
I think I’ve been doing accounting and tax for so long that I’ve become immune to the taboos that other people seem to have about discussing money. Pretty much anybody that can run a G/L in the company I’m working for now knows how much I make – and I’m sure that whoever does know tells everyone else who doesn’t. That stuff used to bug me when I was younger, not so much anymore.
Amongst my friends and colleagues (when I’m not in a managerial position), we often talk about how much each other is making and how much others make – and how we can make more. If one’s making more than another, it’s not bragging, it’s a statement of fact. Well, unless they’re saying “nyah, nyah I make more than you do” – which is something I’ve never heard of in almost 30 years of working. 🙂
With regards to my friends that earn more than I do, I’m not jealous of them and I think the only time I compared and felt badly was when I wasn’t making what I could have. It was a good push for me to earn more. As far as my friends who make a ton? I’m happy that they’ve been rewarded for their hard work. But also grateful that only one of them is making 7 figures. 😉
It seems to me that an aversion to other people knowing your salary means that your value as an individual is tied to your money. My salary is what it is and I don’t view it as a measure of self worth (true when it was on the low end and still true now that it’s on the high end). To that end, I don’t care if people know how much I make. I never bring it up, but if someone was curious I would share. My two cents.
@Jennifer: Not in my case. My value as an individual has nothing to do with what I earn. I simply feel that it’s no one’s business but mine how much money I make.
I did reveal what I was earning once, for my first MSN Money piece: “Surviving (and thriving) on $12,000 a year.” But that was to make a specific point: That I was going to cut expenses so that I could go back to school.
Thanks for reading, and for leaving a comment.
I’m wondering whether this has turned into a cultural taboo because nondisclosure provides a HUGE informational advantage to employers (and those who know how to negotiate and work the system) and a huge disadvantage to others.
Keep in mind that secrecy always has value to someone. All you got to figure out if that someone is you or someone else. If it isn’t you, you’re probably not earning as much as you could be.
On a related note, I think the tabooishness of money is also associated with guilt and lack of money handling skills.
Frankly I’m not that interested in knowing the details anyone. It’s pretty easy to derive the fact that if a family has 2 relatively new cars in the drive way of their 3/5 roomed suburbian house, and their garage is full of stuff, their net worth is likely close to zero.
I agree that the code of silence is often used to keep the natives from getting restless. Esp. keeping women’s salary down.
I was a manager for a long time, and during that time, every year at raise time I was told by upper management what raises (and thus salaries) were to be, so I knew everyone’s salary in my group. As you might expect, newer employees always made more than those around longer.
I made my opinions clear to my management when things were out of whack… namely when longer-term more experienced employees were making less than newer less-experienced ones. But salaries were not something I could control. Nor could I tell those longer-term more experienced employees where they stood.
But in a recent reorganization, I am no longer a manager (a long story). So I felt I was free of the management conspiracy of silence, and I took it upon myself to tell, confidentially, a particuarly lower-paid but senior employee that she was grossly under-paid. She took it well, and using industry-available surveys is pressing her case. I sure hope she (a) gets more, and (b) doesn’t tell about my input.
It sure is a cultural thing, this silence. I recall being in China, and one of the main questions you asked someone when you met them was “How much do you earn?” A common question and no taboo at all. (Others were: What do you do? Do you have any children?). That was back a while.
Where I used to work telling our salary were to lose your job over.
No write ups or the like. It was “nice working with ya, but you knew the rule.” It was in our rule book when we were hired. I guess it just caused too much trouble between the “girls” to let it happen.
It didn’t hurt anyone.