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The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

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Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#81

Post by everfree »

danbruc wrote: post #50
toast0 wrote: post #18

> After a million dollars or so in salary, the absolute amount that a person is paid has no real impact on their life. They can't eat more meals in a day or wear more shoes. What matters to the manager is the relative amount. Sure, nobody needs more than a million dollars in annual compensation (in 2024 dollars), but relative amount gets you to your never need to work again number faster or slower. You might still wo…

Consuming without working for it is immoral, flying privat jets and traveling more is bad for the environment. Those are not reasons in favor of higher salaries.

By that logic, do you consider it immoral to spend lottery winnings?

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#82

Post by ghaff »

crazygringo wrote: post #57
toast0 wrote: post #18

> After a million dollars or so in salary, the absolute amount that a person is paid has no real impact on their life. They can't eat more meals in a day or wear more shoes. What matters to the manager is the relative amount. Sure, nobody needs more than a million dollars in annual compensation (in 2024 dollars), but relative amount gets you to your never need to work again number faster or slower. You might still wo…

Yeah, a million dollars a year is not anywhere close to where having more money doesn't impact you. If that's $600K after taxes, and a year of college for a single child costs $80K at an excellent school, and you've got two or three kids, and housing in a major metropolitan area... I mean you're definitely living very comfortably, but there are still lots of ways to spend money that have a big impact on your life, be…

You can argue about the numbers and there is definitely the flying private jets and basically not thinking about the cost of hotels and schools, etc. echelon. But, yeah, $1m/yr probably isn't that given it's not that much out of the range of a lot of salaried senior worker bees in tech, etc. Sure, that's great comp and you can save a lot but it's not "costs don't matter" level of things.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#83

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #57
toast0 wrote: post #18

> After a million dollars or so in salary, the absolute amount that a person is paid has no real impact on their life. They can't eat more meals in a day or wear more shoes. What matters to the manager is the relative amount. Sure, nobody needs more than a million dollars in annual compensation (in 2024 dollars), but relative amount gets you to your never need to work again number faster or slower. You might still wo…

Yeah, a million dollars a year is not anywhere close to where having more money doesn't impact you. If that's $600K after taxes, and a year of college for a single child costs $80K at an excellent school, and you've got two or three kids, and housing in a major metropolitan area... I mean you're definitely living very comfortably, but there are still lots of ways to spend money that have a big impact on your life, be…

[deleted]

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#84

Post by lkdfjlkdfjlg »

TrackerFF wrote: post #73

I've said this before, but the managing director of the Norwegian Pension Fund - which currently sits at a cool $1.56 trillion, has a $657k salary. Nothing more, nothing less. The return for last year was around 25% Some of the fund managers there make more than the managing director, but still, we're talking about a "modest" figure in the $1mm-$2mm range. That's paltry pay compared to the big bucks made in hedge fun…

Good example.

Yes of course, not everything is about money. There's also 1) prestige and 2) the promise of future money. The Norwegian Pension Fund specifically is very prestigious, and it promises that anyone who can do a good job with $1.5tr probably can also do a good job at one of those 100bn fund that do pay 10m/yr.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#85

Post by lumost »

toast0 wrote: post #18

> After a million dollars or so in salary, the absolute amount that a person is paid has no real impact on their life. They can't eat more meals in a day or wear more shoes. What matters to the manager is the relative amount. Sure, nobody needs more than a million dollars in annual compensation (in 2024 dollars), but relative amount gets you to your never need to work again number faster or slower. You might still wo…

I think this over-estimates the amount required to live a luxurious life in perpetuity.

Consider the case of someone wishing to live a luxury lifestyle in the trendy lower east side neighborhood of manhattan. We'll use a 1300 sqft 3 bedroom condo as a baseline.

https://www.redfin.com/NY/New-York/455-FDR-Dr-10002/unit-B30...

This condo will cost 8k/month with a 20% downpayment at todays interest rates, leaving our hypothetical million dollar a year salary person with 52k/month post-tax. Assuming they live a rather luxurious lifestyle of ~16k per month, they will still have a savings rate of 60%. Leading to a retirement in 12 years with a portfolio of 7.8 MM.

If the person makes 10x this value or 10MM per year... Then they can retire in 1 year. At 100 MM, they can retire in ~2 months.

You can play with the numbers a bit, our hypothetical 1MM/year individual would be living in the "average" 3-bedroom apartment for the Lower East Side. Perhaps the 10MM/year individual would choose the most expensive unit which is only ~4x more expensive, and increase their spending to 90000 per month - equivalent to a new model X per month.

They still retire in 3.8 years.

https://www.redfin.com/NY/New-York/105-Norfolk-St-10002/unit...

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#86

Post by throwaway240412 »

> After a million dollars or so in salary, the absolute amount that a person is paid has no real impact on their life. They can't eat more meals in a day or wear more shoes. What matters to the manager is the relative amount.

Take the now-defunct "American dream" of a single-income family with 3 kids living in a house with a backyard, say, in Silicon Valley and other places that have mobs paying more than $1 million to people, and that goes away pretty quickly.

After tax, with standard deduction, and 5 allowances, that $1 million turns into $529k net. With a $7k rent plus $5k in personal expenses per person (pre-school tuition alone is about $3k, so $5k in personal expenses is not outrageous), that leaves at most $145k in savings.

With a $12k mortgage (the median price in Santa Clara county for all residential is $1.4 million, I'm using $1.8 for a house), that's down to $85k in savings if you live frugally.

But, as other people say, there's more to life than food and shoes.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#88

Post by krupan »

Wow, people used to nearly worship Seth Godin, it's pretty refreshing to see a whole lot of disdain for this article here :-)

I think there's something to his point about marketing. There probably is a way for companies to pay a little less but still attract the top talent by selling the job better. But then, why hasn't anyone figured this out and started doing it? Maybe financial workers, CEO's, laywers, and engineers see through it?

This part is just hilarious, "an industry-wide tax and trade salary cap will actually help these organizations." I mean, I guess maybe he really is feeling like this sort of regulation would be a charitable thing to do? It's actually a terrible idea though.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#89

Post by cscurmudgeon »

danbruc wrote: post #50
toast0 wrote: post #18

> After a million dollars or so in salary, the absolute amount that a person is paid has no real impact on their life. They can't eat more meals in a day or wear more shoes. What matters to the manager is the relative amount. Sure, nobody needs more than a million dollars in annual compensation (in 2024 dollars), but relative amount gets you to your never need to work again number faster or slower. You might still wo…

Consuming without working for it is immoral, flying privat jets and traveling more is bad for the environment. Those are not reasons in favor of higher salaries.

Why do you believe they didn't work for their salaries?

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#90

Post by bluGill »

mcguire wrote: post #32
latexr wrote: post #23

> (Aside: should the guys who drive an armored car that carries millions of dollars in bonds get paid more than the guys that drive an armored car that only carries thousands of dollars in cash? Does the amount of money handled change the difficult of the work?) Possibly, yes. The amount of money handled might affect the likelihood of a heist, and the required preparedness of the robbers. Which in turn requires more…

Want to know something weird? A convenience store or liquor store is much more likely to be robbed than a bank.

Not really, banks are well known to have protections such that you are likely to be caught (most of which I don't know - and those who do know are not talking). It is also well known that you don't actually get much money.

There are convenience stores that still don't have cameras. Liquor stores have liquor - which is probably what you want not the money anyway (money can buy liquor, but you have to go two places now)

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