The Ultimate Guide on What To Do With Your Year-End Bonus

So last week, I had surgery to remove TWO of my wisdom teeth – one on each side. Now, if you’ve ever had your wisdom teeth extracted, you’ll know that the operation is relatively painless, but the aftermath hurts like a b****. Seriously. Try stuffing 2 golf balls in your mouth and you’ll get an idea of what it’s like. Owtch.

On the bright side, it left me with a surprisingly long SEVEN-DAY medical leave from work (Though I spent the first half of it writhing in pain). Pain or no pain, a weeklong break from work is awesome. I caught up on my sleep, reorganized my room, and watched like 20 episodes of Modern Family (which is awesome btw, go watch it).

How to Handle Unexpected (Nice) Surprises

A weeklong break from work is a nice surprise, and so is the other great institution of a regular job: the year-end bonus (or “13-month bonus” as it’s commonly known in Singapore).

It feels pretty damn awesome to receive a year-end bonus, even though it’s not really a true “bonus” per se. So what are you going to do with your year-end bonus this year? Here are 5 possible options:

1. Spend it – What most consumer sheep will do. “Ooh extra money! Time to buy an iPad/massage chair/goat NOMNOMNOMNOM” (coupled with crazed look in their eyes)

2. Save it – What most people will do with the remainder after they’ve purchased said iPad/massage chair/goat. Be sure to take your shopping home in a cab – the possibility of upcoming bus fare increases might leave you with a remainder of maybe $4.70.

3. Sock it into a tax-sheltered SRS account – What very few people will do but could save you hundreds of dollars in taxes next year, depending on your tax rate.

4. Invest it – What old uncles will do (also with crazed looks in their eyes)

5. All of the above – what I think you should do.

This is what your bonus will look like if SMRT increases its bus fares

The All Of The Above Option

There’s really no reason why you should limit yourself to one or two choices with your year-end bonus. Instead, see your bonus as a way to give a boost to everything that will improve your life. Here’s how I’m allocating my year-end bonus this year:

1. Spend 10% of it on whatever I want – In true L’Oreal wisdom: “Because I’m worth it.”

2. Save 45% of it by adding it to the house downpayment fund

3. Sock 45% of it into my SRS account. Ta-dahhh: instant tax savings!

4. Invest the amount in the SRS account in a portfolio of sensible index ETFs

The great thing about this formula is that it lets me resist the temptation of overspending, meets my dual objectives of saving and investing, AND it saves me money on taxes next year to boot. Awesomesauce.

Do It Now

Most people get really ambitious when it comes to planning their time and money. We plan to use our time to get through our to-do lists, and we plan to save and invest our money.

But our plans inadvertently break down once time and money unexpectedly fall into our laps. Instead, we’ll spend our medical leave watching Modern Family, and squander our year-end bonuses on iPads which will probably become obsolete in 6-9 months.

Don’t make the same mistake as the other consumer sheep. Make a decision on the percentage of your bonus that you’re going to spend/save/invest. Then transfer the amounts to the relevant accounts immediately. If you’re reading this outside, set a reminder to do this once you get home. And if you’re home, do it now. If you put this off till later, you’ll run the risk of it disappearing mysteriously. Seriously. Do it now.

Are you done?

Okay, now you can go reward yourself with a couple of episodes of Modern Family. 😉

Jobs and Salaries – How the Pros Negotiate

Received an amazing and detailed article on salary negotiation by Kalzumeus  today (hat tip @ramit), complete with step-by-step instructions, scripts, and the psychology behind some of these  tactics. Love it. Some gems:

On searching for jobs

“Many people think job searches go something like this:

1. See ad for job on Monster.com
2. Send in a resume.
3. Get an interview.
4. Get asked for salary requirements.
5. Get offered your salary requirement plus 5%.
6. Try to negotiate that offer, if you can bring yourself to.

This is an effective strategy for job searching if you enjoy alternating bouts of being unemployed, being poorly compensated, and then treated like a disposable peon.

You will have much, much better results if your job search looks something more like:

1. (Optional but recommended) Establish a reputation in your field as someone who delivers measurable results vis-a-vis improving revenue or reducing costs.
2. Have a hiring manager talk with you, specifically, about an opening that they want you, specifically, to fill.
3. Talk informally (and then possibly formally) and come to the conclusion that this would be a great thing if both sides could come to a mutually fulfilling offer.
4. Let them take a stab at what that mutually fulfilling offer would look like.
5. Suggest ways that they could improve it such that the path is cleared for you doing that voodoo that you do so well to improve their revenue and/or reduce their costs.
6. (Optional) Give the guy hiring you a resume to send to HR, for their records.  Nobody will read it, because resumes are an institution created to mean that no one has to read resumes.  Since no one will read it, we put it in the process where it literally doesn’t matter whether it happens or not, because if you had your job offer contingent on a document that everyone knows no one reads, that would be pretty effing stupid now wouldn’t it.”

On not offering a number before they do

“Every handbook on negotiation and every blog post will tell you not to give a number first.  This advice is almost always right.  It is so right, you have to construct crazy hypotheticals to find edge cases where it would not be right.”

“This vaguely disreputable abuse of history is what every employer asking for salary history, salary range, or desired salary is doing.  They are all using your previous anomalously low salary — a salary which did not reflect your true market worth, because you were young or inexperienced or unskilled at negotiation or working at a different firm or in another line of work entirely — to justify paying you an anomalously low salary in the future. Never give a number.”

I love this article. It’s not every day you get to read something that’s so much more than a superficial “Top 10 ways to get hired!” article. If every blogger/journalist/author got into this level of analysis, we’d have less of an info overload problem.