Earning
A pay rise is worth less than the number suggests
Between tax bands, benefit withdrawal and lifestyle drift, the useful part of an increase is smaller than the headline.
Kwabena Mensah
Careers writer, Money After Thirty
Kwabena writes about earnings, job moves and what a pay rise is worth after tax.
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21 articles
Looking Ahead
Talking to your parents about their affairs before you have to
The conversation is uncomfortable once and expensive to postpone. Most families postpone it.
Looking Ahead
Wills, and what happens if there is not one
Intestacy rules distribute an estate by formula. The formula rarely matches what anyone intended.
Earning
The years your earnings move fastest, and what follows them
Most careers do the bulk of their real growth in a compressed window. Knowing roughly where you are in it changes what you plan for.
Earning
The promotion that costs more than it pays
A step up usually adds hours, responsibility and a different job. Occasionally the net effect on a household is negative.
Earning
What a decade of small raises actually compounds to
Percentage increases stack on each other, which is why a two-point difference in annual growth separates two identical careers by a…
Earning
Retraining in your forties and how long the payback runs
The question is not whether it is possible. It is how many earning years remain to recover the cost.
Earning
Freelancing after a decade employed: what you have to replace
The day rate looks like a large rise until you subtract everything the employment quietly provided.
Looking Ahead
Care for a parent, and who is expected to pay
The rules differ enormously by country, and almost every family discovers them during a crisis rather than before one.
Looking Ahead
The decade when parents and children need you at once
Three demands — children, ageing parents and your own retirement — arrive in the same years, and only one of them can be deferred…
Looking Ahead
Giving during your lifetime or leaving it in the estate
The same money reaches the same people either way. When it arrives, what it is taxed at and what control you keep are all different.
Looking Ahead
Being an executor: what you are agreeing to
It is an unpaid job with legal responsibility that runs for months and sometimes years. Most people accept it without asking what…
Looking Ahead
Siblings and an estate, and where it goes wrong
Disputes after a death are rarely about the money itself. They are about unequal help years earlier, unstated promises and one…
Looking Ahead
Clearing a parent's home, in the right order
It is an emotional job with a legal sequence underneath it, and doing it in the wrong order creates problems that are hard to undo.
Looking Ahead
Retirement is not one date any more
Stopping work in stages is now common, and it changes the arithmetic in ways a single retirement date never allowed for.
Looking Ahead
Funeral costs and the decisions left to other people
It is the one expense a household is certain to face, arriving at the moment when nobody is in a position to compare options.
Earning
Moving into management costs you the skill you were paid for
The first management job is usually presented as a promotion, and it is closer to a career change with a different set of exits.
Earning
Share-based pay, and what it is worth on the day you need it
Equity in an offer is real money with conditions attached, and the conditions decide when you are allowed to leave and what you…
Earning
What a job title is worth outside the building
Titles are internal currency, and they do not convert at the same rate in the market you will eventually have to sell into.
Looking Ahead
A parent moving in with you
Multi-generational living solves several problems at once and creates a set of financial questions that families almost never…
Looking Ahead
The medical wishes nobody has written down
Families are asked to make decisions on someone else's behalf under time pressure, usually with nothing recorded to guide them.