asheris

An entry in the slapnose blog entitled "IRS Says We Po" had a few numbers the author put together, showing how his income has declined in recent years.

That got me thinking, so I popped open Excel and ran some numbers. I'm including adjustments for health insurance costs in this, as I made it a priority to stay insured. In both full-time jobs, health insurance was/is included, so I increased the annual total by the relevant amount to reflect that additional compensation. Fallon included a lot of other benefits that I don't know numbers for, so the loss is actually somewhat greater than shown.

From working one full-time job at Fallon to being laid off in March 2001 and collecting unemployment, my income fell 61%.

When that ran out, the freelance & contracting work wasn't turning up anything, and I was down to just one part-time job, it dropped another 41% to 25.42% of my Fallon salary.

Now, I'm working one full-time and one part-time job, for a 127% increase from where I was about a year ago. This puts me at 44.5% of my Fallon income.

In other words, I'm making less than half of what I was making 3.5 years ago.

Thinking back, I just realized that even back in 1996 I was making about 25% more than I do now, with one full-time job.