Find out what salary your co-workers are making (then ask for a raise)

I’ve talked about saving money on this blog, but not a whole lot about making more money.  Often the quickest and most significant way you can earn more money is by asking for a raise, or finding a job that pays more.  In order to do this successfully, it helps to know roughly what you’re ‘worth’, and what salaries are typical (or atypical) for your given position, company and location.

Glassdoor.com has excellent data to do this.  You’ll need to take 5 minutes to fill out your own salary & create a login (you can choose to omit the company you work for if you want, but that makes your input less valuable to others!)  Once you do that, you’ll have full access to all the glorious salary details on many major companies.  I live in Seattle, so I took a snapshot of this Boeing salary chart for Seattle, WA to give you an idea of what you can find out:

You can also drill down to get more detail about a specific job title:

Arm yourself with this info when negotiating salary (which you should ALWAYS do) for a new job, or at your next performance review when negotiating a raise.  Here’s a very useful (and short) book on how to negotiate your salary: Negotiating Your Salary: How to Make $1,000 a Minute.   It’s a must read (and re-read) before any job or performance review.

Author: Ward Williams

Ward is an independent financial advisor at Better Tomorrow Financial. He started working as an independent investment advisor in 2009. View all posts by Ward Williams