Penelope Trunk

Money

Figure out how much you should be paid (and three cheers for transparent salaries)

Posted to: Money | Office Politics
July 11th, 2008
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Do you know the salary of every employee at your company? I think you should.
I mean, who is being protected by secret salaries? Certainly not the employee—the more transparent salaries are, the more accurately an employee can assess his or her value to a company.
You'd think that companies benefit from secret salaries and that's why [...]

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How I started taming my workaholic tendencies

Posted to: Knowing yourself | Money | Productivity
June 27th, 2008
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After my first visit to the farm, I quickly invited myself back. "I'm coming there without my kids," I told him.
When I got there, he made me hamburger that was shaped a little too much like how it might have looked in the cow's body, and then he asked me what I wanted.
"I want this [...]

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Career Lessons from Eliot Spitzer’s Call Girl, Ashley Dupre

Posted to: Money | Self-management
March 24th, 2008
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In the train wreck of Eliot Spitzer’s political career, there are many workplace lessons. And lots of people are talking about Spitzer’s career. But what about the call girl?
Ashley Dupre, who was Kristen in bed, was no slouch in the career management department. Sure, her breasts are plastered all over the Internet, but don’t be [...]

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How to deal with getting fired (from Yahoo)

Posted to: Journalism | Money | Office Politics
December 27th, 2007
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I just got fired from Yahoo Finance.
The long road to my quick termination started in the spring, when I grew friendly with one of the higher-ups in engineering at Yahoo. When he became my boss's boss's boss at Yahoo, he suggested that we meet if we were ever both in New York at the same [...]

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How to decide if your commute is too long

Posted to: Money | Productivity
December 20th, 2007
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The average daily commute in the U.S. is about 25 minutes. The shortest average daily commute is about 15 minutes for people living in Midwest cities like Witchita, Omaha, and Tulsa. New Yorkers have the longest commute — 38 minutes, which is six minutes longer than the average commute time in Chicago. The average commute [...]

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Twentysomething: Preparing for life without health insurance

Posted to: Entrepreneurship | Money
October 2nd, 2007
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By Ryan Healy – About a month ago, my brother, Dan, was in the hospital. Originally, the doctors told him he had a small cut, and he should use some Neosporin to prevent infection. A couple of days later, they told him he had a staph infection. Staph infections are bad, but for my brother [...]

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Yahoo column: Five financial tools you shouldn't use

Posted to: Money
August 16th, 2007
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One of the ways I got my nearly disasterous financial life back on track was by reading a lot of economic advice online. It helps to be part of a community of people thinking hard about their values and their money and the alignment of the two. And it helps to read a wide range [...]

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5 steps to taming materialism, from an accidental expert

Posted to: Money
August 7th, 2007
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When I was a kid, there was money everywhere. My great grandpa was a lawyer for the Chicago mob in the 1920s, and today, my dad's generation is still living off that money. Sometimes I wonder if the key to being able to squash materialism is to have a lot of it as a kid. [...]

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New research reveals some new ways to buy happiness, sort of

Posted to: Fulfillment | Knowing yourself | Money
July 11th, 2007
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It turns out that money actually can buy happiness, but not a lot of it. At some point, well under $100,000, the happiness value of a dollar starts to plummet, according to Richard Easterlin, economics professor at University of Southern California. This is because social interactions impact happiness more than money does.
But here's a new [...]

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New financial data highlights generational rifts

Posted to: Fulfillment | Money | Productivity
May 31st, 2007
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A group of think tanks, lead by the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that for the first time, men in their 30s are earning less than their parents. For the first time ever, this generation will not be more well-off financially than their parents. What should we make of this new finding? Does this [...]

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Twentysomething: Paychecks are boring

Posted to: Fulfillment | Money | Productivity
April 25th, 2007
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By Ryan Healy — Unless you are a professional athlete or working on Wall Street, an entry-level salary is not very exciting. When you couple this with the fact that the average college student graduates with tens of thousands in student loan and credit card debt and the cost of renting a place in [...]

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You don't need to love risk-taking to start your own business

Posted to: Entrepreneurship | Money
April 23rd, 2007
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A lot of people who would like to start a business think the task is too daunting. But following a passion is not as high risk as you may think. Conventional wisdom about entrepreneurs being big risk takers and living on the edge is not all that realistic. In fact, there are ways to minimize [...]

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Use money to buy time

Posted to: Money | Productivity
April 18th, 2007
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Time is more important than money. You think that you know this, but you probably don't act on it as much as you could. If you spend your time buying material things then you are using up the one thing that can make you happy (time) on things that definitely don't make you happy (stuff).
In [...]

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My financial history, and stop whining about your job

Posted to: Finding a career | Money
March 19th, 2007
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I tell people all the time to change their job if they don't like it, and people tell me this is totally impractical advice. A lot of people write to me to say that my advice only applies to rich people. Or they tell me that single parents, families living paycheck to paycheck, people in [...]

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Yahoo column: Deductive reasoning for the modern taxpayer

Posted to: Money | Working from home
March 1st, 2007
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It's tax time, and every year I think to myself that I should be deducting everything. Really. All my income comes from freelance writing, and since there's almost nothing in my life that I don't write about, maybe I can deduct everything.
After years of thinking I should do this but not really doing it, I [...]

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Financial freedom is outdated; try optimism instead

Posted to: Fulfillment | Money
December 22nd, 2006
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I am sick of advice about how to achieve financial freedom. Freedom from what? I have asked some people, who I will not link to, since I'm dissing them, and the most common answer is that they want to be able to make decisions about their life based on what they want, not on what they can [...]

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Taking good care of a family is relative

Posted to: How to blog | Money | Parenting
September 7th, 2006
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In response to my musings about what it means to be a blogger who is just a blogger, Alexandra Levit sent me an article about bloggers who support themselves blogging. I read it twice. Then I started checking out all the blogs, trying to uncover the secret of the million-dollar blog.
Here is what I uncovered: [...]

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What to do in college to be successful in your career

September 3rd, 2006
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For those of you about to start another year at school, here's a list of things to keep in mind: Twenty things to do in college to set yourself up for a great job when you graduate.
1. Get out of the library.
"You can have a degree and a huge GPA and not be ready [...]

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Your family would be better off with a housewife (so would mine)

Posted to: Fulfillment | Money | Parenting | Women
August 27th, 2006
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Men should not marry women who have careers, according to an opinion piece at Forbes.com. The statistics are clear:
"Marrying these women is asking for trouble. If they quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003). They will be unhappy if they make more money [...]

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Three more ways to think about career happiness

August 22nd, 2006
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If you ask most people if they like their jobs, they'll say yes. Alan Kreuger — scintillating economics professor at Princeton, whom I interviewed this morning — says that this is not because people have jobs they like, but because people have cognitive dissonance and are hard-programmed to like what they have.
On the positive side, [...]

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