Penelope Trunk (author of the Brazen Careerist column and book) has some interesting advice. I’ve been reading through some of the older columns recently and found some gems. Even if you don’t agree with everything she says, it certainly gives you some food for thought.
How much money do you need to be happy? (Hint: Your sex life matters more)
Here’s an interesting post on Cutting Costs for Dummies.
My company recently did something similar. They have a program for reimbursing tuition. It’s a great benefit and from my perspective even if the class has nothing to do with the employee’s job, it still works out great for the company. One class is not going to make the employee leave and to take enough classes to get, say, a master’s degree takes forever at one class per semester. You’ve locked the employee in to staying at your company for however many years the degree takes. And they require reimbursement for any courses taken in the 12 months before you quit. So the degree plus another year.
I have a friend who is doing this. She’s in a certificate program, but even then it takes five years (at one course per semester) to get the certificate. She’s in a job that doesn’t pay as well as it could, but doing the work of someone at least one level up. If she wasn’t taking the classes paid for by her employer she’d be long gone and they’d have to spend money to replace her plus getting an additional person one level up to cover the work she’d been doing. So for her company it’s a lot cheaper to send her to class than it is to promote her and pay her what she deserves. They’ve got her locked in for five years (probably four more than she’d have done otherwise), and considering how much time it takes to train a new person, it’s worth it.
So my company has just changed the rules to require that the courses be not just business related, but specifically apply only to the job the employee CURRENTLY has. So someone wanting to take a course that would help them get to the next level in their job is now out of luck. I’m curious how much these courses were really costing the company. One course has to be less expensive than training a new hire plus paying them while they’re useless. Heck, we paid someone in our department to be useless for a year (with no training or mentoring) before firing them. They could have sent her to a couple of courses and made her useful, or fired her in the first month when they discovered how useless she was. Oh well.
I’ve been reading through some older posts on personal finance blogs and came across one from Nina at Sitting Pretty on Expense Reimbursement
I spent quite a bit of time looking around online to see if any of the finance sites had calculated personal costs the average business traveler might incur by fronting money for business travel. And there wasn’t anything written about it. Am I the only one thinking about this?
I think her point about how expensive it might be if you get behind on submitting reports is valid, but I’m guessing that most people who worry about personal finance are going to try to get them in within a reasonable amount of time.
I did some recent travel on business, and submitted the report about a week after I got back. I could have done it the day after, but I was lazy and trying to catch up on other things. I’ve signed up for direct deposit of the reimbursement checks, and if you fill the form out exactly correctly, scan your receipts (if you fax things and they’re blurry, someone has to call you to get the details), my company is pretty good about getting you your money in 7-10 business days. In my case that was before the credit card bill was due. So I didn’t have to carry a balance or spend any of my money, and thanks to Discover’s current promotion for 5% back on travel expenses, I’m getting a couple of $25 Borders gift cards out of the whole thing. I could have taken the cash, but since I spend a lot of money on books anyway, $25 in gift cards made more sense than $20 in cash.
So for me it was a win/win situation. Someone else paid for me to fly somewhere warm, and I got free books. I can submit virtually all of my expenses (tickets, hotel, meals, rental car) and I get to swim in the pool in the evenings. I’m sure I’d hate it if I had to do it all the time (lots of wasted time in airports) but once a year it’s pretty nice.