Your salary

We spend years tending an investment, and ten minutes on a salary we will draw for thirty years.

Three thousand euros gross a month.

After contributions, say twenty-two per cent: two thousand three hundred and forty net.

It is the only one of the three numbers you ever look at.

With employer contributions, say forty per cent: the employer spends four thousand two hundred.

Three numbers for a single sum. Yours is the smallest of the three.

The negotiation is about the largest. That is his budget.

And that budget is only ever discussed once: on the day you are hired.

Seventy-three thousand and twenty-three euros.

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That is what five per cent more is worth, negotiated just once, on the day you are hired.

Thirty-six thousand euros a year, two per cent of rise a year, a career of thirty years.

One million four hundred and sixty thousand euros of salary. Five per cent of that sum.

In the first year, those five per cent are worth one thousand eight hundred euros.

That is the figure you have in mind when you give up on asking.

One thousand eight hundred the first year. Seventy-three thousand over the career.

Because a rise does not add up: it compounds, exactly as in the first chapter.

You have spent evenings comparing fees of zero point two per cent.

This is the one financial decision of your life that is settled in a single conversation.

Ten minutes. That is how long the part of the meeting about money lasts.

Nobody learns to negotiate from one card. One thing counts, and it is simple.

Do not give your figure first, and never give your current salary.

One anchors the talk on what you used to be worth. The other, on what the job is worth.

That leaves the extras: profit-sharing, employee savings, shares.

They are not salary. They hang on results you do not decide.

Count them as zero in your decision, and take them as a bonus when they land.

The rest of the programme grows what you set aside. This chapter decides how much.