Send Me the Comp Number

This week is about the fight that started in my comments two weeks ago, and the one number I am asking you to send me.

Two weeks ago I wrote that if you are over 40, nobody is going to hire you again. Nearly 5,000 people read that post. Then 35 people told me I was wrong, and one of them said it with numbers. So I read every comment, and I am going to settle this the only way an argument this size gets settled. I am going to count.

Here is what the fight was about. One group said I was right, and they told me how hard it was for them and the people they know to land a job over 40. The other group said I was wrong. One of the commenters told me he had coached 3 people over 50 into new vice president jobs, and that they got hired fast. And a recruiter told me she finds people work every single day, and that my numbers are wrong.

The data either agrees with me or it does not. And the data may never apply to you personally. You may have landed a job easily compared to everyone else. On the other hand, you may be like many of us who could not find a job despite sending the 1,001st resume.

And I noticed something about everyone who wrote in. Every single one of them was arguing from one story. Their brother. Their neighbor. Themselves. One person, one case, and total certainty about how the whole world works. I do the same thing. My one story is louder only because it is mine.

So I am not going to settle this by writing another essay. I am not going to win it by being the loudest person in my own comment section. I am going to do the thing that actually settles an argument this size. I am going to count.

Before you send me anybody else's number, get your own

Most people cannot answer this about themselves. That is why I want you to start with your own.

What did you make last year, all in? Not your salary. Everything. Base, bonus, the equity that vested, plus whatever your employer paid on your behalf that you never saw. The health insurance they covered. The retirement match. The payroll taxes they paid for you. That number is bigger than the one on your offer letter, and it is the only one that matters, because it is the one you have to replace.

Run it now. Write it down.

Then do the second number. Almost nobody does this one.

Take that all-in figure and subtract what it actually cost you to earn it. The commute. The suits. The dry cleaning. The lunches you bought because you were downtown. The childcare you paid because you had to be somewhere at 8. The vacation days you did not take. The weeks you worked past 60 hours and called it normal.

What is left over is your real take-home. Most people over 50 have never once computed it, and the first time they do, they are surprised, because the number is smaller than they thought, and the job was costing more than they counted.

That gap matters because of what the company used to do for you, and you never saw it happen.

When you had a job, a salary was a number a company arrived at after it had already done all the work you are now responsible for. It figured out what to charge the customer, what the work cost to deliver, what your share of the overhead was, what taxes to withhold, what the benefits ran, and then it handed you what was left on the 1st and the 15th and called it your pay. Fully cooked. None of the ingredients visible.

That is why the number you would have to bill as an independent scares you. You are looking at gross revenue and your nervous system is reading it as salary. It is not. It is the top of the column. Everything the company used to hide is standing between that number and your life, and now you are the one holding it.

So this is the whole exercise in one place, and it takes about twenty minutes:

1. Add up what your life actually costs each month. Housing, food, insurance you now buy yourself, the retirement contribution nobody is making for you anymore, and giving if you give. Be honest. A number that pretends you do not give is a number for a life you do not live.
2. Add your monthly tax set-aside. If you do not know it, take last year's effective rate and apply it to your target. The government did not forget you when you left the W-2.
3. Add the overhead of running a practice. It is smaller than you think. That is the good news in this whole exercise.
4. That total is your real target. It has a name. I call it your Freedom Number, and it is the monthly take-home that funds the life you actually live. Not the life you are performing for anybody. The one in your actual house with your actual mortgage.
5. Now divide it by what you would charge one client per month. That answer, rounded up, is how many clients you need. Not a funnel. Not a brand. Usually one, two, or three humans with a problem you were built to solve.

If you want to maximize what you keep, the levers are all on the cost side, and they are not what people think. It is not about charging more. It is about the set-aside you forget to make, the benefits you now buy retail that your employer used to buy wholesale, and the overhead you assume is large and is not. Get the number first. The number is what turns an infinite fear into a countable target.

That gap, between what you made all in and what your life actually costs, is your real job search. Most people have never once put those two numbers side by side.

Now, the ask

One person you know who lost a job late in their career or went looking for one, and what happened to their pay.

That is it. One person. If you have five, send five. Start with one.

For that person I need five things:

1. Their first name. First name only. I am not publishing anybody's full name.
2. What they earned before. Salary, bonus, and any stock, added up into one number.
3. What they earn now. Same three pieces, same total.
4. The difference between those two numbers.
5. How many months it took them to land the next thing.

If you do not know one of the numbers, write "do not know" and send it anyway. Do not guess to make the row look neater. I would rather have four real rows than five clean ones.

If you send me a row, send me one more thing with it. The sentence you would say at dinner to tell somebody what you do. Who you help, what problem you solve, and what shows up when it works. The test is whether a friend can repeat it back to you without stumbling.

Here is why that sentence matters as much as the pay numbers. Picture the person in your row. They did the twenty years. They were good at the work. When the job ended, they had one door to walk through, and that door was somebody else's to open or close. Nine out of ten of them never got their old number back.

One employer holding all of your family's safety is not a plan. It is one bet on one person deciding to keep you. Two employers, or ten clients, is a plan, because one of them leaving does not take the whole thing down with it. That is the difference between a job and freedom, and it is the reason I do this work.

The word for that is freedom, and it is not a slogan in this house. It is the arithmetic of how many people can end your income on a Tuesday.

Why I am asking instead of telling

Here is why the comments did not settle it. Every person in that thread was sure, and every person in that thread had a sample of one. The man with the 3 vice presidents has 3. The recruiter has every placement she has made. I have my own 2 times leaving corporate, and the hundreds of members I talk to. 4 different people, 4 different sets of a few cases, 4 different conclusions. That is not stubbornness. That is what happens when 4 people each look at a handful of stories and then argue about the whole country.

I have now watched four people argue about the whole country using four different sets of a few cases, and none of them were lying.

There is a song about this. Elderbrook is Alexander Kotz, a British singer and producer who started out playing guitar in an indie band, then found electronic music at university in Bath. He is best known for "Cola," the track he made with CamelPhat, which went to number one on the dance chart and got nominated for a Grammy. The reason I bring him up is how he writes. He does not start with the words. He mumbles sounds over a finished track until one of them starts to sound like a real phrase, and only then does he ask what the song is about. He said he always has a scene in his head, like a frame from a film, and once he can see the scene he understands the song.

That is what every person in that comment thread did, including me. We each looked at our own handful of scenes and then announced what the whole country is. Elderbrook does it on purpose and makes something worth hearing. The rest of us do it by accident and call it being right.

What happens to what you send

I read every reply myself. I do not have a team, so it is me.

Next week I publish two things.

The first is your rows, in the numbers you send. How many went backward, how many stayed flat, how many went up, and how big the change was.

The second part has nothing to do with your replies. I went back through that whole thread and I am checking the loudest claims against the public record. The man with the 3 vice presidents. The recruiter who says the work is there every day. I am going to take each one apart and show you what the government's own data says about it. For the libertarians in the room, that is the only data set that stays consistent, flaws and all. So you get that part no matter what.

And if nobody replies, I am going to tell you that nobody replied. I would rather publish an empty inbox next to the record than write another essay and pretend the thread never happened.

One more promise, and it is the one that matters. If the rows come back mostly good news, I am printing the good news. If half of you send me people who landed at the same money or better, that is the answer, and it gets the same table and the same type size as everything else. I would rather be corrected with evidence than agreed with by people who already like me.

The numbers behind my claim, so you can check my work

Only about 1 in 10 workers over 50 who get pushed out of a long-held job ever earn as much again. That is Urban Institute and ProPublica research on people who were pushed. If you left first, took a package, or walked so they would not have to push you, the door you used does not change the paycheck math.

The GAO found that 74% of reemployed displaced workers 55 and older earned less than before, against 58% of workers 25 to 54. I wrote age 40, and this data is measured at age 55, so understand the discrepancy. The penalty starts earlier than the data can see.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that as of January, of the people who were displaced and then reemployed full time and reported what they made, about 49% earned as much or more than at the job they lost. That means about half did not. And that reemployment rate falls hard with age. About 73% for ages 25 to 54, about 57% for ages 55 to 64, and about 39% for 65 and older.

Every one of those numbers describes a group. Not one of them describes your brother. That is the whole reason I am asking.

In 1963, C.S. Lewis wrote a letter to a woman named Mary Willis Shelburne. She was in a hospital and she believed she was dying, and she was afraid. He wrote back and told her that her fear had it backwards, and he ended with a line I keep coming back to. He said there are better things ahead than any we leave behind. She lived another 12 years. He died 5 months later, and he signed the letter as a tired traveller near the end of the journey.

I am not comparing a layoff to dying. The part that carries over is this. Whatever you can see from inside the loss is not the whole picture. She could see a hospital bed and nothing past it. What was actually waiting was 12 more years. When the job ends, all you can see is the door closing. What is on the other side of it is your twenty years, pointed at people who have a problem you already know how to fix.

What to do this week (pick one)

1. Send me the row. One person you know who lost a late-career job or went looking for one. Before, now, the difference, and how long it took.
2. Run your own Freedom Number. Twenty minutes. Your life cost, your tax set-aside, your overhead, divided by your monthly client rate. That answer is how many clients you need.
3. Have one conversation with an operator, not a recruiter. Find the person who has the problem your 20 years already solved. Spend 30 minutes on their problem instead of on a job.

See you next week.

Kirk