An obvious tiny adjustment would be to subtract three weeks of paid vacation, during which you collect pay but don't work. That moves the number to 1,960.

A non-obvious major adjustment is to calculate the *real* number of hours you work per week, including *any* time that you're doing work-related things instead of doing something you'd rather be doing — or instead of something else that earns you money. For many professionals, this number easily tops 50 hours per week, even though they're technically on the hook for only 40. At the higher number, the raw total for 50 weeks is 2,500 hours, which significantly changes the hourly rate.

Bigger picture: lots of folks don't net nearly as much as they think they do from their work, because they don't genuinely account for *all* the time they put into the job.

But I'm reminded of my grandfather saying, “Something is only valuable if someone's willing to pay for it.” I feel like us up-and-comers are still going to be giving away the goods for free until we reach a certain threshold. But I guess that's kind of true in every profession.

I'm really hoping that people realize that they do have a value and just like you said there is an easy place to start with figuring it out as outlined above.

No charge.

BTW the post can be found here: http://steves2cents.blogspot.com/2009/09/job-se...