I commented in another thread that I have a coworker who gets 5 weeks of vacation, plus 2 weeks of sick/personal days a year (as do I), but he thinks that someone making $1000 more per year with only 2 weeks off total has the better deal.
I think he’s crazy.
How much is vacation worth to you? What sort of pay cut would you accept to have 1 more week of vacation? How much more would you have to be paid to have 1 week less? What’s your deal-breaker amount of time off per year (if any)? What’s your ideal?
Wouldn’t a week of vacation be worth a week’s pay? If I wanted more time off this year than was already allotted to me, then I could request time off without pay. That would be the equivalent of a pay cut in exchange for additional vacation.
Right now, I wouldn’t exchange any of my leave for a pay raise, unless it was a great deal more money than the leave was officially worth. I guess the minimum leave I would accept would be three weeks per year, including sick leave, since that is the typical starting amount for my type of job in this area.
Your annual leave sounds pretty generous. I would expect to have to work for a company for 15-20 years before getting 7 weeks of annual paid time off.
How funny that you should bring this up, I have been meaning to PIT my otherwise lovely place of employment for their vacation policy for some time, as it is completely useless to me as it stands.
I get a week a year. This is until year 3, this year, when I will qualify for 2 weeks a year. But I don’t get holiday pay, apparently that is “voluntary” for businesses to pay (I have no cite, I am just being told this), and thus as you can imagine, I must use vacation time to pay for holidays when I take them off, which I have to do, as the business is closed on those days. Because there are more holidays a year than I have vacation time to cover, I also work overtime on a couple of major projects the office does annually and convert that to comp time so I can be paid for all holidays, and maybe actually get ONE extra day out of the deal. SUCKS big time.
So I’d love not only two weeks of time I didn’t have to use for anything else, but holiday pay as well. If the situation were not what it is, I’d still like two weeks as a minimum, so that a week could be taken at once, and then another 40 hours distributed as a day off here and there for long weekends, etc.
Generally what I have found when my past employment has entitled me to SEVERAL weeks off, between 4 & 5, is that I am in positions where I cannot conceivably ever take that much time off in a year (retail management, or other management positions where I am needed day to day). So I guess I would agree that 2 weeks and a thou more in income would be the better deal, for me. If one COULD take off more than 2 weeks a year, 3 would be my limit. I don’t think I have ever taken more than that off in a year, for any purpose.
Right now I would accept a small pay cut of around $20 a paycheck for the entire year to have an extra week of time. But don’t think that’s possible, and will be moot this year anyway, altho it’ll still kill me to use 1/2 of my 3rd year vacation allotment for holidays.!
Not much, apparently, given that I blew off two weeks’ PTO at the end of last year because I could only carry over 80, and I couldn’t be bothered to sign up to take off the last two weeks of the year.
A lot. If, God help me, I ever have to take a job that offers two weeks as the standard, I think I’d gladly take at least a $5,000 pay cut for an extra two to three weeks of leave. As far as I’m concerned, if I can’t travel, the extra money is more or less useless anyway; I’m used to living cheaply and I don’t have anything else I want to spend it on.
We haven’t calculated the cost but MrSin gets 6 weeks vacation, numerous holidays, never takes a sick day but could, and trades half his OT for an additional 20-30 days off a year. Yeah vacation is important to us.
Well, one thing that would be needed to put things into perspective is to know what % of earnings is that K$.
To someone making 12K, 1K is A LOT.
To someone making 120K… mwahahahahahaha! Well, ok, no, if anybody who makes 120K suddenly gets 1K taken out of his bank account he’d still get royally pissed, but compared to the other guy it’s a lot less important. Over 120K, 1K is not a “necessary amount”.
My current job pays about twice as much as the previous one but I’m on a 6-month contract. But? What but? Hell, if I can get one 6-month contract at this rate every year, I’ll be getting 6 months vacation! Hooray!
To me, so long as I’m making the money I need, vacation is worth more than work security. This makes me a weirdo but a happy one.
Unless your coworker is paid less than $1000 total for those *five weeks * he’s not working, yeah, I’m going with crazy.
I would go insane with only two weeks of vacation. Llike most people, and especially most parents, I already use an alarming amount of my vacation time for decidedly unvacationy things. Errands, appointments, sick kids, etc. pop up at least a few times a year. And I need time off, just for me. I wasn’t really designed for the 9 - 5 drudge (yeah, I know, who is!), and it wears on me. I need to take a day or so just to hang out at home and recharge at least every couple of months. The way I see it, vacation time is worth exactly what you’re paid for it, plus the value of free time, which is priceless. I’ll always want as much of it as I can reasonably afford.
Oh, and I always take all my vacation time. My company doesn’t pay for unused vacation time, and I’m about as inclined to work for free as my company is to just randomly hand me wads of cash out of the goodness of it’s incorporated heart.
If that week of vacation meant no email, no calls on the mobile, no backlog of 1,000 URGENT emails to deal with when back at work, then it would be worth a LOT. Most of my “week” long vacations are working a couple hours a day.
I worked for a temp company for about 5 years. We got a week’s vacation for every XXX hours we worked. Fine. That is, until they changed their policy and said that you’d get $400 for vacation pay. Since I normally would have received at least double that, I asked them how they came up with that figure.
Their answer: “We wanted to make it fair for everyone.”
I’m still trying to wrap my brain around that response. Fuckers.
My best deal was when I worked a job that regularly required that I put in grueling overtime hours. Lots of them. They allowed us to take the overtime in money, time, or a combination of both. Sometimes the time is worth more than the money. I loved that option.
Good questions, jsgoddess. Paid time off is important to me, but I’ve never tried to quantify that importance. I agree with DianaG that a day off is worth more to me than my daily wage. I currently get 30 days of paid time off annually. This allotment covers holidays, sick days and vacation. I use very few sick days. A bit of calculating tells me that 11.5% of my pay is for days on which I don’t work. My gut tells me that for me to accept a job that only allowed two weeks vacation, I would have to be paid more money than any company would pay for someone with my skills. I am in a fairly well paid profession, and any job in the salary range for my job description would meet my financial needs. I wouldn’t reduce my vacation time significantly for a twenty per cent salary increase. That may not make sense in pure financial terms, but it makes sense to me.
I have been at current company 6 years…I get three weeks vacation but I have to save one week for Christmas because we get between Christmas and New Years off. I have never gotten my head around that. I would gladly take that week with no pay to have three weeks throughout the year.
It’s the one single thing that my boss and I can’t talk about with getting po’d at each other. I would gladly take days off without pay to get the extra time off however he doesn’t agree with unpaid time off - it’s the time in that’s important to him and the time off which is important to me - therefore we haven’t agreed about this for as long as we’ve worked together.
Periodically, I will call in sick, generally when my garden needs weeding or I just need a day with no one else around (hubby is at work, kid is at school), maybe 2-3 days a year.
I’m personally on the side that a week’s vacation is definitely worth more than a week’s pay. I still don’t understand why companies don’t let you buy vacation time as an employee - for instance, they give you a base of 2 weeks at the beginning of the year. You then may “buy” week increments for that year for a week’s salary up to, say, 5 total weeks.
That way, if vacation time is really important to you, you can have it and if it’s not, you don’t have to have it. Plus, it eliminates the stigma of someone taking a week unpaid during the year because by pre-paying at the beginning of the year, it was accepted that the time would be taken off ahead of time.
It depends on what you value. Personally, I don’t agree with him. I’d rather have the time than the money.
I don’t really need a higher allotment of vacation time. I have 3 weeks’ vacation, plus another 13 days that are vacation days under another title, as well as 15 days sick leave. Next year I’ll be getting another week of vacation. I do have diligently plan to use that much time given the pace of my work, and in fact, have a consistent carry over of days from one year to the next. I wouldn’t want to have less than four weeks, certainly. This is one area among many where I’m quite happy with my job.
That is obviously false, or else you would immediately quit your job, since 52 weeks of vacation would be worth more than 52 weeks of pay.
This is a pretty clear case of two goods that lie on an indifference curve. How much a week’s vacation is worth to you depends on how much vacation you get right now, and how much you value your pay.
I have historically gotten 3 weeks a year (not including sick days) and starting in April I get 4 weeks. Now, if I got no weeks of vacation at all, I’d gladly give up a fair amount of pay to get a week or two of vacation (assuming I couldn’t quit my job.) But at 4 weeks, to be honest, I would not pay very much money for an additional week. Four weeks is enough vacation, I don’t really need five. But I need every penny I’m earning.
On the other hand, if I made $10,000 a week, I’d take twenty weeks of vacation if I could. After $320,000 a year in earnings, the utility of additional money would be vastly lower than where it is at my current salary.
That would cause a lot of problems you’re not foreseeing; for one thing, it’s a pain in the ass to administer. It’s just a lot easier to base vacation on a base company standard and service time.
I know exactly how much an extra week’s holiday costs me two ways: firstly I have contracted for it through my employer’s flexible benefits system, and it’s a bit under £200 per day (I’m being deliberately imprecise); secondly, I used to be my own boss - when I wasn’t working, I wasn’t earning.
when i was a contractor I could have told you exactly how much a day or week off cost me. No work=no pay. Now that I’m more gainfully employed, I expect 2 weeks vacation per year starting, plus holidays which are another 2 weeks for sake of argument. If I were negotiating salary vs. vacation, I’d say 1 weeks vacation is worth 2 weeks salary and work from there.
