Why didn’t you get paid overtime? Were you exempt or was your employer a slime? Why didn’t you raise hell over it?
I had (and still have in my second career) the option of taking green or white for hours over 40 per week. Green being time and a half pay, white being paid time off (comp time). I always took comp time until I reached by highest rate. Then I took all the overtime I could and took the pay to boost my annual salary average and thus my pension.
Here’s a whole thread about the many ways that salaried employees of all types are routinely made to work 50 or 60 or 100 hours for zero additional wages over 40. You have two choices: do the extra time or be fired. When your whole industry operates on that basis, you may be able to change employers, but you can’t escape the exploitative reality of the industry.
This OP is ostensibly about the limit case bad deals, but plenty of more ordinary jobs work the same way. Making, say, $60K+ in any office doing anything and being allowed to work only 40 hours doing so is a very rare treat. White collar slaves is more like it.
High wage hourly workers such as you and I are by far a rarity in the USA. In my industry the vast majority of overtime is paid but only at straight time rates.
LSLGuy basically answered this. There are very few places that pays salaried workers for hours worked outside 40 a week.
Back when I was on call-out forty plus years ago, I only got paid if I drove in to solve a problem. If I was smart enough to figure out how to fix it over the phone, I get zip for being awakened out of a sound sleep. I didn’t like that either! Once though I was in such a fog, I drove in at 3:00 am on a call-out and as I woke up on the drive, I figured out what went wrong, walked into the “backroom” when I got there, explained the issue in about 20 seconds, turned around and drove home. I was glad I’d only put my coat on over my nightgown instead of taking time to get dressed.
Yeah, the day after I had That Meeting, I walked into my classroom and said “Okay, ya dadburned whippersnappers, you’d better behave. I just got told I can retire any day… so as of this moment, I’m here because I WANT to be, not because I have to.
So if you act up, I could walk out this door in the middle of class, and give you all D’s for the semester.”
I am planning to retire this month. IMHO there is no such thing as a magic number. You have to account for your risk tolerance, health scenarios, the economy, and a bunch of other things. There can be a number that makes you feel comfortable enough that the downside is not keeping you awake at night but as Yogi Berra said, it’s really hard to make predictions, especially about the future. It’s all about risk and how much of it you can stomach.
My biggest concern was health care, but when my wife retired she had a retiree health care benefit that continues until we are eligible for Medicare, so for non-catastrophic scenarios our health care coverage is good.
My financial advisor ran Monte Carlo scenarios based on our savings, life expectancy, and so forth. The chance of burning through our assets while we are still alive is in the low single-digits percentage. That’s good enough for us. It might not be good enough for others. But if we have a huge recession, one of us needs around-the-clock medical care, or other disaster scenario, we’ll have a problem.
Congrats, @CookingWithGas. Enjoy your retirement!
So true. I worked as as Government contractor. We had a certain amount of $ available for everyone on the contract for a year. For overtime we had a choice-bill the OT and finish the year on leave without pay or get the work done according to the original schedule and cost projections. And remember, there was usually a pot for everyone on the contract. So anything you did effected everyone. Since essentially everyone in the business had the same contracts, moving to another contractor was a zero-sum game. None of our contracts were big enough to rate cost-overruns.
I “retired” over 15 years ago to be the stay-at-home spouse, which is obviously a different set of decisions.
My wife is retiring in June. There’s a longer post here if you are interested for some reason. Long story short, it was a much, much easier decision for us than for a lot of people (maybe most) for a few reasons:
My wife constructed a monstrous Excel workbook (it’s how she likes to think) to do a lot of analysis of our various retirement income sources, taking it out to age 100. Being conservative with those savings’ growth over the years, we should be able to slide smoothly into retirement without significant changes to our life. If something does go wrong, we’ve got a lot of fat we can trim on the expense side before things get even a little uncomfortable. We both grew up with very little money; we can pare way, way back if necessary.
COVID was a small blessing in that regard - we’ve had a year-long laboratory in which to play with simulating life in retirement.
If I were to offer anything resembling advice, it would be to get really, really good at tracking expenses. Like I said, I use Quicken, but I think even a free app like Mint has enough reporting functionality to do the job. Every morning I download the previous day’s transactions and categorize them, schedule any upcoming payments happening within the next couple of weeks, and just take a quick glance at our overall picture. As a bonus, this habit has let me catch any number of fraudulent credit card charges before they snowballed into huge amounts of money. It may sound like a lot of work to some people, but once it’s part of the morning routine, it’s pretty easy; it’s maybe 10 minutes out of my day on average.
I’m still working in Excel, but I track and categorize every expense, and measure that against what we projected at the end of 2019 when I retired.
Really the only thing that makes it a little bit of a hassle is the credit card line items…I download the activity pretty easily, but each vendor has its own stupid categories, and I don’t see a way to train them to do it differently…so every month I’m doing some recoding.
I’m curious what you see is the major benefits of Quicken or even Mint, I don’t know much about them.
For me, it’s a couple of things.
I like having everything in one app/window. Checking and savings accounts, 401(k), HSA, credit cards, and mortgage all in one app that updates at the press of a button. I haven’t had any account yet that couldn’t connect directly to Quicken, so every morning all of the latest transactions come in. If I do it every day, there’s not a ton of effort involved. Quicken can “learn” (or you can direct it) to assign certain payees to certain categories, so even the effort of classifying expenses is pretty low.
I like the reporting functionality. Every month I print a report of everything that went out last month so we can examine our expenses. At tax time, I can easily print a report of donations and charitable contributions rather than having to dig through individual account documents to catch them all.
I can automate a lot of entry of recurring expenses, so I can have very good visibility as to what my account balances look like a month or two out, so I can move money from savings to checking, for example, to maintain an appropriate balance there.
It has decent “what if” tools for mortgage accounts, so we were able to easily see the effect of extra payments or of paying off early.
These are all things I could do elsewhere, but I just really like the convenience of having everything all in one, easy-to-examine place.
Wait, what? When I last used Quicken I had to get my credit card bill and manually enter each thing I bought that month. Are you telling me that Quicken can talk to Bank of America and put my transactions in there? What kind of sorcery is this?
And my portfolio? I don’t have to enter every stock and update the price manually?
How does this even work? How would Quicken get this information from all the different sources?
This was really interesting, thank you for the detailed response.
I see some more questions followed your post, really curious to see what you have to say.
So, we have these things now called, “the internet,” and, “online banking.”
Sorry. “Wiseass” is my default state. 
When you create an account within Quicken, you have the option to have it connect to your bank/credit card company/brokerage/whatever. You tell it who your financial institution is (most are already available to select from a list), enter your login credentials, and Quicken connects and downloads all your transactions. Initial setup can take a little effort, because it might download a lot of past stuff, but once it’s set up it runs pretty smoothly. Every morning I press the “update” button, and every account does just that.
When you get your monthly statement, you use the “reconcile” feature. Last month’s balance is already populated. Enter the statement date and the closing balance, and the next screen will show you if there is any discrepancy between your statement and your Quicken numbers. I rarely have a difference, and when I do it is usually trivially easy to locate the transaction I accidentally deleted or accidentally duplicated.
And, yes, brokerage accounts are automated as well. Once in a very great while I have to do a manual correction, but not often. For example, when Fidelity sells a few shares of something to pay for their fees, Quicken does not recognize that there should be a corresponding “cash withdrawal”, so the account balance shows as positive. I have to enter a manual transaction to compensate. That’s about the only trouble I’ve ever had.
All this talk about the worry about paying for healthcare makes me glad that I live where I do.
Which would be a helpful comment if you’d mentioned where you live. Even clicking through your account, you listed your location as “Here and There”…
But good for you! Enjoy not worrying about healthcare costs!
Apologies. The socialist republic of Canada.
Thanks. Can I sneak in like during Vietnam? I love Tim Horton’s, I watch hockey, and I’m polite.
Oh, but first, can you do something about January and February?
Come on up! Actually it’s hard to immigrate, but come visit when the border is back open.
Actually, they just announced new immigration targets, (much higher), and they eased requirements for some of the immigration streams. I have a friend, from Kashmir, just finishing a graduate degree. No longer needs to wait a year to apply for Permanent Resident status (step one to citizenship!), sweet!
Yes if you are a recent graduate from a Canadian university you can be fast tracked now. Or a health care worker.