The top 5 salary negotiating mistakes people make - By Mandi Woodruff

When it comes to getting the salary you want, how you handle yourself at the negotiating table can make or break you, says Nicole Williams, LinkedIn career expert and CEO of WORKS, a career consultancy firm.

“This is a game of first card revealed, and you want it to be theirs,” Williams says.

We asked her to walk us through five of the most common mistakes job candidates make when negotiating:

Not dressing the part

This may sound obvious, but Williams says you should always consider what kind of environment you’re walking into when you plan your interview outfit. A three-piece suit may get you far if you’re interviewing in the financial services industry or at a law firm, but a company that is more relaxed (say, a tech startup) might be turned off by a look that makes it seem as if the applicant is trying too hard.  

“You want to look appropriate for this working environment but you want to look on the fancy end of that,” Williams says.

Bad body language

People fidget when they get anxious. We’re all human. But fiddling with a pen, a notepad or, worse, your phone can make you come across as aloof and not serious in front of an employer, Williams says. Keep anything that might distract you in your purse or briefcase or, even better, at home.

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“Anything you’re doing that distracts away from the conversation you’re having works to your disadvantage,” Williams says. “You use your eyes to convey a passion and interest. Look directly at them. You can use hand gestures but not … in a way where you’re distracting from the actual words you’re saying.”

Being the first to name a number
When you’re squaring off with a hiring manager, you don't want to be first to name a salary figure — even if that’s one of the first questions they ask you.

“It’s essentially revealing your hand to them,” Williams says. Instead, become an expert deflector. If your interviewer asks you what kind of pay you're looking for, tell her that you’d like to hear more about your job responsibilities and really talk up your passion for the position and your desire to work with their team. Countering her question by saying something along the lines of “I know you have a budget you’re working with — what budget is that?” is another way to deflect.

And if you feel cornered? Inflate your current salary by at least 5% to 10%, Williams says, which leaves you room to negotiate. Then indicate a range on top of that, rather than an exact figure. Do your homework beforehand and know what salary you can reasonably expect. If your range is too low, you could be leaving money on the table. If it’s too high, they may just laugh you out of the place. Williams recommends a $10,000 range (example: Somewhere between $75,000 and $85,000).

Asking about your salary at the beginning of the interview

Salary discussions should be left to the end of the interview, Williams says. Otherwise, they may think you’re only in it for the money.

“You want to convey interest in the position and ask questions around responsibilities, not how much do I make,” She says.
Besides, by learning all you can about your potential role with the company, you can build a better case for asking for more money down the line.
Accepting their first offer

Once they put a number on the table — even if it's higher than you expected — do not immediately accept.

“When you immediately accept... you look a little foolish, frankly,” Williams says. Instead, ask if their salary is negotiable. "That’s a great open-ended question that allows for them to state a new figure," she says. 

Culled from Yahoo Finance

5 things you need to retire early and comfortably-By David Ning

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While you certainly need a substantial nest egg to retire early, those who are happy in early retirement usually share a few common traits. You will need to be able to cope with financial shocks and to fill your days will new activities so you don't become bored. For aspiring early retirees, here's a list of goals worth shooting for:

You are willing to tune out market gyrations. Most early retirees need the help of growing equities to sustain their lifestyle for decades. But markets are volatile, and it's hard to hang on during a bear market. And the more you look at your investments, the harder it is to hold on. That's why successful early retirees often develop a strategy they feel comfortable with and then don't monitor the market constantly. That way, they won't feel as much anxiety with the daily gyrations, which ultimately helps them keep more money by staying the course.

You know your expenses. Some people project their retirement expenses as a percentage of their current income, but how much a retiree needs to save has nothing to do with his final salary. What you really need is to start estimating your expenses once you no longer have to work. From there, you can determine how much you will need to draw from your assets each year and can calculate a savings goal you need your nest egg to hit. Knowing exactly how much you spend on a monthly basis and that your nest egg can cover those expenses indefinitely can certainly ease many of your financial worries. Tracking your expenses also makes cutting spending without much sacrifice a lot easier.

You are comfortable earning income again if the need arises. You may never need to go back to work, but it's comforting to know that the option is always there. And just a tiny bit of additional income in retirement can make a huge difference because you can put a bit less stress on your portfolio whenever valuations head south. A retirement job can be a last resort that actually isn't that bad, and it could even be fun if you find an ideal position. At the very least, you won't have to significantly reduce your withdrawal rates and cut spending every time the market turns south.

You feel at peace about family dynamics. It's not always a good idea for young people, even if they have managed to save a boatload of money, to retire early. Your financial situation can change quickly once you get married or have kids. A changing family situation affects spending so much that none of the previous calculations make any sense anymore. Day care alone in certain parts of the country can cost $20,000 each year. Add that into the mix and you are looking at a completely different financial situation. If you expect your family situation to change, you probably aren't ready to retire just yet.

You are self-motivated to find new activities to fill the day. While it is fun to dream of retiring early during a stressful time at work, not everyone will actually be happy without work to fill their day. It takes initiative to get off the couch as an early retiree. Instead of running into people at work-related events, you must pick up the phone to call your friends to go out. You need to get over the nervousness of trying something new, and drive to the places you want to visit. Those who sit around all day quickly find that the days get boring, and a lack of social interaction and exercise can also start to impact your health. And let's face it, without a healthy body, nothing is enjoyable anyway.

Aiming to become an early retiree requires the discipline to save and stick to a budget. But happy retirees also need to be able to find meaningful ways to spend their time.

Culled from US News

Here are the only 9 jobs in America where women out-earn men-By Drake Baer and Andy Kiersz

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Getty Images

In 2013, among full-time, year-round workers, women were paid 78% as much as men, according to the American Association of University Women. That's the so-called pay gap between genders, and it hasn't moved much in a decade.

Now, new data released by the US Census Bureau reveals the scope of that gap within occupations. It compares men and women's full-time wages in 342 professions. As Catherine Rampell reports at the Washington Post, women earn more than men in only nine of them. 

View gallery

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(Andy Kiersz / Business Insider)

Furthermore, in the tiny fraction of jobs in which women earn more than men, it's by a nearly inconsequential amount. But when men out-earn women, it can be by a significant amount. Here are a few of the most extreme examples:

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(Andy Kiersz / Business Insider)

The standard explanation for the pay gap is that women self-select into low-paying, altruistic professions like nursing, teaching, and nonprofits, while men pursue highly lucrative, less altruistic careers. But this data shows the faults in that argument, since the pay gap persists in almost all job functions.
Organizational psychology and other fields offer a few explanations as to why:
Women want more temporal flexibility than men.
Harvard economist Claudia Goldin has argued that the wage gap owes to how men and women regard their time differently. While women often take time off to have kids, men typically don't, and it creates cascading effects in earning potential.
Harvard College grads serve as a prime example. Goldin's data is telling:

Among those who received their BAs around 1990, a 10 percent hiatus in employment time 15 years after the BA, thus amounting to an 18-month break, was associated with a decrease in earnings of 41 percent for those with an MBA, 29 percent for those with a JD or a PhD, and 15 percent for those with an MD.

How do we solve this? Either jobs need to be restructured so that they no longer reward never leaving work, or perhaps even more progressively, paternity leave could become mandated for men — and the burden of offspring would be more evenly distributed between genders.
Women are less likely to negotiate their salaries than men.
A 2007 study of graduating MBA students found that half of male grads had negotiated their job offers compared to an eighth of female grads. A 2013 German meta-analysis further confirmed that women are less likely to initiate negotiations.
In an interview with Forbes, Stanford management professor Margaret A. Neale captures why this creates such toxic downstream effects:

If you think of a $100,000 salary, and one person negotiates and gets $107,000, and the other doesn't — what's the cost of that? In a simple-minded way, some people say, "Is $7,000 really worth risking my reputation over?" And I agree, $7,000 may not be worth your reputation.

But that's not the correct analysis, because that $7,000 is compounded. If you and your counterpart who negotiated are treated identically by the company — you are given the same raises and promotions — 35 years later, you will have to work eight more years to be as wealthy as your counterpart at retirement. Now, the question is: $7,000 may not be worth the risk, but how about eight years of your life?

Since changing jobs every two years has become a common practice for getting paid more, losing out on negotiations can have a high price.
When women do negotiate, it comes at a cost.
Harvard professor Hannah Riley Bowles found as much in a 2006 study.
"In most organizations, those who control organizational resources and opportunities for advancement tend to be men," she and her colleagues wrote. "If women are justifiably less inclined than men to initiate negotiations with men, then they may have fewer opportunities to increase their compensation and promotion potential."
Women pay a "social cost" for negotiation, Bowles found, and men do not.

"Women who don’t negotiate may not be refraining because they are shy," explained New Yorker psych writer Maria Konnikova in her coverage of the studies. "They may, instead, be anticipating very real attitudes and very real reactions that are borne out, time and again, in the lab and in the office. Often, leaning in has an even worse effect than saying nothing."

Those are only a few of the biases that women face — and white men tend to benefit from. 

Culled from Business Insider

Challenges of the new pension scheme- Odunze Reginald C

Image credited to hrinsider.ca

With the call in Europe for an extension of the retirement age due to failure  of the pension scheme in those areas as a result of the global financial crises, and a scam targeting retirees, this shows that the pension environment has been a subject of issues and challenges occasioned by misappropriation of fund, failure of the retirees to access their benefit as at when due.

These has resulted in death of these retirees, lack of interest in adhering to the scheme and above government nonchalant attitude in ensuring that the perpetrators are brought to book, the police pension scam is still fresh in our minds.

But with the enactment of the pension reform act 2004 and the amended pension reform act 2014, there seems not only an improvement in the scheme but the average awareness that there is a whole lot of improvement in the management of the scheme, as the pensions hit 4.6 trillion Naira.

But notwithstanding the improved pension’s assets, there are still imminent challenges and issues, these issues can be categorized in to four, and they are follows:

A The challenges of the employee

B The challenges of the employer

C The challenges of the PFAS.

D The challenges of the Regulator

E The challenges of the custodian

A The challenges of the employees: The employee is one the key player in the new pension scheme, if not the most strategic player in the scheme. The mistakes of the employee has adversely affected the working of the scheme,  the major challenges on the of the employees are as follows:

A Lack of Adequate knowledge about the workings of the scheme,

B Negative perceptions towards the scheme

C Nigeria workers not imagined a future without a legitimate retirement plan

D untimely attendance of verification and enrolment exercises.

E untimely presentation of documents for nominal roll, IPPIS etc

F Non updating of registration details for possible changes

G late submission of completed retirement forms

H Submission of incomplete documents

I Inability to send retirement notifications 6 months to retirement

J Not signing of Lump sum agreement

K Unmatched names

L  Age discrepancies

Challenges of the employer:

The challenges of the employers include the following:

Failure of employer to remit contributions

Splitting employee’s contribution

Deducting incomplete contributions as it regards to both employee and employers contribution.

Failures of employers to contact employees six months before retirement

Tactically avoiding accrued pension rights

No information on computation of accrued pension rights of employees

Computation and payment of accrued pension rights.

Challenges of PFAs

Poor service delivery

Delay in access benefit payment

Wrong capture of biometrics

Wrong pen

Double pen, and at times triple pen

Delay in issuing pen

No early response to business correspondence

Low quality investment instruments

Volatile economic indices, e.g. inflation rate.

Challenges of regulator

No enough offices throughout the federation

Inability to thoroughly bring the informal sector in the scheme

No increase of pension for the past 10 ten years

Shortages of fund

Heavy tax on AVC

Challenges of custodian

Inability to capture the schedules

Not able to get the employer after payment issues

Not carrying the PFAS

Challenges of Life annuity

No Six months to retirement notification to the PFA

Information gap on annuity

Wrong information to the annuitants

Not giving the annuitant correct information

Odunze Reginald C is the Lead Consultant, Chareg Consulting.

You can follow our anchor at twitter @regydunze, and our Face book @reginald odunze.com , You can also check us at pensionsbenefit.com

South Africa's rand steadies, market awaits MPC

A man counts South African rand notes in a file photo. REUTERS/Michael Buholzer

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's rand was largely steady on Monday, with direction likely to be driven by global market moves as investors speculate on the timing of policy tightening in the United States.
On the domestic front, market players anticipated few ripples from the South African Reserve Bank's interest rate decision on Thursday, where the benchmark repo rate will likely stay unchanged at 5.75 percent.
At 0631 GMT, the rand was just 0.16 percent softer at 12.0300 to the dollar compared with Friday's close at the New York session.
Government bonds edged higher, pulling the yield on debt due in 2026 half a basis point lower to 7.735 percent.

"Euro/dollar remains the main market driver, not just of global currencies but increasingly also of interest rates, as markets digest whether Fed (U.S. Federal Reserve) tightening will be delayed because of the dollar’s remarkable gains," RMB analyst John Cairns said.

Culled from Reuters