Despite the apparently higher pay that comes with being a salaried employee, all of the extra time put into the job can make the per-hour wage quite low. Taking advantage of all of the tools at your disposal can help to raise your effective hourly wage.

Determining your hourly wage as a salaried employee is quite simple. Simply divide the total amount of money you make in any one period by the number of hours worked in that amount of time. So if you make $50 K per year and work about 60 hours per week, then you’d be making $50K/(60 hours/week*52 Weeks) = $16.03 per hour. While this is certainly better than many hourly wages, it likely isn’t nearly as high as you imagined.

Since we can’t do much about the top line of the equation, the only way to raise our hourly wage is by reducing the number of hours worked. Cutting back on the hours you work is never easy, but shaving even one or two hours a week off will have an effect. Dropping to 58 hours per week brings the hourly rate up to $16.58 in our example.

The much more effective way to reduce the number of hours worked is to take full advantage of your paid time off. In addition to vacation, many salaried employees also receive sick days and personal time. While unused vacation time typically carries over from year to year, sick and personal time is often granted on a “use it or lose it” basis each year. I strongly suggest that you use it. There’s nothing wrong with using all of your allocated time in a given year. You will certainly have enough valid personal business to use your personal time throughout the year and being “sick” is a highly subjective concept. I’m not suggesting that you exploit your sick and personal time but rather take full advantage of it when the need arises.

Using your time off can significantly raise your effective hourly wage. If you took 2 personal days, 3 sick days, and two weeks of vacation, then your hourly wage in the scenario above would jump to $17.24. While you won’t see an increase in your bank account as a result of this exercise, you will see a dramatic increase in the time you have available. The value of that time will be whatever you make of it. Whether it’s spending time enjoying friends and family, exercising, or helping your financial situation by taking the time to get your budget in order. This is true particularly at the beginning of a new year. Perhaps investing this time will yield some extra money to invest in a person-to-person loan portfolio at Lending Club. Either way, making effective use of that extra time makes it even more valuable.

Cutting back to 40 hours a week (or less if permitted) and taking all of your available time off is the ultimate way to maximize the effective hourly wage as a salaried employee. Even if you can’t do that, reducing the number of hours you’ve worked will raise your effective hourly wage and give you the extra time to do the things you really enjoy.

The start of a new year also signifies the end of the previous tax year. Even though April 15th still seems like a long way off, creating a system for organizing your taxes now may save you time, and money, later.

I called this post the tax info shoebox because that’s my organization method. There always seems to be a fresh shoebox lying around after the holidays after someone in my family receives new shoes, sneakers, slippers, etc. I keep this box in my home office and use it to collect all of the tax documents that will be coming in the mail in the next few months.

In addition to documents from your employer, you can also expect information from all institutions where you have taxable income or expenses. For example, if you have a person-to-person loan portfolio on LendingClub.com, then you can expect information from them stating the interest you have earned. When you think of the many banks you deal with, and the numerous investment and income sources you may have, the amount of paperwork that you are collecting can quickly become quite large. Once my shoebox is out for the tax year, I also add in the receipts from any charitable donations for the year that I have been saving.

Being organized will certainly save you time when you do your taxes, and it may save you money as well. If you use a tax preparer, as opposed to doing your taxes yourself, then a portion of the fee is typically tied to how long it takes to prepare your return. Making the job easier will help speed up the process and result in a lower preparation fee.

Being organized isn’t going to make your tax liability any less, but it may make the preparation process more pleasant. Getting organized now, before the documentation starts to arrive, will surely pay off.

With 18 days to go until we reach the end of our 5% Cash Bonus program, we want to update everyone on our progress:

• Our growth has been fantastic! We have reached $6MM in issued loans, and have over $3MM of loans in funding today, so our loan volume is growing extremely well

• Our lender base is growing as well – the number of lenders has doubled in the last month alone

• Our next system release (due in the next few days) also offers a great new set of lender tools that makes lending and account management even easier and incorporates feedback from many in our lending community

With all of the growth in loans and loan requests, we want to reach out as widely as possible to current and now prospective lenders with our special offer: Lending Club will give a 5% cash bonus to all lenders who lend $5,000 or more between December 14, 2007 and February 3, 2008. This bonus can be used to lend or can be withdrawn to your linked checking account. There are no special sign-ups needed to participate in this program.

Click here to read the program details.

Better Lending. Together

As I removed my Christmas tree and started pulling down my other Christmas decorations, the simplicity of what remained in my home was striking. It inspired me to consider other ways to simplify my life.

Don’t get me wrong; I love Christmas and the decorations that come with it. It’s just that when those decorations are removed, the remaining starkness opens up a world of possibilities. As I said in my previous post, Simplify Your Life, you realize that you don’t need a lot of stuff to make your home beautiful or your life happy. Removing the clutter does all those things and more.

We can apply the lessons learned here to the clutter in our financial lives as well. For many of us, the decorations are the glamour of bad debt and the objects that debt allows us to acquire. Taking a step back, we would likely realize that we could easily live without many of the things we purchase. This knowledge can help us avoid the temptation to spend beyond our means, particularly if we’re spending money on things that we don’t really need.

As we become less dependent on credit cards, we can simplify collateral clutter as well. Specifically, we can reduce the many credit card bills that we pay each month down to one payment by consolidating our debt. A good way to accomplish this goal is by obtaining a person-to-person loan on Lending Club. Not only will you have fewer bills to pay, but the low interest rates you’ll likely receive from Lending Club will also save you money month after month. This in turn paves the way for increased saving and investment.

The glitz of the holiday season is exciting and can easily distract us from the things that truly matter to us. By paring things down to their bare essentials, we create a situation upon which a solid base (financial or otherwise) can be built.

Not accounting for money was so 2007. This year, it's all about budgeting.

As the New Year turns and resolutions are made, many people will be making new efforts to monitor their moolah. Budgets are as popular a New Year's resolution as dieting and swearing less, but shucks to jeepers if money management doesn't fall by the wayside just as easily as healthy eating and clean talk.

Budgeting in and of itself is easy. Add the money you have, and subtract the money you spend. It's so easy a sixth grader could do it, provided the sixth grader is receiving a steady income and has expenses other than cup stacking. Many people believe that budgeting is tough, but other than preventing you from buying those fancy shoes, there's nothing tough about it. Budgets are as simple and straightforward as they come.

The hard part is keeping the budget through the whole year. I resolved to budget my finances several years ago, and I am pleased to announce that as of 2008, I am still resolving to budget my finances. Like most resolutions, budgeting fizzles out well before temperatures warm up. For some, the awful realization that January's brutal finances are simply an omen of things to come tends to dampen moods. Others fail to follow through because life gets busy and math is hard. Getting through the first couple months is undeniably the most difficult part, but if you make it past those depressing first weeks, the rest of the year seems like a breeze—not unlike the breeze blowing through the empty folds of your wallet or purse.

More importantly, having a budget that works for you can make all the difference. The straightforwardness of money management allows a lot of room for leeway and creativity, and the beauty of budgets is that they can be whatever you want to make them. The following are six examples of budgets that might each appeal to someone different.

Obsessive-compulsive money management

This is the type of budget that people aspire to—and by people, I mean overachievers. There's absolutely nothing wrong with documenting the minutiae of what goes on in your penny bag, especially if your penny bag is throwing a party or inviting his cool, college-aged brother to hang out. In fact, we should all be more obsessive-compulsive. Then, we would know where that five dollars went that we swore we had before we went into the comic book store.

The detailed approach is full of categories, sub-categories and sub-categories of sub-categories. For example, if a particular budget had a section for entertainment, there would be a sub-category for romcoms featuring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan that take place in climates that receive more than four inches of rainfall per year. In other words, this budgeting style can get a little overwhelming.

On the plus side, money is well accounted for, but at the same time, most people get burned out by President's Day. If you are able to hack it, the uptight budget is the best way to find out where all that money goes.

Low maintenance money management

Hide your money in $20 bills under your mattress. Take out when needed.

“Room to work” money management

This type of budget must be a favorite among hippies and liberals (is that redundant?) because it is all about freedom and not too much about specifics. For instance, if you bring in $2,000 each month, everything else is subtracted from your total until the end of the month. This makes it easy to see how much money you have left but gives you no idea how to plan ahead for anything. Like I said, perfect for hippies and liberals.

General budget management

These budgets are the happy acres retirement home for all other budgets, where they sit together and reminisce about the good old days when they were updated regularly and had a say in big money decisions. Almost all budgets end up here—some out of necessity, others out of apathy. The general budget is acoustic money-managing…in a small coffee shop…on a Tuesday night…in front of five people…four of whom are family members.

Almost inevitably, budgeters don't keep up with the promises of temperance. Feelings change, math skills diminish, and people discover that they liked spending willy-nilly a lot more than they thought they did. A general budget is the perfect old-man cruise when a person reaches this point in life—they are easy to maintain and you can still tell your overbearing parents that, yes, of course you have a budget.

These budgets are arranged in simple asset and liability columns, and after you are done snickering at the eighth-grade humor hidden in the word "asset," sub-columns such as groceries, gas, and utilities pop up. General budgets can be as simple as money coming in and money coming out or as complicated as income, bills, necessities, and entertainment. But it really can't get much more difficult than that, otherwise it is no longer all that general.

Streamlined money management

Big categories, big margin for error, small commitment.

The streamlined budget is the way to go if you're into a fast, efficient way of tracking how your money is spent. It borrows from several other types of budgeting without feeling like a pathetic wallflower. From the uptight, the streamliners have borrowed strong accountability. From the generalized, they have taken the concept of manageable organization. From the lazy, they snatched $20 from under the mattress while no one was looking.

Streamlined budgets are handy because they are less cumbersome than the all-inclusive ones, yet they do a great job of tracking cash flow. I have a streamlined budget of my own named "Jeffy," and it works great for me. Every week, I check my bank and credit card statements for charges and place them accordingly into my expense categories. I have a separate section for monthly bills and income, although the bills part always seems to be bigger.

The budget of your dreams

This budget has income that actually exceeds expenses, and if you have one of these, then you must be dreaming. Seriously, you're asleep. Wake up.

There is no better time than the present to take up budgeting…except for maybe the past. But whatever the future holds, you will be more monetarily prepared knowing your spending tendencies. Resolving to fix your free-flowing funds will be the best resolution you've ever made. I swear…er, promise.