Assessing Career Opportunities

When I was getting my start as a financial planner, I got an offer from just about every financial firm I interviewed with. Every bank, insurance company, brokerage firm, and asset manager was interested in a veteran with an MBA in finance at just 24 years old! Or at least that’s what the offers suggested. Yet, one comparison of offers comes to mind in particular. You see, by the time I was coming down to making a decision, I was comparing two firms, which for dramatic purposes, we’ll just call Firm A and Firm B.

Both firms were century-old financial firms with decades of financial product innovation and services development. They both boasted thousands-plus ranks of financial advisors providing financial advice to well over a million clients. They both had nicely established offices in both Fort Collins and the Denver area. Both had large teams of local advisors with a variety of experience. I had the privilege to interview with both, meet with new and experienced advisors on their teams, and to see the technology and resources they lent to their advisors to help them serve their clients.

Despite the equality of conditions on offer described before, Firm A didn’t offer as much as Firm B. Firm A’s business model was straightforward: you work as a 1099 contractor affiliated with the firm, you get paid 60% of the revenue your business generates, and you pay $500/month after the first 6 months pass to pay for the hard dollar technology costs of your email, financial planning software, etc. You would receive compliance support, access to the regional offices, and access to a team of financial planning experts for advanced questions. Firm B offered something comparable in terms of the support and services, charged less for technology ($100/month), and was offering a $3,000 monthly stipend for the first two years.

It will not surprise you, then, given my earlier allusion to dramatic purposes, that I chose to work with Firm A and not Firm B, despite the appearance of a better offer.

Everyone knows, of course, that comparing job opportunities often comes down to far more than just comparing salaries or hourly rates. Yet, it’s often difficult to assess job opportunities because while there can often be data on the subject insofar as industry benchmarking, it often fails to account for both the hard benefits such as a retirement plan and insurance, but also the fringe benefits such as PTO, flex time, and culture. Worse, while niche benchmarking data can capture data points on even those types of benefits, no one can really tell you how to put a discount or premium on those as it applies to you. So today, we’re talking about developing and using a rubric to assess career opportunities that you can tailor for your own future career decisions.

Benchmarking Cash Compensation

The first and easiest way to benchmark cash compensation for your rubric is to get your arms around the industry norms for compensation. This requires a three-step process generally, but there are some follow-on considerations to take into account that we’ll discuss after.

The first step is to utilize large-scale benchmarking data for your job of choice. The easiest place to do this is the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and finding the relevant data is rather easy. Simply open Google and search for “job title salary Bureau of Labor Statistics.” The job title you sought, or the most relevant similar titles, will show up at the top of the page, and from there, you can immediately see the median pay on offer for that role, typically within the last 1-2 calendar years as benchmarked through ongoing Bureau of Labor Statistics studies.

(Example: financial advisor salary bureau of labor statistics)

The second step is to regionally adjust the national median pay to your particular region. Once again, an easy way to obtain this is to use Google or your AI tool of choice (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, etc.) to ask the following prompt: “How does the cost of living in [city, state] compare to the national average?” Take the relevant result and increase or decrease the national median for the position you’re evaluating to adjust to an approximate median salary for your region. For example, cost of living in Longmont is considered approximately 38%-41% higher than the national average. That means a position with a national median of $100,000 should probably pay approximately $138,000-$141,000 in a city like Longmont.

The third step is then to adjust for degree of experience. Another useful resource for this can be websites like salary.com, which will show relevant levels of experience and relevant salaries. You should anticipate that the job offer you’ve received should reflect both regional cost of living and degree of experience as a fundamental element of the compensation package. Thus, if you’re applying for an entry level role you should not be surprised to see your offer is lower than the national median, and if you’re applying for a senior role you should expect the offer to be higher than the national median unless you live in an area with a cost of living that lives at the far extreme ends of the distribution, e.g. entry level employees living in New York City or San Francisco can anticipate being paid more than more senior employees in markets like Hays Kansas.

Ultimately, the first step of your rubric is not to immediately decline or accept a position if you find that it mismatches your salary expectations in the respective negative or positive sense, but to use that data to then evaluate subsequent elements of the compensation package. To score this for yourself, use a scale of -2 to +2, where -2 means the compensation is well below experience and regionally adjusted considerations for salary, and +2 means the position is offering a substantial premium above the same.

Scoring Mainstream Benefits

Mainstream benefits will encompass anticipated and conventional benefits, such as a retirement plan, insurance, and PTO. For each of these, we’ll provide some benefits-specific guidance.

Retirement Plan: While the benchmark retirement plan in the United States is the 401(k) plan, different positions with different employers and in different industries will offer different options. For example, those working in a school district like St. Vrain Valley School District will participate in PERA’s defined benefit pension plan as a default retirement plan, but will have the option to contribute to a 401(k) and a qualified 457 plan. Others working for organizations like the Federal Government have options like the Thrift Savings Plan. But in turn, while many smaller businesses offer plans like SIMPLE IRAs or startups might offer equity rather than a retirement plan, we’ll evaluate these using the 401(k) as the relevant benchmark most widely applicable.

For a 401(k) plan, the primary items of relevance you can evaluate at the job offer stage are whether there is a match and whether there is a vesting schedule. The 401(k) industry benchmark for a 401(k) match is 4%, which is established because the 401(k) regulations under ERISA set 4% as the matching safe harbor figure. Employers can offer a greater match (e.g., 5% or 6%), but offering less often means the plan is not conforming to safe harbor regulations; this doesn’t mean a plan offering less than 4% is bad, but you may consider it a factor that moves it down on your scale from a 0 to a -1. In turn, you might want to treat either increased percentage matches or a non-elective contribution where the employer adds to your account whether you contribute or not as items that enhance your scale to a +1 or +2.

The other factor is a vesting schedule. While these are less and less common, it’s valuable to ensure that if you participate in the plan and receive a match, the match is going to come with you should you leave. Your contributions are typically always vested in a 401(k) plan, but matching dollars can be locked up either in full or in increments for several years of service with the firm. A lack of a vesting schedule is typical, so probably not an item that adds points to the retirement plan, but a vesting schedule should probably reduce points on the retirement plan.

If you’re comparing similar to 401(k) plans such as a 401(a), 403(b), or 457 plan, the same factors as described above can come into consideration. The only potential standout is the offering of a qualified 457 plan, since that plan uniquely lets you double-dip contributions into such a plan, e.g. an employer offering a 401(k) and a 457 plan can permit you to contribute $24,500 into both the 401(k) and 457 plan in 2026 for a total of $49,000 in contributions, while most employees are stuck with the single plan limit of $24,500.

There are other types of retirement plans such as pensions, cash balance plans, SIMPLE IRAs, and SEP IRAs. We won’t go too much into the detail of comparing these case by case, except to say that if you do some research into each of them, it should be reasonably apparent to you whether they are advantageous for your personal situation compared to a 401(k) or disadvantageous. For example, pensions favor older employees over younger employees, while contribution plans like 401(k) plans, SIMPLE IRAs, and the like, favor younger employees over older employees. Adjust your score accordingly.

Health Insurance: The national average for employer-to-employee costs for health insurance is a ratio of 80% paid by the employer to 20% paid by employees for their personal coverage, not necessarily inclusive of coverage for family members and dependents. This will form the baseline “average” for assessing medical insurance provided by an employer, though the amount of coverage and quality of policies will also be an important factor.

Employers paying all or most of the premium for the employee should receive credit towards the scoring of the health insurance benefit, and employers paying some or all of the premium for family members should receive the same. In turn, if you find your employee-level health insurance premium is greater than $100 monthly, then the employer is potentially shifting the cost of that benefit onto you as an employee. In turn, it’s typical to see that cost of coverage for a spouse or children can extend into the several hundreds of dollars. In these cases, you should expect $300-$500 out of pocket for health insurance if extending it to a spouse or children. As noted before, if your premium costs are less than this, that’s a positive, and if it’s greater than this, that’s a negative.

With regard to coverage, this is very difficult to generalize given the wide variety of health and needs people have. Two key things to look for in the catalog of healthcare options provided by an employer is whether they offer a gold-tier ACA plan and/or an HSA-eligible high-deductible healthcare plan, albeit one that perhaps still has a reasonably low deductible (e.g. at or just above the coverage requirement). Which is appropriate for you is going to depend on your health, family, and cash flow, but either can be advantageous for the appropriate person, and few people fall into a category where neither is applicably beneficial.

Dental and Vision Insurance: One of the great amusements of being a financial planner is the old 90s movie joke where a tired illumination-vest-wearing union worker somewhere is complaining about their job earlier in the movie, then as the plot develops and some erstwhile ominous corporation comes in, we later see that same worker now working for the bad guy company. Explaining their reason? “They had dental.”

The amusement comes from the fact that dental insurance is remarkably cheaper than health insurance, even at the upper end of product quality, and the same can be said for vision. Combining premiums for both dental and vision typically costs an employer as little as 1/10^th the price of health insurance. Thus, if an employer doesn’t offer either, or offers health but not vision and/or dental, they’re being pennywise and pound foolish.

The scoring here is easy. Offers vision and dental? +1. Offers both and pays the premiums? +2. Offers neither? -2. You can then weight by whether there’s family coverage included as well.

Life & Disability Insurance: For life insurance, it’s fairly typical for employers to offer your annual salary; however, this is not actually the best possible option. Because life insurance can be offered freely by employers to employees with a death benefit of up to $50,000 without causing any imputed income, $50,000 is an ideal life insurance benefit as a default. What you then want to see from an employer is very affordable guaranteed issue additional life insurance if you need it. For those who are single or without dependents, life insurance greater than $50,000 is taxed as imputed income to the participant, and the premiums to obtain such coverage are treated as additional taxable income, which is an expense any individual may or may not need. For scoring purposes, offering life insurance is a baseline score, while the presence of more than $50,000 could be a positive or a negative depending on your circumstances.

In turn, disability insurance is another benefit with a strange nature to score. Succinctly, the first variable of consideration is whether both long- and short-term disability coverages are offered. Each is useful; you’re far more likely to use a short-term disability coverage than a long-term disability coverage, but the financial harm of long-term disability is far greater, so each has its place. In turn, the next element is then whether you pay for the coverage or whether the employer pays for it. Believe it or not, either option is fine. If your employer pays for some or all of your disability insurance for you, that means the benefit is free but also means that the income provided by the policy, should a disability event occur, will be taxed as income. Conversely, if you pay for some or all of the benefit, then the income is tax-free. In the case that you pay some and the employer pays some, it’s simply proportional to how much of the premiums were being paid by which party. You should score this as a positive or negative depending on how you account for a personal priority on cash flow versus better insurance coverage.

PTO: There are three primary domains of paid time off. Accumulating/banked PTO, use-it-or-lose-it PTO, and unlimited PTO. Each has its key advantages and disadvantages, but more importantly, there are considerations in how you should evaluate these for yourself, and ultimately how you weight these is up to you.

In the case of an accumulating/banked PTO policy, the primary benefit is that upon termination or quitting, you should have any accrued PTO paid out to you on your last paycheck. This means that effectively all PTO you earn during your time in the position is an accruing bonus that can either be spent on time off or otherwise cashed out at the end of employment. The key downside to this style of PTO is that if you do not work a day or an hour per the terms of your employment agreement, you must spend PTO to be paid for that time or otherwise go unpaid.

One of the least popular options is use-it-or-lose-it PTO, but permit me to make an argument in its favor. While some people might balk at the idea of having their time off capped, one of the best features of a use-it-or-lose-it PTO model is that it encourages you to actually take the time off. While lacking the ability to bank significant time off for a future end-of-work bonus might represent a financial drawback, the mechanism of losing PTO drives employees to actually use their time off rather than letting it expire.

One of the most popular options but also one of the most complex is the unlimited PTO policy. Unlimited PTO is favorable by its very nature because there is no accrual or banking of time off, simply time off taken on an as-needed basis. The key drawback goes hand in hand with the key criticism. Ambiguity often leads people to make more conservative decisions with their requests for time off because they’re afraid of “pushing it” too much. In turn, because unlimited PTO has no accrual or banking element, it carries no cash-out value in the event that you quit with unused time. A critical question to ask during the interview or acceptance phase of applying for a job with unlimited PTO is to understand which holidays the firm takes off by default, what the approval policies for the unlimited PTO policy are, and what the average is for the firm*.

*At MY Wealth Planners, the average employee takes 38.5 days off annually, and the record for time off was an employee who took a combined 107 days off in 25 months of employment, including both elective PTO and holidays.

HSA and FSA Accounts: Whether the company offers HSA or FSA accounts is less about whether there are any incentives in the accounts than that they are offered. These accounts typically cost an employer little-to-nothing to offer and can present employees with substantial tax savings. It is thus a basic measurement of a company’s compensation as to whether these options are available, as the healthcare options under the HSA and FSA can be valuable to anyone, and the dependent care FSA is enormously valuable to parents with young children.

Fringe Benefits

There is an IRS definition of fringe benefits that includes things like a company cellphone or company car, but we’re going to expand our discussion today to encompass a broader discussion of culture and compensation philosophy. Put simply, in the case of the formal IRS version of fringe benefits: Perks are perks. If your company offers you a wellness stipend, company cell phone, free meals, or other quality of life elements, those are all naturally valuable, so long as they’re not serving as a replacement for more core benefits like a retirement plan or health insurance. After all, a ping pong table in the break room is nice, but building wealth you can retire on seems more important.

With respect then to the culture of things like flexible work, professional development, and the mission of the organization, you have to weigh the present and future value of these things accordingly. For example, taking a position with a smaller firm or with lower compensation might be more valuable to you earlier in your career if that opportunity comes with more responsibilities and presents a greater chance of developing useful lifelong professional skills. In turn, if you have a busy personal and family life, you might want to look for firms that offer you the opportunity to clock in and clock out at a very fixed set of times so that you can get back to your busy life outside of work. How you value the infinite variety of factors here is up to you, but for every key distinction you value in a job, try to give those same factors a +2/-2 scale so you can weight them with the core compensation accordingly.

Variable Compensation

Outside of salaries, hourly wages, benefits, and fringe benefits, is variable compensation or incentive compensation. Some roles are billed as having a fixed salary with a +% of salary as bonus; others offer equity or stock options. Certain industries have very common compensation structures; for example, insurance agents are almost universally paid on commission and thus their salary might be little to nothing, but their variable compensation might be the majority of the revenue they produce. In turn, those working in software and technology are very frequently offered restricted stock unit (RSU) grants as part of their compensation package as an enticement to stay with an employer longer term.

The key questions for you in evaluating variable compensation are these:

• Are the goals for obtaining the variable compensation attainable or impossible?
• Is the variable compensation a meaningful amount of compensation and relevant for driving the applicable behavior?
• Does the nature of the variable compensation align with your short-term and long-term goals?

No amount of bonus compensation is meaningful to you if you cannot obtain it, if it does not motivate you appropriately, or if it does not help you get out of life what you want. That doesn’t mean it’s worthless, but when you evaluate a position, any bonus compensation should be most closely aligned with both the way you like to work and what you want to get out of work.

Adding it All Up

When you evaluate any opportunity, you have to make fair consideration of what it does to support your short- and long-term goals. If you’re in a position of advantage to pick and choose your opportunities, you can be more judicious in the opportunities you take, and when you’re out of work or desperate for a change, you might evaluate a less-than-ideal opportunity as still better than the status quo. There is no materially right or wrong answer regarding whether any specific opportunity is right for you individually, but it remains important to evaluate both the “tangibles” of what an opportunity provides as well as the subsequent opportunities and value that it may offer for a future you. Most importantly, while the math might tell you that option A is better than option B, more than anything, using a rubric is there to help you better understand the gut check you feel when evaluating your options. The decision of how to pursue your career opportunities is more than a math question.