Are friends/family shocked at your salary?

My immediate and extended family has always given me crap for my paychecks and unwillingness to accompany them on x-and-y vacation, etc., but they never get tired of saying their relative so-and-so was a SPORTSWRITER for SUCH-AND-SUCH!!!

 

I don't know why, but I always assumed they made more. Not even close to true in the market I worked in.

 

I really have no idea if my parents or my friends know exactly how little I make. I've told them I don't make a lot, but I have no idea if they know what that means.

Here's when it really hits home for me: when I catch up with some of the students I used to teach when I was an unofficial adviser for the newspaper at a local college a few years back. Once they graduated, they immediately lapped me or better -- some a lot better --in pay because very few of them actually went into journalism. It's really quite emasculating.

 

I was the education reporter in my former news gig, so I'd usually get saddled with the "talk to the kids at career day" deal.

A seventh-grader asked me what I made. I hedged by saying "Well, I'm kind of new at the paper, but the reporters who've been there five years or so make almost $30,000."

The look of surprise and disappointment on the kids' faces was quite telling! I think I managed to steer a fair few of them away from the journalism industry that day.

My non-journo friends were always surprised when I told them what I made. I rarely talked about it, frankly, once I realized how much less than most of them I was pulling in. My dad was shocked when I finally told him my salary and couldn't believe I was living on what the paper was paying me.

 

I left journalism -- an SE job at a small paper, had 9 years in -- for teaching.

There were probably 50 times my first year as a teacher where people asked how I was coping with my pay cut, and their faces would be surprised when I told them my salary was slightly higher as a first-year teacher.

 

My dad's a lifelong journalist, so you think I would have known better, but when I was a kid, all mine and my sisters' friends thought my dad made a lot of money cause he was a reporter and his name was in the paper.

May have something to do with the perception of the "elite media" and people assume that means money. If they knew what most of us really make, I think they'd realize plumbers and mechanics are more "elite."

 

Same here.

I've never told anyone in my family how much I actually make, just that it's "way less than you do."

An uncle of mine is drawing more from his pension (I believe it's a pension, anyway ...) than I made last year. He drew, I think, some 28K off that and I raked in little under 22K total.

 

I can tell you from experience that newbies in radio make less than most of those starting in newspapers. I do OK with money now; I'm just concerned about the next landing spot.

 

I don't even tell my wife my salary. Y'all sure are free with yours.

 

Yes, my dad never thought I would make more than 10K in a year.

 

When I started in the business, I was making $8.10 an hour and I had to fight for that. That was only 10 years ago. Now, I'm a little over $30K a year (roughly double). I look back and wonder how I wasn't starving to death and living in the back of my car. I think my folks were just happy I wasn't living with them and was doing something with my degree.

 

Yep, did that, too a few years back. First question I got from the kids was "How much money do you make?" Kids, gotta love 'em.