Relative Income
Most people think of their income in terms of annual (or absolute) income. This can be helpful if you don't care how much you work. But you're in the service industry, and that means you want a lot of flexibility and free time. It's simple, you want to make enough money to do all the things you want to do, but you don't want to use up all your free time to get it. So, you want to make a lot of money relative to the amount of time you work.
This is what I mean by relative income, how much money you make relative to how much you work. Your absolute income only takes into account what you end up with at the end of the year, week, or sometimes even day, and doesn't take into account how many hours you are actually putting on the clock.
Pay close attention to how much you are walking out with per hour. If you aren't making $20-40 an hour, you're selling yourself short. A lot of servers think about their earnings in terms of what they make per week. This can lead to picking up slow shifts on their days off and rationalizing slacking off, because as long as they've made their goal for the week, they're satisfied. If your goal is to always make the highest dollar per hour ratio possible, you will always make more money. It works. Try it.
Think about this. A typical 9 to 5, five times a week, is a 40-hour workweek, and often there's at least another 10 hours of work related things to deal with once you're home. Jobs like being a restaurant manager tend to have even worse hours. If you work for salary, then get ready to work your life away! I've seen managers pressured into working 80-hour work weeks, no joke.
People working a 50-hour work week that take off one month a year for holidays and vacations (if they're lucky), are working 2,400 hours per year. Let's compare that to a restaurant server working 5 or 6 shifts per week for about 10 months out of the year. If the shifts are all around 6 or 7 hours, and they're clearing an average of $30 an hour, then they'll be working about (drumroll please..) HALF that many hours and making around $30,000 annually.
In other words, if you are making $30 an hour after taxes and tip outs, then you will only need to work about 1,000 hours a year to clear around $30,000. In order for a 9 to 5'er to make that kind of relative income, they'd have to make an annual salary of $100,000 before taxes! No matter how you look at it, restaurant servers and bartenders make way more money per hour than most people, and that's just awesome.
This is what I mean by relative income, how much money you make relative to how much you work. Your absolute income only takes into account what you end up with at the end of the year, week, or sometimes even day, and doesn't take into account how many hours you are actually putting on the clock.
Pay close attention to how much you are walking out with per hour. If you aren't making $20-40 an hour, you're selling yourself short. A lot of servers think about their earnings in terms of what they make per week. This can lead to picking up slow shifts on their days off and rationalizing slacking off, because as long as they've made their goal for the week, they're satisfied. If your goal is to always make the highest dollar per hour ratio possible, you will always make more money. It works. Try it.
Think about this. A typical 9 to 5, five times a week, is a 40-hour workweek, and often there's at least another 10 hours of work related things to deal with once you're home. Jobs like being a restaurant manager tend to have even worse hours. If you work for salary, then get ready to work your life away! I've seen managers pressured into working 80-hour work weeks, no joke.
People working a 50-hour work week that take off one month a year for holidays and vacations (if they're lucky), are working 2,400 hours per year. Let's compare that to a restaurant server working 5 or 6 shifts per week for about 10 months out of the year. If the shifts are all around 6 or 7 hours, and they're clearing an average of $30 an hour, then they'll be working about (drumroll please..) HALF that many hours and making around $30,000 annually.
In other words, if you are making $30 an hour after taxes and tip outs, then you will only need to work about 1,000 hours a year to clear around $30,000. In order for a 9 to 5'er to make that kind of relative income, they'd have to make an annual salary of $100,000 before taxes! No matter how you look at it, restaurant servers and bartenders make way more money per hour than most people, and that's just awesome.
