<p>I'm so confused on how to evaluate how much money I need. I do not know what kind of things to put into account (insurance, taxes, bills, etc). Any tips? Any books? So I know how much money to negotiate in job interviews.</p>
<p>How much is rent? x12
food per week? x52
car insurance? get quotes
rental insurance? get quotes
tax rates are publicly available
factor in your loans if you have any</p>
<p>salaries can vary a lot based on career field and geographic location. you can get general rent prices by scanning craigslist for different arrangements and what the people are asking (townhouse, single family house, apartment, condo, near work, farther from work, etc)</p>
<p>remember you are not going to be living the high live right out of undergrad... you'll probably be living with a apartment/house-mate or two or three or four.</p>
<p>while it is fine to try to negotiate when you get a job offer, keep in mind you are not the first person out of college that your employer will be offering a job to. They are aware of costs and what people have accepted (and thus lived on) in previous years. In other jobs (like fed government), there is not really any negotiating room.</p>
<p>You don't want to know how much money you NEED, because that number is very low - look up how many families live under the poverty line.</p>
<p>The question you are asking is how much you WANT. This is a completely rational and reasonable question! However how much you want has no correlation with what will be offered to you. For example, if you want to live in a midtown Manhattan apartment, purchase a car, go on a nice vacation and still have enough to save for emergency and retirement, you would probably want to have a $100,000 salary; conversely, if you want to live in Brooklyn without a car and not bother with a vacation or savings, you would probably want $30,000.</p>
<p>A good resource is Glassdoor.com. You can get a realistic picture of salary bands in different companies within an industry. If you get an offer, you should absolutely try to negotiate, but make sure to be reasonable. If you are offered $35,000 and your research says the standard is $38,000, it is reasonable to ask for $40,000 and see what happens; the worst that will happen is that you accept the initial offer, and the best is that you will accept an offer for five grand more. Conversely, if you're offered $25,000 in an industry that typically pays $50,000, you may not be able to negotiate up to industry standard.</p>
<p>Salary negotiations are fascinating to me, to be honest. It's a great display of economic theory: you are the supply and have a price associated with you; demand determines what that price is!</p>
<p>One-on-one salary negotiations are a terrible example of economic theory. They're easily manipulated, one side wields all the power and information is almost always asymmetrical. The employer is represented by a trained professional negotiator skilled in psychological manipulation, while the employee... isn't either of those.</p>
<p>Come to think of it, actually that's a perfect example of capitalist economics. (Hence the need for unions.)</p>
<p>By the way, you're totally wrong in saying "the worst that will happen" is that you accept the original offer. Employers can revoke the offer itself if you even try to negotiate. Which happens all the time.</p>