A job offer is not one number. This week, you learn how to price what can be priced, flag what cannot, and test whether the headline salary survives the rest of the offer.
MATCHVESTINGHEALTH PREMIUMHSAPTO
START HERE
Two tracks are moving this week.
The book keeps moving in sequence. The finance lesson moves where it is most useful.
Reading track
Chapter 8: The $100,000 Opportunity
Chapter 9: The Five Questions
These continue the story and give you a risk framework we will use again later.
Teaching track
Week 7 lesson: job offers, benefits, vesting, PTO, and total compensation.
Assignment 3: The Two Offers
Discussion 7: Salary Is Not the Whole Offer
Nothing here requires your own employment information. Use the supplied cases only.
ASSIGNMENT 3 · SUPPLIED CASE
The salary line is only the front door.
You saw these offers last week. This lesson teaches the pieces without doing the full Assignment 3 comparison for you.
Offer A
$66,000 salary
100% of first 2% 401(k) match
Immediate vesting
$280/month employee health premium
$0 employer HSA contribution
10 PTO days
Offer B
$61,000 salary
100% of first 6% 401(k) match
3-year cliff vesting
$90/month employee health premium
$1,200 employer HSA contribution
20 PTO days
The point: salary alone cannot settle the choice. The time horizon matters because vesting changes what the employee actually keeps, and some important terms are missing entirely.
PRICE THE PIECES
Some terms are clean numbers. Some are estimates. Some are conditions.
SalaryDirect annual cash compensation. Usually easy to price.
Employer matchCan be calculated from salary and the match formula, but only if the employee contributes enough and vesting is understood.
Health premiumThe employee premium is priceable. The full value of the health plan is not known without deductibles, networks, copays, and out-of-pocket limits.
Employer HSA contributionEmployer dollars deposited to the employee's HSA. Priceable in the supplied case, but it does not describe the entire health plan.
PTOValuable paid time, but not extra cash salary. Any dollar estimate depends on an assumption about what a day is worth.
VestingA condition on ownership. It can change the value of employer retirement contributions if the employee leaves.
Rule for this week: Price what you can. Label assumptions. Do not force every benefit into one fake-precise number.
PRACTICE · EMPLOYER MATCH
A match is not just a percentage. It is a formula.
Practice case: salary $58,000. Employer matches 100% of the first 4% contributed. Assume the employee contributes enough to capture the full match.
$58,000 × 0.04 = $2,320 maximum employer match
Then ask the second question: when does the employee own those employer dollars?
VESTING
Money can be credited to your account before it is yours to keep.
Suppose an employer uses 3-year cliff vesting for employer contributions. The employee leaves after 18 months.
Start0%
12 mo.0%
18 mo.leaves
36 mo.100%
Cliff means cliff. Under a 3-year cliff, the employee is 0% vested before the cliff and 100% vested at the cliff. Employee salary and the employee's own retirement contributions are separate from this rule.
PRACTICE · HEALTH PREMIUM
Monthly benefits costs have annual consequences.
Practice case: one plan costs the employee $255 per month. Another costs $105 per month. What is the annual difference paid by the employee?
Premium is not the whole health plan. A lower premium can come with a higher deductible, smaller network, or different cost sharing.
EMPLOYER HSA CONTRIBUTION
A dollar from the employer still needs context.
In the supplied case, Offer B includes a $1,200 annual employer HSA contribution.
Best treatment: include the employer HSA contribution as a supplied employer benefit. Do not double-count it, and do not assume it tells you whether the health plan itself is better.
CURRENT BENCHMARK · BLS JUNE 2026
Benefits are large enough that salary cannot stand alone.
For private-industry workers, BLS reported that wages and salaries were 70.0% of employer compensation costs and benefits were 30.0% in June 2026.
70.0% wages
30.0% benefits
Private industry averageFull-time private industry benefits: 31.5%
$46.89
Total employer compensation cost per hour, private industry
$32.82
Wages and salaries per hour
$14.07
Benefits per hour
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026. Open the official BLS release
BENCHMARK, NOT SHORTCUT
What does 30% actually let you say?
BLS is a benchmark. It tells you benefits are a meaningful part of compensation across a population. It does not price Jordan's exact package and it does not turn 30% of salary into a personal benefit total.
PTO · VALUE WITHOUT PRETENDING IT IS CASH
Assignment 3 leaves PTO outside the cash-style package total on purpose.
Discussion 7 asks what happens when you assign the time an estimated value and use that estimate only as a sensitivity test.
Do not do this
Add PTO to salary and call the result cash compensation.
VS.
Do this
State an assumption, estimate the value of paid time, and see whether the recommendation is sensitive to that assumption.
Before you can value ten days, you must answer a more basic question: what is one paid workday worth?
GATED CALCULATION · DISCUSSION 7 PREP
Choose the denominator before you see the number.
Use Offer B's $61,000 salary. Choose a method, calculate the estimated value of one paid day, and enter your answer.
Working-day baseline
$234.62
$61,000 ÷ 260 workdays
Equivalent hourly method
$234.62
$61,000 ÷ 2,080 × 8 hours
A 365-day method gives about $167.12. You may defend another denominator, but explain what it measures and what it leaves out. PTO replaces paid work time, which is why 260 workdays is the stronger baseline here.
SENSITIVITY TEST · DO NOT FINISH D7 HERE
Your estimate is an input, not the answer.
Discussion 7 asks you to take the daily value you just estimated and apply it to the PTO difference after you finish Assignment 3.
Year one
Offer B has 10 more PTO days than Offer A.
10 × your daily estimate
18 months
For the discussion, assume PTO accrues proportionally. The difference becomes 15 days.
15 × your daily estimate
Stop here. Do not use this lesson to run the full Offer A versus Offer B comparison. Assignment 3 requires you to produce the year-one and 18-month baselines yourself. Discussion 7 then tests how sensitive those baselines are to your PTO assumption.
WHAT THE OFFER DOES NOT TELL YOU
A recommendation is only as good as the facts underneath it.
For Discussion 7, identify one missing term and explain why its absence matters more to your recommendation than the $5,000 salary difference does.
The missing fact is not worth points because it sounds important. It is worth points when you explain how it could change the recommendation relative to a known $5,000 salary gap.
WORKFLOW · DO NOT WAIT UNTIL SUNDAY
Assignment 3 feeds Discussion 7.
Both close Sunday, October 4 at 11:59 PM, but Discussion 7 cannot be completed well until the Assignment 3 calculations exist.
1Read Chapters 8 and 9
2Finish A3 year-one and 18-month math by midweek
3Use your PTO estimate in D7
4Leave time for two substantive replies
Sunday, October 4 at 11:59 PM
Discussion 7: Salary Is Not the Whole Offer
Assignment 3: The Two Offers
SAVE YOUR WORK
Build your Week 7 prep note.
Nothing here submits automatically. Your notes stay on this device unless you copy them.
WEEK 7 · READY
Look past the headline number.
Price it
Annualize the terms you can calculate.
Condition it
Ask what vesting and time horizon change.
Question it
Name the assumption or missing fact that could change your recommendation.
Carry this sentence with you: A salary is a number. A job offer is a system of cash, benefits, conditions, time, and tradeoffs.
Sunday, October 4 at 11:59 PM
Discussion 7 and Assignment 3 both close at 11:59 PM.