Work Dilemma or How Do I Ask for a Raise

I’m a pretty competitive person by nature. I don’t really know why that is, but I am. As you can figure out by now, I’m fairly frugal and I’m looking to make enough money to retire early – really early for most people.

The last few days at work have been a bit of a wake-up call. When I joined my company we were like the New England Patriots – we never overpaid for talent. The interesting thing is that everyone seemed to drink the Kool-Aid and the company grew quite a bit. To continue the growth and/or just give an extra jump, my company decided to bring in new people, a lot of new people. In fact, it seemed like we didn’t have work for all these new people. It’s getting close to a year later and I look around and all these new people aren’t really contributing to the bottom line. Worse yet, it seems like everyone has gaudy titles and I suspect salaries to match.

So I did a little research into what my salary should be. It’s always a tricky subject, so the best I could do was a range. My main source was Salary.com. I augmented it with a couple of other sources, but when it came down it here’s what I found. If I were to err on the conservative side and give myself a title of someone with less experience, I would need a 20% raise tomorrow to make the median in my area. If I were to use the job title with the exact number of years of experience, I have in my profession, I’d need a 38% raise to hit the median salary.

I think the time has come for a raise. How much should I ask for? Leave your comments below. Perhaps if I learn to speak up for myself, I’ll get it done tomorrow. That’s not exactly a strong suit of mine, so I’m not so sure.