Walmart to Help Associates Get College Degrees

[cookderosa]

My employer kicks in $5k a year and I'd be stupid to leave it on the table. That's a $5k/yr raise that i would be willfully turning down.

YES!! That's the way I see it too.

When my husband started his BS through employer reimbursement, his income was probably around $40,000 per year with no opportunities for an increase in that company- he'd been hired in at the top of what they pay, and that's just what the job pays. <shrug> But, he had an educational benefit, and I was just finishing up at TESU, so it caught my attention. He did the degree - and that degree would have cost us about $35,000 on our own, so beyond it being a $35k "gift" the real benefit is that it qualified him for a job that started at $55,000.

For a single income family with 4 kids, that made a difference in our life- a big one. That was many years ago, but to evaluate the impact of that kind of pay bump had (has) on a family, you have to multiply that out over a lifetime and factor in that any standard of living % increase is on a higher base too.

He finished his MBA last week and received a modest base salary bump of about $1,500. I've heard his coworkers say that's not enough to motivate them, but they're not doing the math. That isn't $1500 x 1 year, it's times your working lifetime - not to mention a simple 3% standard of living increase! My math estimates he'll have netted an additional $100,000 between now and retirement from the "modest $1500" increase. And he's 48 years old, so imagine had he done this 20 years ago!!? LOW. HANGING. FRUIT.