In tough financial times, the traits of the chronic under-earner carry as heavy a penalty as those of the continual over-spender

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Source: Wikipedia

Over-spending is never a good idea and we’ve heard a great deal recently about the ways that people have been tempted into spending far too much by cheap and easy credit. Cutting back on your spending is certainly one way to cope with the financial downturn; one that many people are obviously taking, given the howls of anguish from industries facing lower sales. But what about under-earning? What if you find yourself in continual financial straits, not because you spend too much because you don’t earn enough?

Writing in BusinessWeek, Michelle Conlin suggests that “for every obscenely piggish ceo pay package, there’s legions of underearners crawling all over Corporate America. ” She bases her article on the book by Jerrold Mundis, Earn What You Deserve: How to Stop Underearning & Start Thriving. There’s also Barbara Stanny’s book, Overcoming Underearning: Overcome Your Money Fears and Earn What You Deserve.

In summary, under-earners may do great work, but they rarely get the financial recognition they deserve for it, mostly because they don’t believe their employers will pay them more. A few have the idealistic idea that money goes only to people who compromise their essential humanity or sell out their creativity to get it. Many simply won’t take responsibility for the problem or are too fearful to stand up for themselves.

Here are some other ’symptoms’:

1. Chronic under-earners work in fits and starts. Sometimes they nearly kill themselves with effort; sometimes they get so tired and depressed they hardly do enough to stay in the job. Because their work output is unreliable, they lose out on the credit they deserve.
2. Many tend to over-commit to helping others or doing minor chores out of some sense of obligation. They fill up time they could spend on themselves with routine or jobs for others. Perhaps, by being so busy, they hope to be noticed and rewarded. If so, it won’t work since all these insignificant chores make them look unfit to handle anything bigger. It’s also a great way to avoid tackling the real problem of being stuck in a lousy, underpaid job.
3. Instead of acting to make a change in their earning power, they stay passive and hope for some miraculous event to make life better for them, like winning the lottery. Remember the old saying, “Those who live in hope, die in despair.” Here, it fits. It’s your life, so do something and stop relying on chance to bail you out.
4. Most have odd attitudes to risk. They flee from obvious risks, like those involved in investing their money anywhere other than putting it in a low-interest bank account or getting out of that dead-end job and trying to find something better on the open market. Yet they also tend to be suckers for ‘get rich quick’ schemes that promise wealth without effort. Many lose even more money that way.
5. They fear asking for a raise, perhaps because they have such poor levels of self-esteem. Yet they cling to the belief that having more money will solve all their problems. Thus they create a ‘Catch-22‘ situation for themselves, in which they think earning more is the only way out of their problems, while they remain unwilling to do anything to bring it about.

To be honest, I think nearly all of us can recognize some aspects of our behavior here — at least on an occasional basis. Being an under-earner happens when these traits become habitual.

The good news is that all of them exist only in the mind. All it takes to quit the ranks of the under-earners is to change your thinking and start taking responsibility for the way you want your life to turn out. Surely it can’t be worse.

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