It’s so tiresome, and increasingly irritating, to encounter those three infamous words “Total Compensation Package” when you’re looking at job specifications or, even worse, during a “1–1” with the automatons in your own HR department when at a performance review of some sort.
For you know all too well that when it comes to compensation it’s the modus operandi of practically every company that has been, is, or ever will be¹ in existence to give you an extreme and severe shafting on take home pay by offering as many worthless “perks” as possible in lieu of actual cash money.
Those perks may include, but not be limited to:
- Tax saver commuter tickets and “bike to work” schemes.
In many countries employers are able to offer tax free loans toward commuting costs and schemes to aid the purchase of cycles — as long as they are primarily used for commuting.
Naturally, this is only of use if you’re actually going to an office and is therefore of little use to employees who remote work for any significant period of time.
Also, if you’ve got a tax free loan for buying a ticket you’re still buying a ticket and it’s coming out of your own money — to me, that’s hardly helping since I’m still paying, albeit slightly less, out of my own pocket. - Shares that vest so far beyond your “work horizon²” that you’ll either be retired, dead, or uploaded to the cloud before you’re able to acquire them, let alone sell them.