Career & communication · course 61 of 105

Compare Job Offers to the Dollar

Do the arithmetic inside a job offer: hourly to yearly pay, paychecks and raises, the 401(k) match and vesting, then two offers added into one yearly total, side by side.

4 modules

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What it teaches

The arithmetic inside a job offer, with the rules quoted from US-government pages. The words (salary basis, bonus, PTO, the 401(k) employer match, vesting) from the Department of Labor’s regulations, OPM and the IRS. Pay conversions: hourly to yearly on a 2,080-hour year (52 weeks × 40 hours), yearly to hourly, a paycheck for biweekly, semimonthly and monthly pay (weekly, 52 a year, is on the card but not drilled), and raises in dollars and percent. The employer match: “50% of what you put in, up to 6% of pay”, the IRS/Labor Department’s two-tier safe-harbor formula, a match the cap limits (or that pays nothing when you put nothing in), and how much of the match you own under the IRS’s cliff and graded vesting schedules. Then two offers side by side: salary, bonus, match, PTO and commute added into one yearly total, which offer is higher and by how much, and what salary one offer would need to catch the other. The AI asks 3 questions, places you, shows a short card per module, then gives you one question at a time.

Gross pay only. Not a negotiation course, not tax or career advice, and it can’t tell you which offer to take.

How long

41 items. About 12-25 rounds for a confident student up to about 50-65 for a beginner, plus a 12-item final: 1-3 sessions (estimate, not timed with a real student). The tutor gives a one-line save code at the end of each session.

The modules

4 modules, drilled one item at a time.

M0
The words
The words: salary basis, bonus, PTO, the 401(k) employer match, vesting
M1
Pay conversions
Pay conversions: hourly to yearly, yearly to hourly, a paycheck for each pay period, raises in dollars and percent
M2
The employer match
The employer match: plain, capped, the two-tier safe-harbor formula, no contribution, and vesting
M3
Two offers side by side
Two offers side by side: the yearly total, which is higher and by how much, and the salary needed to catch up

Before it teaches, it asks

1
Are you weighing a real job offer right now, or learning the numbers ahead of time, and is the pay hourly or salaried?
2
A $78,000 salary is paid every two weeks (biweekly). What is each gross paycheck (before tax), to the nearest cent?
3
Your 401(k) plan adds 50% of what you put in, up to 6% of your pay. Your pay is $60,000 a year and you put in 8% of it. How much does the employer add?

What’s exact, and what isn’t

Show

Straight from the course’s own notes.

Quoted (M0, and the rule lines on the cards): 20 quotes, each checked word for word by a script on a saved copy of its page (read 2026-10-12; the script does not re-fetch the live pages). Sources: the Department of Labor’s regulations 29 CFR 541.602, 778.208 and 778.219 (the eCFR text, version dated 2026-10-01); OPM’s “Computing Hourly Rates of Pay Using the 2,087-Hour Divisor”; the IRS pages “401(k) plan overview” (last reviewed 2026-08-04) and “Retirement topics - Vesting” (last reviewed 2026-04-08); and the joint IRS/Department of Labor booklet Publication 4222, “401(k) Plans for Small Businesses” (Rev. 11-2020). M0's Answers are short paraphrases of those quotes, not computed.
Pay periods a year: Weekly 52, biweekly 26, semimonthly 24, monthly 12, read from Table 3 (the pay-period count in Worksheet 1A) of IRS Publication 15-T (2026).
Computed by script (every Key in M1, M2 and M3): In exact fractions, money rounded to the nearest cent with half a cent rounded up (OPM’s page states this rule for hourly rates; the course applies it to every dollar answer). Each of the 32 wrong answers is produced by the slip it names and must differ from the key; the wording of each slip’s explanation is hand-written.
Course choices, not government rules: The 2,080-hour year (OPM’s page names it as the figure federal pay used until 1984; federal civilian pay now uses 2,087, and this course does not); always 26 biweekly paychecks (OPM: usually 26, sometimes 27); M3's “total yearly value” (salary + bonus + match + PTO value − commute), with the bonus paid in full, the match fully vested and each PTO day worth the figure the question states. The match formulas in M2's questions are examples of what a plan can use: the 50-cents-per-dollar example and the safe-harbor tiers are quoted, the “up to 6% of pay” caps are the course’s own examples, and the vesting schedules are the two the IRS page tabulates (a plan picks its own).
Honest limits: No taxes or take-home pay, no 401(k) contribution limits, no Roth, no stock or equity, no health insurance, no overtime. It drills quoted rules and stated numbers; it can’t tell whether a real offer is fair, what an employer owes you, or what your own plan says. The Department of Labor’s own website refuses scripts, so its material comes through its regulations in the eCFR and the joint IRS/Labor booklet.
Not in it yet: Taxes and take-home pay; 401(k) contribution limits, catch-up contributions, and Roth versus traditional; stock options, RSUs and other equity; health insurance and other benefit costs; signing bonuses and clawbacks; overtime pay, state paid-leave laws, cost of living and relocation, other currencies; negotiating an offer.