Family Finance Blog

Every year my company pays me a few extra hundred dollars, they just don’t know it.

I work at a very small company. Here there are no departments, no people whose sole job it is to hire people or to manage payroll or to do purchasing. That’s where the extra money comes in. I volunteer to do the purchasing job. I buy just about all the little things here and there that the company needs, and occasionally some larger things as well. In an average month I charge $2,000 - $3,000 on my credit card. When there are travel expenses, that number can go up fast.

Since I always use a rewards-based credit card, and never carry a balance on any of my cards, I’m making 1% - 3% on all of those purchases. That’s great for me. Sure it’s only $20-$30 a month (at 1%, which is most of the purchases), but that’s $240-$360 a year (and sometimes more) for doing nothing extraordinary. As for the time it takes up - that’s all work time. Preparing the invoice to get reimbursed is time I can legitimately charge to my company. My company is pretty good about paying me in two weeks, so sometimes I even make more money by tossing the money into a high interest savings account and paying off the credit card at the last moment (via auto-pay). It’s an entirely winning scenario for me.

If you work at a small company, and your finances are in good order, it may be worth your time to volunteer to purchase things a little more often. I know I enjoy the extra money.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 8:08 am and is filed under Work, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.