Converting your salary to an hourly figure

The Trick: Take your salary, drop the last three zeros, and then divide by two.

Example: So if you earn $40,000, you're left with $20 an hour.

Maybe you're a salaried employee trying to figure out whether you should take that job that pays by the hour. This trick would certainly help.

This comes from making a couple of assumptions about your working hours and some quick observations about time. There are 52 weeks in a year, and so if you're working a 40 hour week for 50 of those weeks, you'll be working 40 x 50 = 2,000 hours in a year. Take your annual salary and divide by those 2,000 hours (equivalently, drop the last three zeros and divide by two), and voila, you get your hourly rate.