“It’s not your salary that makes you rich, it is your spending habits.” — Charles A. Jaffe

SalaryI’ve written in the past about The Great Divide in Compensation and Equal Pay for Equal Work. The net of both posts: do you want to make big money? Then go work on Wall Street or at a minimum work like man!

For the rest… maybe now is the time to ask for a raise. CareerJournal.com gives a couple of ideas. In Getting a Raise from the Boss, Jaclyne Badal writes, “To help arm people as they seek raises, a broad array of job-search and other Web sites are adding salary calculators and other tools that help people figure out what is a competitive wage in their particular job. However, most of these tools are based on basic services provided by two sites: Salary.com and SalaryExpert.com.”

The above tip was published before PayScale was in full swing. In this month’s issue of Business 2.0, Paul Kaihla asks, Are You Paid Enough? He writes, “PayScale’s mission is to bring transparency to one of the deepest secrets in the labor market: who earns what. The site collects real-time pay data directly from workers and spits out an analysis showing what an occupation is worth – organized by a given city, industry, or company – with the speed of an online stock quote.”

“So far PayScale has collected the salaries of 5.5 million American workers. They entice people to cough up their confidential info with an incentive – free reports showing how they stack up against others doing similar work.”

“From PayScale’s homepage, you click through about 10 screens of multiple-choice questions about your total compensation, employer, work experience, and schooling. If you’re, say, a nurse with a degree from UCLA earning $28 an hour in an emergency room in Los Angeles, the site’s instant report will show you’re underpaid by about 15 percent.”

What better way to ask the boss for a raise… show a report about what others are making and ask that the company pony up the disparity with your salary. Damon Darlin at The New York Times calls it the Kelly Blue Book for compensation. In Using the Web to Get the Boss to Pay More, he writes that, “The salary sites give you a good idea of where to start the negotiations confidently… like that reference manual for used-car prices.”

Aside from PayScale and Salary.com, Darlin mentions a third site, Payscroll.com. Payscroll is beta testing at the moment and will be user-ready in the next 30-60 days. So check back on that one before your mid-year review!

Also, as he concludes, “Persuading the boss you need more money demands more than a report from an online service.” You might want to keep this in mind before you step into the boss’ office and plead your case… make sure your work justifies the raise and then use your Internet research to support the request! You still have to deliver, but PayScale can certainly help shore up your case.