Over the last month, Mr. Frugal has developed a new application that runs on Facebook that will tell your social network about a job search.

Once logged into Facebook, the FriendlyJobs application allows users to post details of the type of job you’re looking for, and will then update a user’s status to let people know about their need for a job. In the next few days, I will add the ability to see job searches of friends of friends.

The application can be found at: http://apps.facebook.com/friendlyjobs or through this link (if you’re logged into Facebook).

The other day, Mrs. Frugal got something in the mail from that provided us with the ability to buy life insurance through a plan affiliated with her employer. It seems as though life insurance is something many of us are thinking about right now with the sudden deaths of Michael Jackson and Billy Mays, so I wanted to put some comments up about life insurance.

I talked with another financial planner (Justin Krane at Krane Financial Solutions) about things to think about when it comes to buying life insurance through an employer and he had the following points:

1. If I leave my employer, could I take the life insurance policy with me? Is it portable?
2. If I do take my insurance with me when I leave, what kind of policy would I have?
3. If it’s term insurance, how many years will I be covered for before it expires?
4. Is the policy convertible?  Can I change it to whole life or universal life insurance if I wanted to while I am still employed, or when I leave?
5. While I am still employed, will my life insurance premiums stay constant, or can the rates increase?  If so, how often will they increase? (it’s usually every 5 years or so)
6. What is the maximum coverage I can buy at my employer?  Is it enough coverage?

Item #6 could be a whole conversation. A good rule of thumb is that if you pass away you should have at between 20 and 30 times the  annual income you want to replace.

When it comes to replacing “income” of a stay-at-home parent who takes care of the children, some families opt to replace the working spouse’s income with the idea that the surviving spouse will stop working in order to take care of the children.

Another point of caution is to not buy too much insurance. I know it sounds funny, but you don’t want to pay for more than you need. It’s the frugal thing to do.

My wage, before taxes, is about $34.80 per hour assuming I work 52 weeks a year for 8 hours a day. But what I’ve realized recently is that I should be adding my commute time to the 2,080 hours and subtracting my vacation & holidays. Let’s see what happens.

In a year, there are 261 weekdays (365 – 52 Saturdays – 52 Sundays). We get 10 holidays and 15 vacation days. In addition, we get up to 8 sick days, of which I’m on track to take 5. So the number of days worked is 231 (261 – 10 – 15 – 5).

The number of hours spent working or in my car each day is 10.5 (8 hours of work and 2.5 hours in my car).

10.5 hours x 231 days worked =  2425.5 hours for my job each year.

To find my real salary, I take my salary and add benefits and subtract the cost to get to work.

I use Mrs. Frugal’s benefits for the most part, as she’s a teacher and teachers have great benefits. My primary benefit is 401(k) matching. That adds about $653 this year.

I then subtract what it costs me to get to work. I drive 5o miles round-trip and I assume it costs me $0.39 per mile. This must be adjusted to become pre-tax dollars. In other words, I have to earn $0.52 in order to cover the expense of driving one mile (0.39/0.75). This comes out to $26.00 per day, or $6,006 per year (231 days * $26.00 per day).

So I take my salary, add $653 to it, subtract $6,006 from it, divide by the hours spent in my car and at work, and I get $27.68 per hour. After tax, this is $20.76 per hour.

When it comes down to it, that doesn’t seem like a whole lot of money given my degree and time spent in school.