Hello again and welcome back to happy hour. In light of the recent outbreak of COVID-19 across the globe, apart from all the attention paid to the medical side of the pandemic, there is another major concern that most of us have, due to all the containment procedures and lockdowns, many companies around the world are struggling, and consequently resorting to pay cuts, affecting our income to different extent. So in today's episode, let us take a closer look at our pay. So we go through all the essential information on your payslip.

Pay slip,it literally means a slip of paper that documents how you get paid. Now opening your payslip can come with real mixed emotions. The first thing all of us do is usually to seek out the big number to see what our real pay is. And it can go something like this. Yeah, I have been paid! ... Hang on a second, that's not the amount I was expecting. They've taken how much for tax? What's the other deduction for? This can’t be right. Sound familiar? Pay slip can be really confusing to a lot of people. So in today's episode, we'll go through some the vital information on your payslip just so that we will be better informed on our next payday.

As long as you work for any organization or company, you will get compensation. It's a very interesting word choice if you think about it. Compensate means to make up for things. And compensation here means your pay. It's almost like the company is trying to compensate you for the hours they take from you. And usually a company or an organization would have a department or a division called payroll or compensation department. So you might have a payroll manager who is dealing with all the calculations. And if you get paid every month, then every month there will be a specific payday. For my work at the university, my payday is on the first of every month. You can also ask people, when is your next payday?

In English there is an expression, to live paycheck to paycheck. Paycheck is the check you get for your salary. Live paycheck to paycheck means your salary is only just enough to cover your spending for the month. So you're always waiting for your next paycheck at the end of the month. Now I know most Chinese have the habit of saving at least a percentage of our income in the bank. Saving up for rainy days, we would say. But in many other countries, people don't have that habit. So if you now read news in the world, due to the virus, people cannot go to work. You would see that some employees are saying they can't afford to take any pay cuts because they are already living paycheck to paycheck.

Just last year, according to a survey done by Forbes, a shockingly high percentage of workers surveyed in the US often or always live paycheck to paycheck.

Now back to our pay slip, the largest number we see on that is usually called gross pay. But that's definitely not the number we will get in the end. What we will get in the end is called net pay or take home pay. It’s the part that you can take home. For most of us, usually we get a base pay. This is our basic salary. And this usually changes with your pay band or pay grade. Say, if your company has five different pay grades, the higher you go the more base pay you will get. In English, there is an expression called above one's pay grade. This means this is something that is above my power and my authority. For instance. You can say, I can't make this decision. This is way above my pay grade.

Apart from the base pay, another big part of our income is bonus. The usual ones we get annual bonus and performance bonus. Performance bonus is based on your performance or how well you have done your job. Some companies in order to encourage their employees to always be there and don't take any sick days or other time off, they have attendance bonus. And then we move on from bonus to overtime pay. Ideally, if you work overtime during statutory holidays, official holidays, then you should be entitled to double pay or even triple pay. For those people in sales, they can also get commission. So for example, selling houses and if you sell a house, you can get a certain percentage as commission.

So we talked about base pay, bonus, overtime pay and commission. Some of us also get allowance. Some people get housing allowance, transport allowance, or even mobile and internet allowance, depending on how great your benefits are. Another type of extra money you're likely to get is subsidy. In China we have some special subsidies, for example, post specific subsidies, or seniority subsidy. Seniority subsidy is not very common in many countries. This generally is a subsidy based on how many years you have worked for the company. So those were what we get.

Now, let's move on to deductions. What gets taken away from us? First of all, obviously, we need to pay income tax. Each of us will have something called taxable salary. This is based on the national income tax structure. Obviously, the more you earn, the more tax you need to pay. Most of the companies would also have sick leave deduction. So if you're sick for more days than allowed, then they will take some money from you. And also absence deduction. If you don't show up for work, there is a deduction as well. In Chinese, we say 五險一金. If I ask you what are those? They all fall in the category of social insurance or social security. 中國的五險是pension養老, unemployment失業, work related injury工傷, maternity生育and medical醫療. On Top of that, we have housing fund住房公積金. And sometimes we might be able to enjoy some preferential tax payment policy. For example, if we're supporting elderly parent, we might enjoy a little bit of preferential tax policy that we pay less tax.

When we were talking about 五險一金, some of these social insurance are paid by both the employee and the employers；some are only paid by employers. The money that we pay usually is employee deduction because this part, they take it out of your pay. For the employer, it's usually called employer contribution, because the company needs to put into the pool.

So that's pretty much the essentials about our pay slips. Hopefully, today's episode helped you understand your pay slips a little bit more. And as we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel for this virus outbreak, I sincerely hope that whatever loss you have suffered during this outbreak things will get better soon. Just remember the old saying, it's often the darkest before dawn. If you have anything to add to the payslip, if you have other items on your payslip that you would like to share with us, leave a comment in the comment section.

I'll see you next time. Bye.

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