Our Two Cents, Leveraging Your Parenting Skills to Get the Job, & Calculating Tax Brackets

Welcome to Work & Wallet—a newsletter where finance meets career advice.

Our Two Cents with Lorna Kapusta, head of Women & Engagement at Fidelity Investments

In honor of Women’s History Month, we asked Lorna Kapusta about her thoughts on women empowerment, career advice, and more. Here’s what she had to say.

What does women empowerment mean to you?

To me, it’s pretty simple—it’s about making sure women (and everyone else) can share their viewpoints freely.

It’s about providing opportunities to raise the status of women through education, awareness, literacy, and training. It’s about ensuring that women have access to opportunities, and they’re supported to go for those opportunities.

How is your team helping to increase financial literacy among women?

A big part of our focus on women and money is to help women feel empowered to take control of their financial future.

Here are some areas we’re working on to improve financial literacy among women:

1. Creating a “safe space” for women to discuss financial topics. Our Women Talk Money community is a great example.
2. Providing easy-to-understand resources on how to get started (and keep going). We’ve found that 65% of women said they’d be more inclined to start investing, or invest more, if they had clear steps on how to do so, which is why we recently relaunched our women investors hub .
3. We need to support our next generation of investors. The earlier we can start helping them learn about money, the better. In particular, we need to help teen girls. Based on our research, the gender investing gap starts early. If we can change that, we can have a positive impact on future women.

What’s the best career advice you’ve received?

Earlier on in my career, my manager pulled me aside and said, “Lorna, use your voice! This is what we’re paying you for. And don’t worry about what people think. You’ll always think more about what you said vs. anyone else.”

It’s so important, especially as women, to be confident in yourself. You have a unique perspective, and you should share it. Take the seat at the table and use your voice! And inspire other women to use their voice and let them know they’re valuable to your team and company. It doesn’t happen overnight, but little by little I got there.

How do you balance career and family?

Balance is a tough word, but I try my best, and there are some tools that I apply to both my career and family that have helped. In business and with my family, I know I can’t do it all, so I focus on the big things and let the rest go. What does this look like?

At work, I’ll ask myself, “Will this have a material and meaningful impact? Will it help a lot of people? Am I solving a big customer issue or opportunity?” There are always so many tasks we can be doing at work, and I’ve realized a lot of these tasks may only incrementally drive change. So, I regularly step back and ask myself, “How much of an impact will this actually have?” If it’s not that big, I’m not afraid to delay, pause, or stop.

At home, I take a similar approach. I have a pretty busy household with three kids, three dogs, one cat and two sets of aging parents. I can’t be at every sports game, school event, or family/friends get-together, but I do my best to be at the big things that matter.

Every week, I reassess what I am going to do vs. not do. I’m far from perfect, and I’ve had a lot of guilt over the years (especially when it comes to my kids!), but I have to let it go and give myself grace that I am doing my best.

What advice would you give a woman who hesitates to go for the promotion/new role/etc., in the workplace?

First of all, many of us hesitate, so you aren’t alone. I went through this myself. Many years ago, I had been promoted to a new role with significantly more responsibility and was feeling a lot of self-doubt about it. Shortly after, I met my mentor for lunch, and even though I didn’t speak up about those doubts, they seemed to sense it and told me about moments they’ve felt “imposter syndrome”. This was such a monumental moment for me—learning that my mentor experienced something similar and how they moved past it.

If you’re struggling with going for a promotion or a new role, here are a few action steps that may help:

• Remind yourself of your strengths, skills, and past work achievements. Knowing your strengths can help build your self-confidence. You can look at old performance reviews, ask for input from colleagues—make a list and review it.
• Acknowledge any skill gaps you may have to do the job, and make a plan to learn and build those skills. Women often believe that they need to have mastered every skill in the job description. However, that’s not the case! Be aware of your strengths, identify your areas of growth, and commit to resolve and address any skill gaps over time.
• Discuss it with your mentor or sponsor. Typically, they know you well and will have your best interests at heart. Get their perspective, and, if you can, get their support to advocate for you.

I’ll end with my favorite phrase: “You’ve got this!’

What’s the best career advice you’ve received? Let us know in the comments!

How to leverage your parenting skills in the workplace

If you left the workforce to raise kids and want to get back to work (with adults), here’s how to showcase your child-raising superpowers during your job search.

You’re a master multitasker.

Chances are you’ve juggled multiple people’s schedules, cooked dinner while helping with homework, and given two dogs and three kids a bath at the same time. (Seriously, who wouldn’t want to hire you for project management?)

You know how to be cool under pressure (most of the time).

What parent hasn’t had to remain calm in the face of a child melting down in public? Feel confident that if you got through nighttime feedings, bad dreams about monsters, and stomach bugs, all with no sleep, you can handle the pressures of a nine-to-five. Keep that confidence next time you walk into an interview.

You know how to put others first.

Servant leadership is key to producing positive work cultures. Far from the top-down hierarchy of old-school forms of management, servant leadership is about fueling the success of others. Servant leaders create positive work environments in which employees can thrive. They build trust with their employees and encourage autonomy and innovation. That’s exactly what parents do—they create a safe environment so that kids can grow and become independent.

Not convinced you’re ready to face the working world again? Think about whether your abilities have grown in these areas since having kids:

• Problem-solving
• Conflict resolution
• Patience
• Organization
• Materials management
• Empathy

You probably said yes to most of these. Now get out there and show the world your new skills!

Read more on reframing your mindset and nailing the return-to-work job hunt here .

What exactly are tax brackets and how do they work?

It’s a pretty common misconception that your tax bracket represents how much of your income you’ll have to pay in federal income tax, but that’s not how tax brackets work. Tax rates rise along with income, so the higher your income, the higher your tax bracket. Let’s look at a hypothetical.

Cyrus lands a job making $98,000 a year. Sweet! He looks at the 2023 IRS tax brackets for single filers to see where his income falls and is a little alarmed to see his income falls into the 24% tax bracket. But Cyrus shouldn’t panic.

It’s helpful to think of these income ranges as buckets rather than brackets. Each bucket holds a different amount of money that’s taxed at a different rate. When the first one fills up, your income spills over into the next one, and so on.

That’s how it works in theory, but no one pays taxes on every dollar of their income. Cyrus contributes to a 401(k) and a Health Savings Account, which help reduce his taxable income—in other words, he can scoop it out of those buckets.

And then there are other deductions he takes when it comes time to file his taxes. As a single filer with a simple return, Cyrus takes the standard deduction—a bigger scoop out of the bucket.

This is what these deductions do to Cyrus’ taxable income:

$98,000 total income

- $9,000 401(k) contribution

- $3,000 HSA contribution

- $13,850 standard deduction

___________________________

= $72,150 taxable income

After deductions, Cyrus’s marginal tax rate is 22% (the biggest bucket his income falls into). But that’s still not his effective tax rate—the actual percentage of the gross income he pays, after deductions. To get there, we do just a little more math:

Divide taxes owed by total income ($11,181/$98,000 = 0.114). And now convert it into a percentage: 0.114 X 100 = 11.4%

That gives Cyrus an effective tax rate of 11.4%, far from the 24% he feared he would owe.

Need a better visual? Check out our article here .

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