I almost accepted the lower offer because the bigger number was harder to compare

Two offers landed in the same week. One was a straight $105K in a city I already lived in. The other was $95K, fully remote, with equity, a better 401(k) match, and a relocation stipend I wasn't planning to use. My gut said take the $105K -- it was just a bigger number, and bigger numbers feel safer when you're deciding in a hurry.

I almost did it. Then I actually sat down and did the math instead of eyeballing it, and the remote offer won by a wide margin once I accounted for the equity vesting on a normal schedule, the 401(k) match difference over a year, and what $95K actually buys in a place with a lower cost of living than where the $105K job was based. Base salary alone hid more than it revealed.

That's the trap with comparing job offers: the number on top is the easiest thing to compare and the least reliable one. A $95K offer with real equity and a strong match can beat a flat $105K offer once you do the math. A remote offer tied to an expensive city's pay band can be worth less than a smaller number somewhere cheaper. Most people either eyeball it under time pressure, or open a blank spreadsheet the night before they have to respond and try to rebuild all of this from scratch.

So I built the workbook I wish I'd had that week: The Job Offer Decision Kit.

It's a 6-tab spreadsheet plus a companion PDF guide that turns base salary, bonus, signing bonus, equity/RSU grant, 401(k) match, benefits, and PTO into one clear Year-1 number for up to 4 offers side by side. It adjusts that number for cost of living, so a bigger salary in an expensive city gets compared honestly against a smaller one somewhere cheaper. It scores the non-money factors -- growth, culture, stability, flexibility -- by what actually matters to you, not a generic checklist. And it sets your target ask and your walk-away number before you get on the phone, not during it, with 6 ready-to-send negotiation scripts for the conversations that actually come up.

You don't need to know spreadsheet formulas to use it. Every cell you're meant to fill in is color-coded with an example value already in it; everything else calculates automatically. It works in Excel, LibreOffice, and Google Sheets, and setup takes about 10-15 minutes for one offer.

If you've got an offer sitting in your inbox right now, or you're expecting one soon, you can get it here: https://logi2.gumroad.com/l/ukkvqm

Originally published on Medium.