InsAgentOhio
New Member
- 3
I have been working in a small-town Ohio insurance agency for 8 years. Started out at 19 years old working part-time and am now 27 years old working full-time. I write and service auto, home, and occasionally commercial and farm policies. When I started, I was paid minimum wage $8/hr. since I just serviced policies. I had no bills at the time and didn't know much about insurance.
Now, I probably take care of like 75%-80% of the total work for the office (it's just me and my boss). My boss makes like $100,000-$120,000 a year and shows up like 20 hours a week at the office. Half of that time is spent talking to family members on her cell phone, running errands, picking up kid from school, etc. She usually only does actual work for like 1 or 2 customers a day whereas I probably talk to like 10-15 insureds a day. She constantly just forwards me her texts and emails she gets from customers and asks me to call them back for her, put the change in, etc. She will only answer the phone if I'm already on a phone call and it isn't someone calling who is hard to deal with or mean. If one of her customers calls in that is a pain in the a**, she will tell me to answer the phone and lie and say she's not at the office or that she's busy.
She pays me $25,000 a year / $15 an hour. Am I being way underpaid? When I look at salaries online, it looks like starting out in an insurance job, you should be at like $16 or $17 an hour and I'm at $15 after doing this 8 YEARS!!!
The $1 a year raise I've been getting since starting out minimum wage isn't bad, but I never got any real boost in pay after hitting all the adult milestones (bought a house, graduated with a 4 year degree from college, started a family, got married, etc.) or never got a decent boost in pay after I advanced what I could do at work (started out just servicing my bosses customers when they would call in or stop in the office, now I write and service policies for my customers and my bosses customers). I don't write a ton of new business and I'm not a huge salesperson due to it being such a small town that I have lived in my whole life. Basically, 75% of the people I know have already been insured with this agency for a long time. So I know my boss probably wants me to bring a lot of new customers in and make her more commission then she can pay me more, but at the same time, everyone I know is already insured here! I just service their policies now since they can just text me rather than calling the office or trying to get ahold my boss. My boss has always had me write policies in her code rather than my own, so she gets the commission, then she pays me hourly.
Lastly, another thing that has been making me mad recently is that when she quotes people, since she's commission, she adds on the Smartride/Snapshot/you name it discounts, paperless, EFT, rates the vehicles as farm use, etc. without even asking them for that info or explaining to them what they have to do to get those discounts. So when they call in to start the policy and she's most likely not in the office, I take the payment and start the policy for them. Then when their payment goes up because they lose discounts she put on there to get it cheaper to get them to switch to us, they call and I'm the one that has to deal with a pissed off customer. Of course since she's my boss, I can't really throw her under the bus to the customer and I just have to explain why the discount fell off and just be like "Sorry, she must have forgotten to explain that to you when she quoted you." Then the customer is mad at me because I told them the price is higher than what my boss told them. I then tell her about the situation, and she normally says something along the lines of: "I don't want to talk to them. See if you can help them."
Just seeking advice, seeing if others want to share how much money they make for what work they do.
Now, I probably take care of like 75%-80% of the total work for the office (it's just me and my boss). My boss makes like $100,000-$120,000 a year and shows up like 20 hours a week at the office. Half of that time is spent talking to family members on her cell phone, running errands, picking up kid from school, etc. She usually only does actual work for like 1 or 2 customers a day whereas I probably talk to like 10-15 insureds a day. She constantly just forwards me her texts and emails she gets from customers and asks me to call them back for her, put the change in, etc. She will only answer the phone if I'm already on a phone call and it isn't someone calling who is hard to deal with or mean. If one of her customers calls in that is a pain in the a**, she will tell me to answer the phone and lie and say she's not at the office or that she's busy.
She pays me $25,000 a year / $15 an hour. Am I being way underpaid? When I look at salaries online, it looks like starting out in an insurance job, you should be at like $16 or $17 an hour and I'm at $15 after doing this 8 YEARS!!!
The $1 a year raise I've been getting since starting out minimum wage isn't bad, but I never got any real boost in pay after hitting all the adult milestones (bought a house, graduated with a 4 year degree from college, started a family, got married, etc.) or never got a decent boost in pay after I advanced what I could do at work (started out just servicing my bosses customers when they would call in or stop in the office, now I write and service policies for my customers and my bosses customers). I don't write a ton of new business and I'm not a huge salesperson due to it being such a small town that I have lived in my whole life. Basically, 75% of the people I know have already been insured with this agency for a long time. So I know my boss probably wants me to bring a lot of new customers in and make her more commission then she can pay me more, but at the same time, everyone I know is already insured here! I just service their policies now since they can just text me rather than calling the office or trying to get ahold my boss. My boss has always had me write policies in her code rather than my own, so she gets the commission, then she pays me hourly.
Lastly, another thing that has been making me mad recently is that when she quotes people, since she's commission, she adds on the Smartride/Snapshot/you name it discounts, paperless, EFT, rates the vehicles as farm use, etc. without even asking them for that info or explaining to them what they have to do to get those discounts. So when they call in to start the policy and she's most likely not in the office, I take the payment and start the policy for them. Then when their payment goes up because they lose discounts she put on there to get it cheaper to get them to switch to us, they call and I'm the one that has to deal with a pissed off customer. Of course since she's my boss, I can't really throw her under the bus to the customer and I just have to explain why the discount fell off and just be like "Sorry, she must have forgotten to explain that to you when she quoted you." Then the customer is mad at me because I told them the price is higher than what my boss told them. I then tell her about the situation, and she normally says something along the lines of: "I don't want to talk to them. See if you can help them."
Just seeking advice, seeing if others want to share how much money they make for what work they do.
