Work

Is This Going to Keep Me Alive?

July 10, 2013 By Jennifer Derrick 4 Comments

Sometimes people over-complicate personal finance when they are in a crisis. They start trying to figure out what they can cut, yet still maintain a certain level of creature comforts. They start doing all kinds of mathematical gymnastics trying to work out whether they can afford this or that, or if they can cut this but keep that. They start flinging justifications around like Mardi Gras beads. But it really isn’t this difficult. When you are in a financial crisis and the poop has truly hit the fan, there’s only one question you need to answer about any potential purchase, any service you’re debating keeping, or any activity you’re trying to stay involved in. That question is this: Is this [insert purchase, service, activity, item, etc. here] going to keep me alive?

Now, this sounds rather drastic, but it really is this simple. Anything you’re contemplating spending money on should be necessary for keeping you alive. By “alive” I mean sheltered, clothed, fed, sanitary, employed, and kept from freezing to death. And this may mean that these are accomplished at a very basic basic level, not the level to which you are accustomed.

What’s the difference between keeping yourself alive and spending too much? Some examples: You may not be sheltered in a 5,000 square foot house kept at a comfy seventy-five degrees when it’s twenty degrees outside because all of that expense isn’t necessary to keep you alive. You may be sheltered in a one bedroom apartment kept at sixty-three degrees. No, it’s not your ideal, but you aren’t freezing to death and you have a roof over your head. You may not be wearing the designer suits you’re accustomed to. Instead you might be wearing someone’s cast off suit you bought at the thrift store. You might need a car so you can keep your job, but it may not be the brand new model you’ve been driving. It might be used and eight years old. What you need to keep you alive is often much cheaper than what you’ve been paying and you’ll find that many “perks” can go by the wayside.

If you’re dealing with a financial crisis, you don’t ask yourself if you want the item. You don’t ask whether it looks good on you. You don’t ask if you can juggle some other payment so you can afford this other thing. You don’t ask if you’ll be able to afford it in the future, even thought it’s a stretch for now. You don’t ask if someone else has one, or if they think you should get it. You don’t ask if you’ll be sorry later that you didn’t buy it, and you don’t ask if not having the item is going to make anyone unhappy. You simply ask yourself, “Is this going to keep me alive?”

Asking just this one question takes all of the ambiguity out of your purchasing decisions. If you’re wondering if you can continue to pay your mortgage or if you should sell the house, you don’t run hundreds of projections about what “might” happen if things get better by such and such a date and you don’t spend hours gnashing your teeth over it. You just ask, “Is paying my mortgage going to keep me alive?” Most likely the answer is, “No,” because, while you need shelter, you don’t need shelter that you cannot afford to stay alive. You can downsize and still remain sheltered, while giving yourself some room to work through your financial crisis.

Do you need cable? No, it’s not going to keep you alive. Do your kids need to be in three sports this season? No, because it’s not going to keep them alive. Do you need a cell phone? Not unless it’s necessary to keep you employed, and then you only get the bare minimum needed to keep your job. Do you need new clothes? Again, only if it’s necessary to keep you employed, decent, or warm, and then you only buy the bare minimum needed to meet those needs and you buy them at the lowest price possible, whether that’s at thrift stores or from discounters. Do you need to eat out? Not unless it’s your only way to get the food you need to stay alive.

One simple question is all you need to take a lot of the stress out of a financial crisis. Sure, it’s still going to be hard to get out of the mess you’re in, but when you stop trying to justify your wants and you stop trying to make too little money cover too many wants and inflated needs, life gets remarkably easier. You free your brain up to do the more productive work of figuring out exactly how to get out of the financial mess you’re in and you see reality much more clearly. When times get better you can start asking yourself some other questions about your purchases, but in the middle of a crisis, you only need to ask, “Is this going to keep me alive?” and answer it honestly with a simple yes or no answer.

(Photo courtesy of James Willamor)

Desperate for a Job. Or Not.

January 3, 2011 By Jennifer Derrick 6 Comments

I have two friends who both run businesses. Both have told me similar stories lately about how, in such a down economy, they cannot find people to work for them. The first friend runs a construction business that specializes in renovating restaurants. He routinely has people come to him, begging for work. They plead for jobs because they need to feed their families or they are about to lose their homes. Since my friend always needs employees, he takes many of them on. He even takes on the ones who are “overqualified” because they are out of work professionals.

My friends is upfront in the interviews about the amount of travel required (a lot, but company paid), the salary (which is very generous), the physical labor, and the hours (long, but with overtime pay). Despite the travel and the long hours, these people take the job. They claim to be so desperate for work that they will happily do anything, no matter how long the hours or how arduous the work. Despite their desperation, the average new hire quits after just two weeks. The travel is too much, the hours too long. They beg my friend to find them work closer to home but he reminds them that this was part of the deal. The jobs close to home go to those with seniority. They beg him to cut down the hours so they can spend more time with their families. My friend reminds them that the hours are long because the work needs to be completed by a specific date. When they can’t get easier hours or work closer to home, they quit.

“I don’t get it,” my friend says. “If I was so desperate for money and about to be thrown out of my house, I’d do anything and stick with it.” He told me that it makes him think twice about hiring people. He wants to hire those who really need to work, but having employees coming and going every day is disruptive and expensive. He admitted that he may just have to start hiring only those who are truly qualified and experienced in the field, even if that means he has to do with fewer employees and stop being “the nice guy.”

My other friend tells a similar story. She runs a manufacturing facility. She is always hiring employees because hers won’t stay, either, despite the fact that she provides full benefits and good salaries. They come in claiming to be desperate enough to take the third shift that no one else wants. They claim that the fact they have to work most holidays doesn’t bother them. They beg for the job because it has insurance. Yet within a couple of weeks they are complaining about the shift work and how it means they never see their kids. When she reminds them that this is what they were hired for and that they said it wouldn’t bother them, they beg for special consideration. When she can’t give them what they want, they quit.

It’s not that most of these people are leaving for other, more suitable jobs, either. Most willingly choose unemployment over hard work or inconvenient hours. They would rather be racking up debt, losing their homes, and going without insurance than working at a job that requires travel or odd hours.

I agree with my friends. I don’t understand this behavior. Jobs are hard to come by, let alone jobs that offer good salaries and benefits. If you are truly desperate for money, you have to be willing to take and work at anything, even if it’s not ideal. Maybe you don’t like all the travel. Maybe you don’t like shift work. But which is worse? Travel, or being foreclosed out of your house? When you are desperate for money and you have no job, you have to suck it up and do what you need to do. To do otherwise is to act irresponsibly. You can’t get everything you want in life and sometimes you have to suck it up and deal with unpleasantness until you can get into a better situation.

When someone offers you a helping hand in the form of a job, you should take it and be grateful for the opportunity. You should work at it as hard as you can until you can find something that suits you better. You shouldn’t just cut and run because the work is too hard, or the hours not ideal. You need to pay your bills and support your family more than you need to be home for dinner at 5:00 every night. And who knows? Working at this job that’s so awful may lead to other opportunities. Who knows who you might meet or what you might overhear. You might be able to find a lead on a better job through contacts you make at this job. And a good reference certainly won’t hurt you. If you can get an employer to tell another employer about how hard you worked and how loyal you were to the company, even though it wasn’t your ideal situation, a prospective employer might favor you over another applicant. That’s much better than a reference that says, “You know, Joe quit after two weeks because the work was too hard and he didn’t like the hours.” Even if nothing else happens, at least you can pay your bills, keep your house, and possibly have insurance in the meantime.

The more people who act like this, the harder jobs will be to come by for everyone. Employers like my first friend, who are willing to take on almost anyone who needs a job, will be harder to find because they can only be burned so often before they tighten their hiring policies and look only for those who have years of experience in the field and a proven ability to “hack it.” It’s expensive to hire a new employee. Employers will only take so much of this foolishness before they say, “Enough. I will not hire anyone who isn’t experienced or who isn’t willing to sign a contract for a year of work.” This hurts everyone because there are fewer employers to turn to when you really need a job.

If you really need a job and someone is kind enough to offer and you accept, you really need to commit to that job, at least until you find something that is more your ideal. Quitting because it’s hard or inconvenient isn’t just bad for you, it’s bad for the employer and bad for those who will come after you who could have really used that job.

Get Paid to Look at Porn – Strange Ways to Make Money

September 1, 2010 By Maggie Ellis 29 Comments

If you’ve ever wanted to be paid for the time you spend surfing the Internet for porn, I’ve got good news for you. It is possible to get paid to look at porn on the Internet. We all know that the Internet is a big place and that it is difficult to police. User generated content sites that don’t want any pornography on them such as YouTube, Facebook, PhotoBucket, and others have a hard time keeping offensive content off their sties. Other problems crop up when content that is deemed illegal in certain jurisdictions is posted on the Internet.

Computer filters can only catch so much and sometimes they filter legitimate content. There is no substitute for the human eye when it comes to determining what is acceptable or legal content. As a result, there are companies and organizations that will pay people to surf for porn. If you want to get paid to look for porn, here are some places that might hire you.

Law enforcement: Local, state and federal law enforcement organizations are always on the lookout for pornography and other offensive content. Despite freedom of speech rights, there are still some things that are illegal, particularly if it involves children or coerced behavior. You could get paid to search for questionable content and hunt down criminals.

Work for a software security firm: Someone has to make up those lists of banned sites that filtering programs use. While many sites are already in the databases, new sites crop up every day. These companies hire people to look for sites that need to be added to the list.

Work at a user-generated content site like YouTube or MySpace: Individual sites hire people to review uploaded content and check for acceptability. You’ll not only look for porn, but any other content that the site does not want posted such as drug use, gang activity, or hate speech.

Work at a firm that is used by the big sites on an outsource basis: Not all sites hire their own content reviewers. Some outsource the work to content review companies. Crowd Flower and Cloud Crowd are examples of companies that handle this outsourced work. If you work for one of these companies, you may be called upon to review content on several different sites. They also handle other outsourced work, so you might not surf for porn all the time.

Find postings on sites like Craigslist, Mechanical Turk, Live Work, etc: Sometimes the big content review companies even outsource their work to individuals. You can find postings on various Internet contract employment sites. Some smaller websites also use these contract work sites to find people to help police their content.

You won’t make much money looking for porn. Most content reviewers make between $8 – $12 per hour. Individual tasks may pay much less. There is also another downside to this type of work. No matter how much you might want to look at porn, chances are you will eventually run across something that you find horribly offensive or disturbing. Even the most jaded people eventually run across something that disturbs them greatly. Many of the content review companies keep therapists on staff or on call to help people deal with things they may see. Just like working in an ice cream parlor makes you hate ice cream, surfing for porn for a living can take all the fun out of looking at porn. However, if you’ve always dreamed of getting paid to look at porn, this type of work might be for you.

Do Automatic Retirement Contributions Help or Hurt?

August 16, 2010 By Jennifer Derrick 8 Comments

You may have heard about the movement to automatically opt employees into their 401K’s. Right now, the default option is for you not to contribute. When you’re hired they ask you if you’d like to contribute and how much. If you say no, then nothing is taken out of your check. There is a movement afoot to make opting in the default option instead. When you’re hired you would automatically have three percent (more or less depending on the employer’s plan) deducted from your check and placed into a retirement plan/fund of your employer’s choosing. You would have to specifically tell your employer not to do this in order not to contribute to the plan.

The thinking is that if the default option is to be enrolled in the plan then more people will save because, frankly, we’re all too lazy to be bothered with filling out the paperwork to stop the withdrawals. This is partly why more people don’t currently contribute to retirement plans. They’re too lazy or busy to be bothered with filling out the paperwork to join and researching the options for their contributions. So, the thinking goes, if you automatically enroll people into the retirement plan, they will be saving something and probably won’t opt to change it.

The goal of this plan is to get people to save something for their retirement. The government wants us to save more because retirees with no money will soon overburden Social Security and Medicare. People need to start taking responsibility for their own retirements. Since people have shown time and time again that they won’t contribute voluntarily, the government wants to try to sneak it up on us.

I don’t disagree with the plan. I wish more people would step up and take care of their own retirement planning. I’m not looking forward to supporting others in my old age. I will have saved enough to take care of myself, but I will likely be penalized in higher taxes and reduced Social Security payments to take care of those who did not take responsibility. However, I wonder if the plan will really help all that much.

Sure, it’s great that people will be saving something. And they probably won’t really miss the money because three percent taken out of your paycheck before taxes really isn’t that much. If your gross pay is $2000 every two weeks, for example, then three percent of that is only $60, or $10 per month. That shouldn’t present a problem for most people. And therein lies the problem. The contributions that will be automatically deducted are not nearly enough to create a secure retirement on their own. Obviously the idea is that the employee will opt to contribute even more or to open some other retirement account like a Roth IRA on their own. Yet if people won’t even voluntarily sign up for retirement plans, what makes anyone think they will voluntarily opt to have even more deducted from their checks? I think the odds of most people exceeding the default deduction are pretty slim.

The other goal of this plan is to teach people to save. The idea is that if you show people savings in action they will be inspired to save more. If you show them how a 401K adds up they will want to do more. I don’t think this will work, either. Most people know how saving works. You don’t need much more than an elementary school education to understand interest and compounding. When you start a job you are usually given information on the retirement plan that includes all kinds of charts showing how your contributions add up. People ooh and ahh over those charts during orientation, but still don’t sign up. For all that they understand, people still don’t want to save. You can’t force people to save money. Sure, you can take a nominal amount of their check but you can’t make a non-saver get excited about doing more. Sadly, many people only learn how to save once the crisis comes. Forcing people into a 401K isn’t going to turn them into savers or teach them how to save for the long term.

I worry that these plans will have the opposite effect. Instead of getting people to save more, I worry that this default contribution scheme will increase complacency amongst people and actually lower their desire to save. People will start to think, “I’m saving for retirement through my employer. I don’t have to do more.” They’ll lose any desire they may have had to save more because they will assume it’s being taken care of by those default deductions. Even if you explain that they need to do more, many will assume that what is being done is enough. If people are so complacent when they aren’t saving at all that they think retirement will magically take care of itself, why would anyone think that they would not become even more complacent and guilty of magical thinking once a little money is actually being put away?

When people who’ve been “tricked” into these contributions retire they will have some money saved and that is better than nothing, but it won’t be nearly enough to accomplish the governments’ goal of reducing the burden on entitlement programs. It won’t be enough to make them independent in retirement. I don’t think many of them will have learned to save on their own. I’m afraid that this plan might actually make the saving situation worse in this country. People will assume that it’s taken care of and not bother to save more, to learn about investing, or to take responsibility for their own situation. If they won’t do it when no contributions are being made, why would they do it once some contributions are being made by default? So what do you think? Will automatic contributions help or hurt the long term retirement prospects in this country?

Five Ways Employees Should Act

July 24, 2010 By David G. Mitchell 10 Comments

I just returned from a trip to my local grocery store. The store manager, who has been with the company for thirty years, was at the front of the store greeting customers. The employees who have been working there for the past ten years smiled and said hello as I walked by them. Indeed, most of the people I encountered in the store were quite friendly and pleasant.

Then there were the more recently hired people who work at the store. I walked by one young man who has seen me at least two or three times per week for the past year that he has been working there. I said hello, as I do to everyone who works at the store as I walk the aisles. He responded with little more than a grunt and did not even bother to acknowledge me by looking at me to make eye contact. A few aisles later, a representative of a major beverage company was taking an inventory of his shelf space and completely disregarded my cheerful hello as I walked past him.

I realize that people who are working cannot get their jobs done if they are stopped every three minutes for a conversation, but people who work with the public have to be ready to at least be polite and friendly so that customers feel welcomed and appreciated. That is the most important task of every person who works in retail. Sadly, based on conversations with store managers, it grows ever more difficult to hire young people who have the social skills that retail requires.

Employees who lack social skills will stop me from going to a store. If I am going to offer my cash to a retail establishment, I want to offer it to people I like, even though I know that the money will be headed off to a large corporate parent that is not located in my community. If you own a retail establishment, however big or small, here are the five things that you should require of your employees to help ensure that you keep my business (and the business of anyone who thinks like me):

Be Friendly

A smile and a cheerful hello can very quickly make a patron forget about inconveniences experienced in a store. Cashiers can do their job and still exchange a few pleasantries.

Don’t Be Too Friendly

There is a cashier at my local grocery store who I have avoided for years. I am not alone because it seems that only tourists and newbies visit her checkout line. She shares inappropriate details about her life. She talks far too much and I don’t think any regular customers want to be caught in her conversations. If she were the only cashier, I would turn around and leave the store immediately.

Be Hygienic

Everyone gets coughs and colds but try not to emphasize that to customers, especially when handling their food products. Wiping the tip of one’s nose with a finger and then picking up my jar of olives in order to scan it is just a bit too gross for me.

Don’t Share Your Problems

When a customer asks how you are doing, you are always doing well. Remember that. Customers have their own problems and unless your customers are also your friends — your close friends — you do not need to dump your problems on them.

Be Knowledgeable

If you work at a store, take the time to learn about the merchandise, especially where it is located. Know what is on sale.

Offer to help customers who look confused

Employees are not ornamental. They are there to help customers and employees who do not know about the products sold will be of little help!

What do you look for in the employees of the stores in which you shop? If you work in a store, what frustrates you about your co-workers?

How Employers and Employees Should Act

July 15, 2010 By David G. Mitchell 3 Comments

It was not that long ago that a young person could find a job and expect to keep that job until he retired. Experience was rewarded. Seniority was respected. Pensions were offered. And at the end of a long career, employers expressed their gratitude.

Those days are gone and it is now exceedingly rare to find someone who has spent a lifetime in one job, with one employer. It is customary for people to have many employers and that is not an entirely bad thing. From each employer we have an opportunity to learn new things, to meet new people and to grow in different ways. Employees will move on when better opportunities present themselves. Employers will eliminate positions to save money even if it means getting rid of a long time employee. It happens.

Just because it happens, however, does not mean that employers and employees should assume that it must happen. Indeed, both employers and employees will be better served if they act as if they will have a mutual relationship for a lifetime because preserving that fiction ensures the benefits of loyalty for however long the relationship does exist. With that in mind, here are ways that employers and employees should pattern their behavior.

Employees

You never know where your career will take you or who you will encounter along the way. Even if you know that you are not going to stay in a job for very long, treat it as your lifelong position because your coworkers will always remember the impression you gave them while you were working with them and you never know when one of them might be in a position to hire you for your dream job down the road. For that matter, you never know when you will need a recommendation or even if you will ever actually be able to leave the job in the first place. Never put yourself in the position of being fired just because you expect to be able to quit.

Managers

You are only as good as the team that you build. Your goal should be to build loyalty by building the resumes of the people who report to you. Trust them. Give them responsibility and the opportunity to improve their resumes. Make it possible for them to leave you. If you do that, you will find that most of your direct reports will feel too loyal to you to readily jump at the chance to leave you. At the same time, if you ever leave your position, you will have set your employees up for promotion on the one hand, or the ability to quickly find a job on the other. Either way, if you build the careers of the people who report to you, you will have lifelong loyalty from them and they will know that you are loyal, too. That can only help you as you advance in your own career.

Small Business Owners

If you want your business to someday be something more than a small business, have solid business plan, get good business financing, and treat your employees well. Treat them as if they were family — not the bad side of the family that you try to avoid but the part of the family that you visit at holidays. Your company can only grow to the extent your employees can shoulder the growth. Treat them like pack mules and they won’t necessarily carry your business where it needs to go.

Where do you fit in the employer-employee spectrum? What are the things that you remember about your colleagues, your managers and your direct reports?