The unemployment rate is now over 8% nationally, 10% in California, and growing.
A primary fear of Americans today is losing their job through no fault of their own which is the source of income and support for themselves and their family.
Historically, we are a nation that spends what it earns plus some and we may be experiencing the turning point for that sad but prevalent perspective.
For this final piece in the series I suggest we all need to look seriously at how much we rely on our employers and careers as the sole source of income we need to live the life we’ve both chosen and built. Is that really a safe bet? But what choice do we have you might say, and with good reason, after all, you can’t simply start doing something else, and even if you could, how would that be any different?
Many years ago I recall reading an article from some magazine, whose name escapes me, titled “Obsolete at 40″. It was an article that actually shocked me. The case was very well built for how older more educated and tenured employees were actually being replaced by their early 30’s something counterparts who would do better work, had endless energy to work more than 40 hours a week and accepted less pay happily.
I couldn’t imagine that happening, it was foreign to my way of thinking. Didn’t big companies value those long term loyal employees who had done so much for their employers over the years? Weren’t they entitled to some sort of special treatment for all they had done? This article was partnered with a then obscure perspective that major employers preferred temporary contract employees to long term hires and that this would become a trend in the coming years simply to avoid paying retirement benefits and better quality work they speculated would be done by somebody with specific skills for a particular result in time.
In today’s world we now know that was indeed a trend. Had we paid attention to that trend we could have changed our behavior as many have so as not to be impacted by the loss of a job. In fact, as some report, to loose their job would be a blessing, here’s why:
I am encountering many who now want to build something for themselves that they control. Start a small part time business, work in the evenings to supplement income, maybe even buy rental real estate in Silicon Valley at these low prices with positive cash flow which will grow rapidly during the upcoming economic recovery. Let’s go out on the weekends and get some of the stuff people sell at endless garage and yard sales then sell it on E-bay some say. There are many more examples of this kind of ambitious thinking and it is growing at a feverish pace!
Bottom line - Let’s create additional sources of passive income so we don’t have to rely 100% on an ever evolving career or job that may not turn out to be as secure as we imagined when we graduated from high school or college.
What do you think?
