Slicing Through Money's Mysteries
Quitting is considered a dirty word. I’ve always had the view you should never give up if you want to achieve your goals. Even if you break both legs, you better drag yourself through the mud and rain to reach glory on the other side!
However, as I grow older, I’m slowly coming to accept the wisdom of quitting. Or at least quitting while you are ahead. Let me share a story from one friend who temporarily did just that.
I’ve made the case the best time to work may be during a pandemic. With fewer things to do, you might as well spend more time making more money. Further, if you are able to work from home, you could actually figure out a way to work less and still get paid in full!
Since March 2020, I’ve talked to many tech friends about their work schedules. About 80 percent of them said they loved the flexibility of working from home because they had more freedom. They also said they were able to work fewer hours and get the same amount of work done. As a result, they could play more tennis during the day, catch a SF Giants matinee game, take long naps, and travel everywhere.
Hearing about their flexible work schedules made me really think about going back to work full-time. Our worlds were converging, therefore, I thought I might as well get paid. Besides, with two young children, having subsidized health care, paid time off, 401(k) matching, and a steady paycheck sounded good.
But my wife knocked some sense back into me by asking whether any of my tech friends had kids. None did. Therefore, the freedom my friends had working from home would be different from the freedom I was imagining.
I put my dreams of getting paid to do less aside until now.
To get ahead in your career, it’s a good idea to reverse engineer how the best get there. I’ve written the best career advice book to help you get ahead and get out. It’s entitled, How To Engineer Your Layoff, and was recently updated with great new features.
My book on how to negotiate a severance is actually one of the best ways to learn how to get everything you deserve. It’s unorthodox. But, very true based on my 13 years managing people in the brutal investment banking world business.
In 1999, I joined Goldman Sachs working as an Equities analyst at their World Headquarters in NYC. By the age of 27, I was promoted to Vice President. And at the age of 30, I got promoted again to Executive Director making well over half a million dollars a year. I’ve interviewed several hundred candidates, seen several thousand resumes, and absolutely know what it takes to get ahead in the work environment.
When it’s finally time for you to call it quits, my book will layout a game plan to help you negotiate a severance so you can walk away a winner. I left work in 2012, and received a lump sum severance that provided for over five years of living expenses. My last deferred compensation hit my checking account five years later in 2017.
How To Engineer Your Layoff is newly updated thanks to tremendous reader success stories. There are new case studies and insightful recent data points. In addition, there are even more resources and material to help you leave your job with money in your pocket..
Never let anything get in the way of pursuing your dreams. If you do, you will regret it. As I wrote in my Wall Street Journal bestseller, Buy This, Not That, “You will regret more of the things you don’t do than the things you try!
Remember that annoying kid in school who made fun of you for getting a good grade? The goal was to make you feel bad at doing well so he wouldn’t feel so terrible about himself.
I had plenty of encounters with such kids growing up at my public high school. In the end, I brushed their mockery aside. I decided to be the best student possible to have as many opportunities as possible.
I thought the mockery would slow down as I got older. However, it seems to have amplified due to the internet. Most recently, I was criticized for my idea of starting and keeping a family business going. My idea was to provide options for my children when they graduate from school. The world is a harsh and competitive place.
Andrew from Vancouver, who is 29 with no kids said I was “obsessed.” Another guy named Li from somewhere in Asia, who is also 29 with no kids, called me “crazy” over e-mail. I’m not sure why people without kids feel like they know about the pressures parents face. But it’s a curious phenomenon I’ve observed since I became a father.
Why is planning ahead and offering an idea to help other concerned parents considered obsessive and crazy? Besides, what kind of fool would sell a cash cow that is enjoyable to run in a low-interest rate environment?
In my mind, it is stupid not to plan for the future. Globalization increases competition for jobs while technology reduces the number of jobs required to produce.
Paradoxically, life is getting easier and harder at the same time. As parents, we must fight for our children until they can independently fight for themselves.
When everybody seems to be getting rich but you, it’s a disconcerting feeling. However, after 20 years of living in San Francisco, the startup capital of the world, I say that if you want to get rich, don’t join a startup.
We always hear about hugely successful startups in the news. Names such as DoorDash and Airbnb are the flavors of the month. With monster post-IPO share price performance, thousands of new millionaires will flood the San Francisco Bay Area. However, we seldom hear about the failures or the zombie startups that end up treading water for years.
Most startups either fail or have a mediocre exit. As a result, the below-average salaries employees earn to join a startup in exchange for equity often ends up being a bad trade. Employee shares are either diluted away or early investors have a ratchet clause that make them worthless.
When a startup does get bought out, it is the founder or founders who usually walk away with something meaningful. Sizable payouts typically aren’t going to the employees who helped make the founders rich. Founders know this, and sadly, they often still don’t try to take care of their employees once they receive their liquidity event. Don’t join a startup if you want to get rich!
In my quest to prevent people from entering startup purgatory, here is a new case study of how the founder of Baremetrics, Josh Pigford, walked away with millions while his employees were left with peanuts.
Pigford was very transparent, which should help future startup employees make better employment decisions.
Let’s say you got poor grades in high school or college. You partied too much or were simply disinterested or unfocused. Let me share with you how to overcome poor grades and get a job. Poor grades doesn’t doom you to a “C-student” or worse lifestyle.
But let’s first be honest. A lot of people still don’t believe there’s a high correlation between good grades and work life success. Could it be that those who poo poo good grades as unnecessary are the ones who didn’t get good grades themselves?
Let’s imagine for the next couple seconds poor grades are poor indicators of success, even though for the first 22 years of your life, they are used in every aspect of progress. Now that you’ve had your couple seconds, let’s snap back to reality.
Here you are, about to graduate college with a mediocre “B” average and you’re getting shot down during interviews left and right, assuming you are getting any.
From the employer’s perspective, they can interview from any number of schools, each with a plethora of “A” students. Therefore, why bother with you despite a good-looking resume?
Your stubborn self still holds on to the belief that grades don’t matter, because you know you’re going to be a star some day.
Want to learn how to get laid off? Let me introduce the “it’s not you it’s me” strategy. This strategy will help you feel less guilty when you’re trying to leave a firm with a nice severance epackage.
Guys have it tough. We have to always make the first move when we want to talk to a girl. Even if the girl really fancies a guy, for some reason she won’t talk to him even if it means missing out on potential true love for the rest of her life!
Afterward, she’ll pout to all her friends why the guy never came up to her. Well guess what? Approaching an attractive stranger is sometimes petrifying for people with balls too!
Let’s take it a step further with marriage. Even if a girl wants to marry her boyfriend of five years, she is willing to miserably wait for many more years instead of straight up asking him to marry her! Such strange social habits we practice don’t you think?
Today, things are much more balanced now. Girls come up to me left and right asking me to buy them a drink only to walk away after they’re done.
I have a strong theory why men have an edge in getting what they want in the workplace. The simple answer is that men have been trained since a very young age to get the girl or else end up alone forever.
Now you know why I’m often bringing up the topic of relationships. If you can develop your relationship building skills, I strongly believe you will increase your chances of getting what you want.
I’ve written extensively about how to get laid off in order to get a severance package and ultimately live a more purposeful life. While learning how to get laid off is a fantastic way to learn how to never get laid off, in this post I’d like to share some direct advice on how to get paid and promoted faster.
After all, for most people, the quickest way to financial freedom is by earning more through a day job. The more you can make and the faster you can get promoted, the more you can save and invest. The more you can invest in passive income investments, the sooner you can be free!
So, what are my credentials for advising people how to get ahead in the workplace? I’ll sum it up this way: at the age of 27, I made Vice President at my Wall Street firm from a non-target, public school with no connections.
The VP title is generally reserved for people with at least eight years of experience out of college, or with at least three years of experience after attending business school. I had just finished up my fifth year out of college and my first year of part-time business school before getting the nod.
The percentage of students getting into an institutional front office position at a bulge bracket firm like Goldman, Morgan, and Merrill from a non-target school is probably less than 1%. Of that 1%, less than 25% make it directly to Associate. And of the 25%, less than 40% make it to Vice President after three years. Basically, if you can get your foot in the door, I estimate there’s only about a 10% chance of ever becoming VP.
Most people don’t last beyond three years on The Street, one of the most unforgiving industries on the planet. It’s an environment where your competitors are not only smart and ruthless, they’re also willing to consistently work insane hours to get ahead. The pressure is unbelievable.
In fact, the longevity of a Wall Street employee is very similar to that of an NFL player. Like a halfback who’s plowed through a career’s worth of goal line surges, my “legs” finally gave out. I was done after 13 years.
This is the environment in which I learned five key lessons applicable to all industries I’ll share with you here. I’m pretty sure if you take my advice to heart, within a year you’ll see a noticeable difference. Like making more money, it’s up to you to decide whether you want to put in the effort or not.
If you’re looking how to quantify risk tolerance and how to determine the appropriate exposure to stocks, you’ve come to the right place. Financial SEER is a way to quantify your risk tolerance so you can try to make investment returns in a risk-appropriate manner. SEER stands for Samurai Equity Exposure Rule.
This post is also for someone who is wondering:
One of my primary goals on Financial Samurai is to help readers build meaningful wealth in a risk-appropriate manner. You need to learn how to quantify risk tolerance before making the right amount of investments. Financial SEER serves to quantify your risk exposure by calculating how many months you are willing to work to make up for a potential investment loss.
With the constant push and pull between fear and greed, finding a way to quantify your risk tolerance is important. You don’t want to let your emotions take over when investing. This is what we call investing FOMO and real estate FOMO.
Instead, you must find a way to invest based on your risk tolerance and stay the course over the long term. Otherwise, you may lose lots of money, which ultimately means you lose lots of time. And time is your most precious asset of all!
Getting laid off is never a pleasant thing. However, getting laid off with a severance agreement is way better than quitting a job with nothing!
Too many people quit their terrible jobs today when they could have negotiated a severance. In 2012, I negotiated a severance from my job of 11 years that paid for five years worth of living expenses. I got all my deferred cash and stock compensation. If I quit, I would have got nothing.
But before you sign your severance agreement, it’s good to do several things first. Here are some recommendations as a severance negotiation expert who wrote the book, How To Engineer Your Layoff, now in its 4th edition for 2020 and beyond.
