Career & Employment Archives - Financial Samurai

How To Negotiate A Severance As A High-Performing Employee

Since negotiating my own severance in 2012, I’ve consulted with several dozen individuals about how to best negotiate a severance. Although I’ve taken a hiatus on 1X1 consulting since the birth of our son, I can’t help but think of my favorite consultation this Memorial Day weekend: my wife’s.

One of the most common questions I get from people who haven’t bought my severance negotiation book is: why would a company ever give a high performing employee a severance?

Hopefully with my wife’s severance negotiation example, I can convince some of you it’s possible. I’ve already published a guest post from a client who shared his successful severance negotiation strategy. He had been with his firm for over a decade and was also a high performer.

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Top Jobs Of The Future For Your Million Dollar Education

Posted by Financial Samurai 37 Comments

While doing research on different types of vacation jobs to try once my son starts going to pre-school, I stumbled across a Money Magazine article highlighting the hottest jobs in 2040. My son would be 23 by then, fresh out of college and ready to take on the world. Perfect!

When I graduated from college in 1999, the hottest jobs were in investment banking and management consulting. Even big law was considered in high demand. Now, all those fields are snoozefests. To be able to work at tech companies to feed people’s narcissism is now all the rage.

Given it’s graduation season, I thought it would be great to highlight these wonderful, future jobs and suggest a couple more for good measure. After all, some of you will ignore my advice of attending public school and spend big bucks attending private grade school and college even though everything can be learned for free nowadays.

Let’s see whether all that time and money spent will be worth it!

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Taking A Vacation From Parenthood By Going Back To Work

Posted by Financial Samurai 165 Comments

Going on vacation by going back to work One of the things I learned after leaving Corporate America is that entrepreneurship is much harder than a day job. When you have to be the marketer, the creator, the accountant, the publicist, and the customer support, you often wonder how you can make any decision to move your business forward.

But after over a year of being a full-time parent, I’ve come to realize that being an entrepreneur is a walk in the park in comparison! FT Parenting > Entrepreneurship > Day Job in terms of degree of difficulty.

As a stay at home dad to a newborn, you realize why sleep-deprivation is an effective torture technique used by the CIA. You experience mini-heart attacks on a daily basis because there’s always a close call as they learn to crawl and walk. You endure pain in your knees and back because you constantly get down on their level to make a connection. Your patience is tested as you read the same books, work on the same dexterity exercises, and use the same hand signs over and over again. Then of course there’s the diaper changing, temper tantrums, and crying.

Despite all the difficulties of child raising, I wouldn’t trade the initial years for the world. The joy you get from seeing your little one smile and waddle into your arms when you enter the room is priceless. There’s also an incredible sense of satisfaction helping your baby reach milestones.

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The Best Financial Move I Ever Made Is Something Everyone Can Do

Posted by Financial Samurai 122 Comments

After warning about financial destruction due to scams and get rich quick schemes, I’d like to balance things out with an uplifting financial story. As part of my productivity push, I’ve been spending some time answering questions on Quora, a Q&A platform, instead of spending time answering questions on Financial Samurai where the answers are readily apparent in the content.

One of the questions I answered was: What is the single best financial move you have ever made in your life?

I selected this question because it made me think hard about positive choices. I’ve been too hard on myself lately with the responsibilities of fatherhood and being the financial provider for my family. This answer ended up getting a couple hundred thousand views and 5,000+ upvotes in only a week, so I thought I’d share it with all of you.

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Career Or Family? You Only Need To Sacrifice For 5 Years At Most

Posted by Financial Samurai 115 Comments

It’s impossible to be a great parent and a great employee or entrepreneur at the same time. Something has to give don’t you think? I’m sure some of you are disagreeing since you’ve done a wonderful job doing both. But unless you believe being a great parent includes being away from home for 12 hours a day while your little one gets ignored at a daycare facility, we’ve got different definitions.

And if you’re rich, hiring a nanny to take care of your kids while you pursue making even more money you don’t need doesn’t count as great parenting either. At least if you’re not rich, you’ve got an excuse to go to work!

Before every parent reading this post gets too pissed off, let me acknowledge we don’t need to be great at both parenting and work. Being good is generally good enough. But if you want to try to be great at either your career or at parenting, then it’s often beneficial to go ALL-IN.

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