Career & Employment Archives - Page 3 of 36

Increase The Value Of Your Professional Network By Befriending These Five Archetypes

Your professional network is incredibly valuable in order to get ahead. With a strong professional net work, you will have more professional and personal opportunities. More people will root for you and want to support you. This posts shares how you can increase the value of your professional network.

For 10 years I acted as a mentor to incoming analysts or associates at one of the two investment banks I worked for.

Being a mentor was rewarding and a way to help younger folks navigate the often terrifying waters of a cutthroat work environment.

One of the main pieces of advice I gave was this: You should spend as much time selling yourself internally as you do externally. 50/50.

What I noticed during my career was that those who zoomed up the corporate ladder always seemed to have the strongest networks, regardless of whether or not they were the best producer.

The majority of people hate to network. They believe hard work is enough to get ahead. Unfortunately, from a career and financial perspective, networking is vital if you want to outperform.

There is no true meritocracy.

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Abolish Welfare Mentality: Janitor Makes $235,812 Plus $36,652 In Benefits

Posted by Financial Samurai 149 Comments

Abolish welfare mentality if you want to get rich

If you want to get rich, you must abolish welfare mentality. Life is tough now due to the coronavirus and massive unemployment. However, these are the times to get creative and shine.

Below is a passage that shows the difference between someone with welfare mentality versus someone with abundance mentality.

A guy looked at a Corvette the other day and said to me in a disapproving tone, “I wonder how many people could have been fed for the cost of that car?”
I replied, “I’m not sure. It fed a lot of families in Kentucky who built it. The Corvette fed the people who made the tires. The car fed the people who made the components. It fed the people who mined the copper. The Corvette fed the people who made the trucks that hauled the copper ore. The car fed someone who helped sell the car.”
That’s the difference between having an abundance mentality and a welfare mentality. When you buy something, you put money in people’s pockets and give them dignity for their skills.

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The Work From Home Survival Guide: Because Your Sanity Is Important

Posted by Financial Samurai 27 Comments

Now that millions more people are working from home due to the coronavirus, I thought I’d share some tips on how to keep your sanity. This is my work from home survival guide.

I haven’t worked in an office full-time since 2012. Losing the routine and the camaraderie of co-workers was tough during the first year. I often found myself twiddling my thumbs, waiting for my wife to wake up because I had been conditioned since 1999 to wake up by 5:30 am.

There was probably a point where I lost my mind for a couple weeks being so isolated from the outside world. So I decided to write about some of those feelings throughout several posts. Here’s one of them: The Negatives Of Early Retirement Nobody Likes To Talk About.

Over time, I got used to the isolation as I found my own routine.

Although I don’t have a day job, I do spend roughly two hours a day on average writing posts and a newsletter.

The Joy Of Working From Home

With the world firmly moving toward remote work, employees everywhere will soon realize several things:

How absolutely ridiculous all those meetings were
How easily a meeting can be replaced with an e-mail
How incredibly inefficient it is to commute in rush hour traffic twice a day
How much time is wasted during work hours
How it’s no longer as necessary to live in an expensive city
How difficult it is to concentrate at home when you have kids and a stay at home spouse
How much deadweight personnel there is
How lonely working from home truly is
How much more productive you’ll be at home

For many, working from home sounds like a dream come true. But like with most things, the grass is always greener on the other side. This post will help you better appreciate your ability to work from home and highlight tips on how to maximize your work from home opportunity.

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How To Build A Stronger Brand For Your Business, Blog, Or Career

Posted by Financial Samurai 97 Comments

Build your brand and eat like a king forever. Ignore your brand and starve like a mendicant waiting for scraps. This post is about how to build a stronger brand for your business, your blog, or your career.

A brand cannot be developed over night. It must be carefully nurtured. Along the way, your brand may suffer or change with the environment. You must always keep working on it.

This post will talk about how to build a stronger brand. Once you’ve developed a stronger brand, you will receive more opportunities in your career. You will build more trust. Finally, a strong brand creates pricing power.

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Follow The Money: A Look At The Best Paying Government Jobs

Posted by Financial Samurai 86 Comments

Updated on June 10, 2020

Recently, I read two articles that blew my mind. Perhaps they will blow your mind too.

1) The first article talks about how the US Army fudged $6.8 trillion in accounting entries back in 2015 to balance its books. The Defense Department’s Inspector General said the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up. What?

“At first glance adjustments totaling trillions may seem impossible. The amounts dwarf the Defense Department’s entire budget. Making changes to one account also require making changes to multiple levels of sub-accounts, however. That created a domino effect where, essentially, falsifications kept falling down the line. In many instances this daisy-chain was repeated multiple times for the same accounting item,” Scot J. Paltrow writes.

While the government goes after regular folks who get their taxes wrong because there are so many rules, it turns a blind eye on $6.8 TRILLION in accounting errors? This seems like a huge double standard and an abdication of responsibility. An army spokesman later downplayed the significance of the improper charges, and said the real error in question is “only” about $62.4 billion. Come on now. $62.4 billion is still a massive amount of money that has vanished into thin air.

$62.4 billion a year in misappropriated funds can:

* Create 1,248,000 new social worker jobs paying $50,000 a year

* Create 624,000 new teaching jobs that pay $100,000 a year

* Line the pockets of 62,400 corrupt officials by $1,000,000 a year

* Really line the coffers of 1,000 contractors by $62,400,000 a year

“Nobody knows where the money is going,” said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon and critic of Defense Department planning. But actually we do know where the money is going. Its going into the pockets of the top 0.1% government employees charged with handling the budget in the form of under the table money, salaries and bonuses and the pockets of companies that receive defense contracts.

2) The second article talks about how San Francisco has an annual budget of $9.6 billion, more than 13 other States in America!

Reporter Heather Knight writes, “In 2010, the budget totaled $6.4 billion in a city with 805,000 people, meaning the city spent nearly $8,000 per capita. Six years later, the $9.6 billion budget is paying for services for 865,000 residents, or $11,100 per capita. Inflation explains a little of that increase, but certainly not all of it.” In other words, the city of San Francisco grew by 7.45%, but the budget ballooned by 50% in six years. That is out of control!

We know it’s much easier to vote to raise taxes on other people especially if you don’t have to pay more yourself. Illustrative of this is a SF law passed in 2011. As originally proposed, all SF residents would pitch 1-3% of their gross income in to raise $6.8B for public education.

The majority pushed back against this proposal and the legislation was changed to charge only those making $200,000 or more, ignoring entirely the fact that there are people making less than $200,000 who also have kids. As a result, only $2.5B was raised. But the majority is the majority, and in an election, the majority always wins.

In San Francisco, if someone graffiti’s your garage door, you will get fined by the city if you don’t remove the graffiti at your own expense within a short window of time. Homeowners are responsible for maintaining all the trees on public property outside their house even if they didn’t plant them.

Further, if the public sidewalk outside your property is cracked, you must pay to fix it too. You would think with a $9.6 billion budget, the city would be responsible for maintaining its own property. Nope. Let’s not get started about the homeless situation and the poor public transportation system.

Finally, roughly 20,000 of San Francisco’s 39,000 employees make over $100,000 a year. Now that is impressive! So that’s where the $9.6 billion budget is mostly going annually.

Amazingly, in 2020, San Francisco has a budget of over $12 billion now. Got to love it!

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Can I Collect Unemployment Insurance If I Have Passive Income?

Posted by Financial Samurai 65 Comments

My friend and I have both developed a healthy amount of passive income over the years. We are talking true passive income where we don’t have to do any work to make money. It gets us excited thinking about passive income because we have the optionality of quitting our jobs, moving to some tropical paradise, and not die alone if we don’t want to! But can you collect unemployment insurance benefits if you have passive income or investment income?

My definition of passive income comes directly from CD interest income. With an average yield of 4% (7-yr CD’s), my passive income isn’t sexy by any means. But, it’s a great feeling knowing the principle will still be there and then some years from now.

Collecting dividends is not my idea of generating passive income. The reason is because you have to actively manage the portfolio and you could blow yourself up in a downturn.

Does Passive Income Affect Unemployment Benefits?

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Should I Go To Grad School? Get Rich Or Die Trying!

Posted by Financial Samurai 25 Comments

You’ve got your undergraduate degree and now you’re debating if you should go to graduate school. I’ve been in your shoes. I too wondered should I go to grad school? It’s a big commitment. Tuition can get quite expensive, especially if you quit working full-time to go to graduate school. However, earning a graduate degree can boost your career and really increase your earnings potential.

I’ve decided to dedicate time this month on graduate schools, specifically the much loved and vilified graduate degree, the MBA. Let’s start off with a layup as to why getting your graduate degree is a good idea, if you want to make more money.

Go To Graduate School To Make More Money

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The Gender Wage Gap And A Solution To Income Inequality

Posted by Financial Samurai 76 Comments

How would you feel making 25% less than your peers who do the same work at your same level? I’d be pissed and demand equal pay for equal work.

Depending on which study you read, women earn only around 80 cents to the dollar compared to men. Unless you don’t have a mother, sister, daughter or wife, men need to pay close attention as well.

Fight The Gender Wage Gap

In order to solve the gender income inequality situation, we must first understand why there is income inequality between males and females. Here are some theories from various sources as to why:

1) Men are more aggressive at asking for raises and promotions.
2) More people in leadership roles are men because men have had a head start. There is a propensity for men to take care of their own.

3) Men are more interested in more lucrative fields such as finance, private equity, management consulting, and engineering of all types.

4) Society puts more pressure on men to be able to make enough and take care of a family.

5) Men can’t give birth.

Slow Improvements In Female Wages

From the chart above, you can see a steep increase in female wages as a percentage of men’s wages in the 1980’s as dual income households became more common.

In 1985 for example, a female college graduate made roughly $62,000, while her male counterpart made $100,000. By 2005, the female worker made roughly $74,000, a healthy 19.3% increase, but still a 24% income discount to her male counterpart.

More recently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that women earned 82.8% of the median weekly wage of men in the second quarter of 2010, the highest ever recorded. However, a 17.2% gap is still not good enough.

There might be a sinister evil empire out there that conspires against women to earn equal pay for equal work. There’s probably some truth to every single one of the five points above that affects pay equality. However, if we strip away all the conjectures, and focus only on fact, there is only one truth: men cannot give birth.

The Gender Wage Gap Is Unfair Because Someone Has To Give Birth

One of my good friends graduated from Harvard business school in 2006 and just gave birth. Before having her first child, she swore to me that she’d be a career woman for life.

She loved the challenges of the corporate world and she was good at negotiating deals. After taking three months off for maternity leave, she came back for a week only to give her boss her two week notice! Needless to say, her boss was not happy!

My friend lives in a paid off 4,500 square foot mansion in Hillsborough County, one of the richest counties in all of North America. She no longer wants to work because she doesn’t need to work. Her husband is a multi-millionaire. She has a beautiful baby girl at home she can’t stand staying away from. I’d quit too if I were her!

Someone has to give birth, and it so happens the role is placed on females. If you are a manager of a start-up, and have two equally qualified 30 year old candidates, one male, another female, you will consider the likelihood of each candidate’s ability to work the longest throughout the entire year, for as many years as possible.

Wage Discrimination

Start-up life is cutthroat, and you cannot afford any employee to take off longer than 2 weeks at a time. What would you do as a manager? If you don’t have all hands on deck, the limited amount of money in venture funding will run out before you can generate a revenue and then everyone loses.

At the margin, it may be logical to bake in an income that incorporates the likelihood chance of a candidate working for 12 months of the year. If the chances are for 10 months of work a year, then the pay might be offered at 83% of par.

Pay discrimination is wrong, but often it’s just business. Unfortunately, it is the woman who suffers from such unspoken calculations when hired. I find this a disturbing reality because I would never want my sister, daughter, wife or mother to not earn what their male counterparts earn for equal work. Hence, I’ve come up with a logical solution.

Solution To Solving The Gender Wage Gap

The solution to gender income equality is passing a law that requires all companies grant the same amount of parental leave for women AND men.

If a woman gets three months maternity leave, then the father should also get three months paternity leave. We need to start eradicating the term maternity leave, and start using the words Parental Leave so that both the father, mother, partner can be treated equally.

Positives Of Parental Leave

Some of you might think it’s not fair that the father who doesn’t have to go through nine months of pregnancy and childbirth gets to take the same amount of time off. After all, maternity leave really is considered short-term disability my a majority of firms.

However, a good husband will be there for the mother throughout the entire nine months, waiting on her hand and foot, attending classes, and caring for her every need.

A good father will worry just as much, if not more so because he might feel helpless since he’s not carrying the child. A good father would love to spend as much time with his new born as well.

Related: How A High-Performing Employee Can Negotiate A Severance – This is my wife’s story after she got unfairly passed over for a promotion.

Fix The Gender Wage Gap

As a hiring manager, once you realize there’s now an equal chance both man and woman to be on Parental Leave, you have a lower propensity to discriminate on pay. You may of course secretly discriminate based on whatever other metrics you find justifiable, but at least one of the main points is now the same.

If you’re unhappy with your employment situation, then I highly recommend you negotiate a severance. I was sick and tired of working more and getting paid less in 2012, so I negotiate a severance worth six years of living expenses.

Get Paid What You’re Worth

The experience was so transformational that I wrote a book about how to do the same thing called: How To Engineer Your Layoff: Make A Small Fortune By Saying Goodbye.

It’s the only book that teaches you how to negotiate a severance. In addition, it was recently updated and expanded thanks to tremendous reader feedback and successful case studies.

If you feel you’re not getting paid what you’re worth, start your own business online on the side! It used to cost a fortune and a lot of employees to start your business. Now you can start it for next to nothing with a hosting company like Bluehost for under $4/month and they’ll give you a free domain for a year to boot.

Brand yourself online, connect with like-minded people, find new consulting gigs, and potentially make a good amount of income online one day by selling your product or recommending other great products. Not a day goes by where I’m not thankful for starting Financial Samurai in 2009.

Here is my step-by-step guide on how to start your own website.

Blogging For A Living Income Example: $300,000+ — A real income statement example from a blogger. Look at all the income possibilities. CLICK the graph to learn how to start your own site in under 15 minutes.

Updated for 2020 and beyond.