Help for downsized, outsourced and other "reluctant entrepreneurs"

This Sunday’s New York Times featured a story headlined “Job Search Firms: Big Pictures And Big Fees, But Few Jobs.” When will everyone realize this liberating truth:

If you redirected the time, energy and money you’re pouring into your job search and instead put it into starting your own business, you’d end up way ahead.

How?

• First, you’d actually be practicing the work you’re asking an employer to hire you to perform. That demonstrates passion and commitment. It also shows potential bossed how good you really are.
• If your occupation isn’t really your passion, you could get started doing the work you’d like to do, instead of what the company tells you to do.
• Doing work you genuinely enjoy — work you’re really good at — increases your personal joy. It makes each day a pleasure, instead of a drag.
• Your own business gives you the freedom to decide how many/few hours you want to work. Need more income? Simple, just work more. Content with what you’re earning? Great, kick back and enjoy the rest of your life.

You don’t have to be an Einstein to start or run your own micro-business. You just have to be willing to work and learn.

Source: NY Times

It was an amazing year. Last weekend, the TV talk shows were full of remembrances of Cronkhite and the Moon Landing, but that was only one small part of the magic. As a NY Times photo retrospective vividly reminds us, 1969 was also the year of:

• Woodstock and Altamont
  
• The Jets and Mets both win national championships
• “Butch Cassidy” and “Midnight Cowboy” were both released
  
• Nixon introduces the term “silent majority”
  
• the Beatles’ last concert
  
• Lef Zep’s first album
  
• John and Yoko (”looking like two gurus in drag”) have a bed-in
  
• student sit-in at Harvard,
  
• “Laugh In” debuts…
  
• plus Chappaquidick, Charlie Manson, Sharon Tate

There’s one item that seems small and minor in the NY Times timeline, but it was HUGE if you were a male 18+ in 1969: the Draft Lottery.

Remember all that? You will if you take five minutes and check it out the timeline. It’ll being back a ton of memories.

AARP, with some help from Chase and Visa, have compiled a free 19-page brochure of “50 Ways to Love Your Money.” The title is clearly a take-off on Paul Simon’s old song, “50 Ways to Leave Your Money” — er, Lover.

The booklet’s design is mighty snappy-looking, but most of the content is pretty stale, shallow and familiar. Still, it might be useful if you haven’t been paying attention to your money. (Or hating it.)

Topics include saving, budgeting, managing debt, identity theft, caregiving, planning for the unexpected. Other brief sections cover credit, debit and prepaid cards, contact info for the three main credit reporting agencies (Experian, TransUnion and Equifax), and the true cost (with interest) of your credit card purchases.

Of course, two of the three interest rates the booklet compares are from the Dark Ages: 10% and 15%! Pretty humorous when you’re paying 22% or 29% on credit card purchases today — while watching your grace period shrink from 28 days to 21 days.

Download your free copy of the AARP “50 Ways to Love Your Money” here.

For a far more in-depth look at the same basic topic, read Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez.

David Brooks in the NY Times wrote eloquently about the high price of success in an op-ed piece about Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings:

“This isn’t the old story of a career woman trying to balance work and family. This is the story of… a style of life that hasn’t yet been captured by a novel or a movie — the subtle blend of high-achiever successes, trade-offs and deep commitments to others… the intoxicating lure of work… You see the way people not only choose a profession, it chooses them. It changes them in a way they probably didn’t anticipate at first.”

When you’re considering self-employment versus employee, be sure to weigh the high costs of “success” in Corporate America. In your own simple business, you make the decision about how hard you’re willing to work, and how much you’re willing to give up.

Becoming a truck driver is an option some laid-off white collar are considering. And why not? If you’ve spent your life caged up in a cubicle, the open road must seem pretty appealing.

“It’s something I always thought I would like, and just never got to do,” said Patrick Greene, who used to work at investment bank Bear Stearns.

Pay for a heavy truck or tractor-trailer driver averages $37,560 per year — and far more if you’re an owner-operator. Training takes three to six weeks, and there are few restrictions on receiving a commercial driver’s license. Just have good health and a decent driving record.

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