Survival+
Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation
|
Guest post by Heather Green
A friend of mine recently graduated from college with a business degree and a few years into working for a large corporation, she decided that she wanted to start nursing school. Now, I would say she had lost her mind, but honestly, I don’t blame her one bit!
Nurses are in extremely high demand and the pay is phenomenal. Not to mention, you are helping to save and change lives everyday, how rewarding! So I asked her how she was going to transition from making great money to going back to school full time while paying her bills (including her previous school loans!). She smiled and said that she had a plan.
Continue reading Nursing Your Career Back to Health →
By Kevin M
Let’s be honest, most retirement posts in the personal finance blogging world are aimed squarely at people in their 20s and 30s. Those over 50 are presumed to not exist. It’s almost ironic, isn’t it, talking about retirement to people who are so far away from retirement that it’s very nearly irrelevant while ignoring those for whom it’s right around the corner?
Maybe it’s that the vast majority of people on the web are under 35, or maybe it’s just easier making multi-decade projections to a group of people so far from retirement that they’ll never remember any bad advice they’d gotten early in life. And in a different direction, all things are possible when your time horizon is 30, 40 or 50 years. Those magical retirement projections that’ll turn us all into millionaires just wouldn’t work without all those decades!
But what if you don’t have decades to accumulate a retirement fortune? What if you’re over 50 and retirement is just a few years away? If you don’t have at least a healthy six figure portfolio, how do you prepare for retirement now that the luxury of time is no longer available to work in your favor?
Continue reading Over 50 – No Pension, No 401K – What Now? →
Controlling our tendency toward Creative Avoidance
By Kevin M
How is it that that some people seem enormously successful, yet astoundingly they have more free time than the rest of us? Have you ever noticed as well that some people who are incredibly busy are at best only moderately successful? Perhaps you’re one of them, always busy, but not having as much to show for your efforts as you think you should.
The typical human reaction to this apparent contradiction in the natural order of things is to assume that the successful person with all the time on his hands is a) lucky, b) has an “in” with important people, and even c) must be doing something unethical, immoral or illegal.
While each of those considerations isn’t beyond the realm of possibility, there’s a far greater chance that the successful person with all of the free time on his hands has found a way to
maximize his results while minimizing his efforts. He manages to do this by saying “NO” to unproductive tasks, either by making it clear to others up front that he won’t engage himself in them, or by simply refusing to participate.
Logically, isn’t that what we should all be doing?
Continue reading Majoring on the Majors by Learning to Say NO →
By Kevin M
In Jobs and Careers That Aren’t Coming Back we listed and discussed 13 career fields that are in a state of decline and unlikely to recover. Today we’ll cover the very opposite: job fields that are here to stay and likely to expand.
Global off-shoring of jobs and advances in technology are squeezing many jobs and careers into gradual extinction, as computers and cheap overseas labor eat away at once common fields of employment. But not all career fields are affected.
People who can produce or fix things often have the greatest job security. The world is full of machines, all in need of service or repair sooner or later. Being one of the people who can keep them going is a chance to start to a side business or to full scale self-employment. Equally important, though we tend to think of most innovation occurring in laboratories, many technological discoveries happen somewhere out in the field, produced by people who can work with their hands.
Continue reading Blue Collar Jobs Can’t be Moved Offshore →
By Kevin M
Recently on OutOfYourRut I’ve been writing a series of posts centered on employment alternatives–self-employment, side businesses and soft employment (part-time, temporary or contract work). The purpose in discussing these alternatives is based on my belief that the weak employment environment we now find ourselves in may not be temporary, and longterm changes need to be implemented in order for us to survive in a job market that may look very different from what we’ve know for most of our lives.
( Photo by Phil Campbell )
Though connecting employment weakness to the recent recession is the standard line, doing so fails to give proper recognition to longer term trends which have had an even greater effect on the job market than we assume. Globalization, advances in technology and rising healthcare costs have marginalized much of the labor force in countries such as the United States. While technology has been eliminating jobs at home, wage arbitrage has been taking place globally, in a competition that high wage/high benefit labor bases, such as that of the U.S., are at a competative disadvantage versus low cost/unbenefited work forces in third world countries. We can protest that it’s unfair competition all we want, but it’s also the reality of our time.
Though the evidence is all around us, I stumbled upon a recent article that addresses the longer term job outlook more directly.
Continue reading Jobs and Careers That Aren’t Coming Back →
By Kevin M
There probably isn’t a soul in the workforce who hasn’t dreamed of or at least contemplated the possibility of working from home. There are many benefits to this arrangement but it’s important to understand the limitations as well.
I’ve spent a good deal of my life working from home and I strongly recommend it as a preferred work style. But I’ve also become quite familiar with both the advantages and the downsides of home basing. For years I worked from home as a mortgage loan officer. It was a natural advantage because it provided the ability to concentrate all of my efforts on serving my customers. It also forced me to learn to work independently and to identify and utilize outside sources who could enable me to do that fully.
Over time I became comfortable with the proverbial “chief cook and bottle washer” aspect of self-employment, and was able to transfer those skills to subsequent businesses, including recruiting and this weblog.
One element of work-at-home that I know to be absolutely critical above all other concerns: your contribution must add tangible value to your employers business.
Work-at-home isn’t about us nearly as much as it’s about our employers and what we can do for them through the arrangement. Never forget this.
Continue reading Making Work-At-Home Work For You →
Guest Post
There can be extreme competition out there these days when it comes to making an impression on the people who matter at work. Finding ways to impress the boss while maintaining your sanity can be difficult to say the least. While you certainly don’t want to have to work 70-hour workweeks just to get ahead, the benefits of career advancement probably won’t just fall into your lap. Most of the time, it takes hard work, dedication, and the ability to learn and adjust to changes in your work environment to get ahead in your career. Here are some tips to take into consideration.
Continue reading Ten Great Tips to Advance Your Career →
STRATEGY #10 TO SURVIVE A DOWN ECONOMY
By Kevin M
When careers and money become questionable foundations in our lives, what’s left? It’s often only in bad economies that we even entertain the question.
In 10 Ways To Survive a Down Economy (published on Christianpf.com June 1) we listed ten strategies to help us deal with the bad economy. Our topic for today, the final strategy, Strategy #10:
Seek fulfillment beyond your work. In a world where careers are no longer either peaceful or progressive, self actualizing through your work may not be the path it’s been in the past. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to find fulfillment outside of work. Take more active roles in regard to your health, family, faith and community.
Continue reading Seek Fulfillment Beyond Your Work →
|
OutOfYourRut.com Disclaimers
General: Any information in regard to money, credit, personal finance, or in regard to any other monetary topic, provided or shared on OutOfYourRut.com is presented for information and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. It is intended to provide general information only and does not constitute personal financial advice in regard to your specific circumstances...MORE-->
|
