Posted on 04/23/2006 7:49:45 AM PDT by SmithL
One of my readers is an underemployed 59-year-old man from among us here in the South Suburbs. Call him Harry. He works in information technology. Slowly and wearily, he says: "Once you get past 50, I swear, it gets tough, it gets really tough."
For instance, Harry applied for a job with a city of Chicago department that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He got an offer for some contract work. There were no benefits, but it was a paying job.
A woman from the city called him one Monday morning and wanted to know if he could start at midnight. Harry said he'd like to give his current employer a week's notice. That wasn't good enough. The job was gone. The caller told him: "This is a brave new world. Learn to live with it."
(Excerpt) Read more at starnewspapers.com ...
Your post is excellent.
Thanks. Well, a few years from now I'll either be getting griped out for not saving this money for my retirement or I'll be getting griped out for good planning, over coming obstacles and having a comfortable retirement income coming in:')
Another huge problem with our society.
why do you have to pay for your kid's college? Can't he/she get a job, get a loan, ROTC scholarship, apply for grants in aid. I've got 4 of the little buggers heading off for college at 2 year intervals starting in 2010. I 've saved for the last 17 years, since I was married in order to "help" but not pay for everything.
The kids that got drunk the most and needed to "find" themselves had everything given to them by mommy and daddy. If you pay for something with sweat equity, you want to learn a craft, get out in 4 years and care about what you're learning.
Health insurance is a bear, but with HMO's and other differed IRA type of health programs, a little prioritization by Harry could put him back on his feet.
Life is hard, I feel for him, cause that's what happened to my sister. However she made the change to consultant, moved from LA to Austin and is loving every minute of it. She's got more "work" than she can handle as "project manager" for Oracle systems and other d-base problems.
But somebody earlier hit the nail on the head... she kept on upgrading her skills continuosly. She says it's a pain in the a#@ but it's made her a hot commodity as far as IT work is concerned.
I see three things in her that struck me as behavioral that made her employable forever. She worked hard without complaining or blaming, she was always willing to travel and move and she kept upgrading skills.
I think being married with kids in school would be tought to just up and move but sometimes you've got to make sacrifices.
And you would hire someone who might leave you on a days notice? as I said if you expect two weeks notice from your employees be damn sure to grant two weeks to people you hire.
>>>>"Retirement was fun.... but it got old.
I started my new biz at 50+, man what a ride"<<<<
Hey wasn't Colonel Sanders about 70 when he latched on to a "Secret Recipe" for chicken?
If this current biz gets boring, I can always start another one.
TT
I look at it like a cheater. If he will walk out and leave someone else for you then he will walk out and leave you for someone else.
One drawback of having experience or job skills is that employers will sometimes look at the resume and (without someone even stating their going rate) will say, "You're asking too much." Never thinking that maybe that person is just looking for a job at almost any wage.
Those kids are basically our future. Thank you Alouette.
My oldest grandson is 6. We are checking out Vet Schools. A&M, maybe:')
The new electronic medical records systems are a chore to keep up with as well...
Say on an unrelated note...it would be neat if the RN's here at free republic could start their own ping and threads groups...I'm not sure how to do it yet but it would be cool to have one!
Why don't you start a thread and see who's interested? There are a lot of us here.
I think what rubs a lot of Freepers the wrong way about these kind of articles is the obvious agenda behind them and the way the media takes these "down-on-their-luck" people and uses them for political purposes. Which essentially is to show how mean capitalism is and how nice it would be if we elected caring Communists like Hillary Clinton who would give these poor people socialized health care and other social safety nets that would "make everything better."
Now this particular article is not quite as atrocious as others in this genre, but it does pander to those liberals who think the solution is socialism, government housing, public welfare, socialized health care, etc., etc., etc., which is anathema to good conservatives.
Liberalism has produced several generations of grasshoppers who are now attacking the ants as "selfish" for having planned ahead.
Not that this guy in the article was necessarily a grasshopper. But there are some grasshoppers on this thread who are attacking the ants.
I think another dynamic here is that many people do not realize that as an employee, you are simply a commodity. Once the employer decides that a commodity is no longer needed, the commodity is gotten rid of. Many people have fallen into the trap of thinking that the employer is "mean" and that the discarded employee is a "victim."
I believe that too many people who are employees do not think in terms of themselves being a commodity. Many of them have been poisoned by nearly a century of socialist labor unions and feel that their employer "owes them a living." Not only that, but they feel that as they gain seniority, that their pay should automatically increase while their work decreases. This is not the right attitude to have as an employee.
An employee should always be thinking of how they can acquire skills to not only make them more valuable to their employer but will make them valuable to other employers as well. This is the way to make more money. Too many people take a job, get good at that particular job and then fall into a "comfort zone" where they feel that they can set the rest of their life on cruise control. Well life does not work that way. Those who put themselves on cruise control often are the most expendable employees.
There are also other ways that employees can protect themselves from being out of work. They can commit to saving a portion of their paycheck for savings and retirement (such as 401k). After several years of working, they should have accumulated enough assets to sustain a significant amount of time of being out of work. By the time they have worked 30 or 40 years, they should have enough assets accumulated to where they no longer "need a job" and simply work for the pleasure of it or for the goal of retiring in comfort as opposed to retiring to subsist.
Even if you are an employee in the working class, you can assure yourself of a comfortable retirement if you save 15% of your income throughout your working career. Yet those who helpfully point this simple truth out to others so that they do not make the mistakes as the man in this article, they are attacked by others as being uncaring, unsympathetic and whatnot. I suppose that if we were to respond to such as article by saying "Oh, that poor man. Isn't there some government program for him? It's the fault of George Bush and all those evil conservatives that he is in the situation he is in!" that we would then be perceived as caring and sympathetic to this man's plight.
I think Oregon's are very highly rated. Oldest granddaughter is looking that way.
Now the Aerospace Engineer (11) and the Lawyer (9) are looking at Ivy League schools ;^)
Thanks for sharing an understanding of from where I was coming. I like your attitude. /;-)
I am liking you more and more. Well presented.
Since when did it become "expected" that parents would put their children through college?
Inflation has made it virtually impossible for a young person to earn enough to complete college in a reasonable period without significant debt. When I finished my B.S. at a state university in 1977 I had less than $1000 in debt and had earned enough working summers to pay about half of the cost of my education (less than $3000 /yr); my parents paid the other half. My parents' contribution required some sacrifice on their part. They willingly 'did without' some things so I had more opportunity.
I have two children who both completed B.S. degrees at state universities two years ago. The annual cost for each was close to $14000. They did their best to earn as much as they could but didn't come close to paying half. We sacrificed to make sure they finished debt free. Both were told grad school was their responsibility.
The key message of this thread is that one's continued employability requires current job skills. Thomas Friedman's 'The World is Flat' should be required reading by all young people. Parents need to instill into their children a life long passion for learning. College and graduate degrees are no guarantee of employability, but can provide important fundamental skills.
BTW - we told both our kids that our financial support was contingent upon their prudent lifestyle choices. My wife and I made it clear that we were paying for performance. We were not about to make the required sacrifices just to have them goof off - and we made certain they understood that.
My point is it is NOBODY but you who decides what skills to acquire. CHOOSE WELL!!!!
As a manager, he expects alot out of his employees. But it's not unusual to see him working late or weekends, along with the people he manages. In fact, the first time I ever got in trouble was for shutting down a server for maintenance at 11:30 PM on a Sunday night. It turns out he was running some reports using data from that server!
I've known him since 1989, and done support for him, and he knows that I'm the sort of tech who will "get it done," no matter what it takes. I once took a weekend trip with him to one of their remote offices, and when he said that he couldn't authorize the travel or overtime labor rates (which would have been $225/hr, at the time), I told him that if he'd take care of the room and food, I'd just tag along in case he needed me. It turned out he did, and we took care of the problem. But I think that impressed him. Now, 3 other employees and myself take care of 120 Windows 2000 Terminal Services servers, 1 Novell server, and about another 25 assorted database and application servers. It's a lot of work, and it's a challenge. But it's a job, and I'm getting a lot of good experience.
Mark
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