Your Finances

The first thing to take control is the Financials. When you are faced with challenges in your income side of the equation, you certainly need to look at the expense side to balance if off.

The last few topics I talked about were FAITH, THINK & QUICK INCOME. Yes, you must have faith. Once you lose faith, you lose everyting. You need to really think of your next step of action. One urgent step is to control your finances. Next step is to decide to be an employee or to seek out to be self employed or start a new business.

Let focus on the finances now. While most people may not practise it. It is important that you have a Income Statement or Profit & Loss statement. In this case, if you are out of job, you Income Statement is one sided. Only expenses.

So, now you need to look into your expenses. You need to list down in detail what are you monthly expenses. All the daily and yearly payments will be summarised or pro-rated into monthly expenses for easy management. Daily expenses are summed up and average value is use. These includes housing payments, transportation, food, school fees, insurance, utilities, taxes, and all other expenses.

After summing up the monthly expenses, using the amount of cash you have, you will able to work out your wealth indicator. That is how many months you can survive with your current cash you have. With that, you will be able to know your own position.

After doing this exercise, you will be able to know what to cut when you need to.

So, the Urgent thing to do is to develop survival skill number four: MANAGING YOUR EXPENSES!

Who says being retrenched is not stressful. It certainly is stressful. But with faith and doing appropriate actions, you will get to where you are.

Survival Skill Number Four: Managing Your Expenses.

Is Your Wife Working?

Welcome to the Club!

Soon after I was laid off last year, I visited a friend who (let's call him Mr. H) was running his own Telco service company. Mr. H was laid off 2-3 years back and after thinking for a
few months, he decided to start this company. That was another story that I want to talk about in term of starting business. What I wanted to share here is only one interesting aspects of the meeting.

We went to a coffee store at the ground level of this office building for a chat. Soon after, we were joined in by another couple of guys of middle age. I guess their ages around late 40s & early 50s. You can see their seasoned faces. Mr. H introduced them to me, but, I could remember their names (look, I have this problem of memorising people's names). But, one interesting introduction line Mr. H gave was worth pondering upon:

"Look," he said, "we belong to the group of people whose wifes are working! Welcome to the club!" Then we all laughed.

This is quite a strange phenomenom. It seems that, in Singapore, males of middle ages find it more difficult to land themselves jobs than the female counter part. In this case, my wife was laid off 10 days before me. She got a job within a month. Well the fact is her annualised income is now about 55% of the previous earning. For me, it seems different. I don't get any offer for any
kind of jobs like that even though I indicated my interest.

When I looked around me, I suddenly realised that many of my friends who are not working basically supported by their wifes. So, what is the reason? The fact that the wifes are working makes them less enthusiastic to land themselves jobs? Something else?

Anyway, the key point is, I call it survival skill number 3:

QUICK INCOME!

Key survival skill here is to get one of the couple to get a job as quickly as possible. Even if the income is not able to cover the expenses. One of my wife's ex-colleague who was laid off at the batch when into depression. He has five children and wife has never for the last 5 years. One of the children requires special attention (medically). Here is the issue. He is not willing to accept a job that will pay him less than what he needs to support the family. Many ex-colleagues tried to match him to jobs but not quite successful.

Here comes the key point of discussion: Why must employer pay you enough to support your family?

Listen up, guys, nobody owes you a living. Not even the government! Employer is going to pay you the PERCEPT value of the job. Your employer will pay you $10,000 per month answering phone calls if what you do will secure $100,000 of business every month. Otherwise, please expect $1,000 per month.

Mr. H is quite lucky that his wife's job seems to be stable and quite highly positioned, so no worries for him. He took his time to set up the company. Spending about 1 year to develop the software needed. Then, marketing the services. In total, about 2 years, he was not "drawing any salary" (not having income). Until about 2 year later that there of Net Income to the company and he started to give himself salary". That was a long wait but his business is improving.

Think about it.

Survival Skill Number 3: Get Quick Income for Family.

What to do when you are retrenched?

You don't have to rush!

Since I am experienced, I am here to share with you some tips I learned.

Depending on whether you are prepared or not. Some companies / manager are kind enough to give ample notice (unofficially) so that you are pschologically prepared. These are kind souls we should appreciate. Some managers are lacking in self confident and humanity. They may give you a surprise. My wife's retrenchment was planned over 3-6 months. Her department was to close down. She was initially offered to relocate to another country. There were lots of discussions and payouts were already determined well in advanced. No surprises at all. People get their money and go. No hard feelings. Some peole who were not affected even wanted to join them and asked for early retirement. But they were declined since the company thought the they were still needed. This is good. Open, frank, nothing to hide type of management style. Employees understands the rational and accepts the offer without much resentment. Of course that does not mean that they are not worried about their future.

My was a surprise. I was given one week to clear up my outstanding works and my compensation was also minimal. That is the different between companies or managements with human touch or without. It also reflects the confidence level of the management. Even though they gave me a hit, I was more or less seeing in coming 2 - 3 months before. I told my staff to look for new job because he was new (less than a year) and definitely not able to get any compensation. So, he managed to get out 2 months before I was hit.

Why I had been sitting around for 9 months?

My answer is, there are too many things to try!

Yes, once you are out there, you suddenly realised that there are so many possibilities that you can make a living. So, my advice to you is to stop and

THINK!

The biggest reason that I spent 9 months not doing anything productive (I am using making money as measurement of productivity) was that I jumped into things too quickly. There wasn't enough thinking. I tried too many things without thinking through.

You see, for me, I am not interested to get a job anymore. So, I spend 3-4 months exploring franchising opportunities. I combed various places for shop spaces. I talked to a few master franchisors. I did my spread calculations. I when to various locations to count human traffics at different hours. All these works are for me to do feasibilities study. After few months of hard work, I concluded that none of those opportunities I explored are feasible. Then, I jumped into stock trading full-time. Again that took me another 3 months to realised that it may not be something I love best. Then, I came across Internet Marketing. Something I am very confident and committed. (Please visit http://www.simplemindset.com, http://www.bizgenerator.com & http://dragonation.blogspot.com) I believe that my future is in Internet Marketing. I also started to do work on my old trade (IT Consulting). I teamed up with my University Classmate to work on IT consulting services. (Please visit http://www.probaseconsulting.com).

All these takes time. I spend 9 months of my time doing evaluations etc. See, I used to jump into things quickly. Now, I want to think first before I do anything. Now I am sharing this with you, So, listen up. You can short cut all these processes by simply taking a step back and

THINK! (survival skill number two)

Before you decide what to do next...

Gook Luck!

Survival Skill Number Two: Think Through

First Day at Work after 9 months

If you are feeling squeezed, you are not alone!

30th August 2006. First Day at work after 9 months. What a change! This is a 2-month contract to help a customer to design a new software application.

Nothing spectacular about work to talk about. I'd been in IT industry for almost 20 years. Whatever is there is nothing new. Lots of evolutionary innovations. No quantum leaps.

Over to lunch at a cafeteria at the basement, after finishing my lunch, I noticed someone appearing to be familiar. So, I approach him. True enough, my ex-colleague whom I had not met for over 10+ years. He looked haggard somewhat. So, I asked him, "how are you these day? Are you working aroud here?" "No, I am not working here," he said. "I am looking for a potential client in this building. I am doing my own training business."

We sat down and talked for a while. The outright thing he told me was, "I am struggling to make a living. Life has been very tough over the last 3 years." He is over 50 and he holds a Master in Arts degree. He was a training manager in my previous company. He teaches soft skills.

After lunch, I met yet another ex-colleague who is working in the client that I am servicing. What a small world. He was retrench before and he is accepting this lower position here. He is not in my category. He is just couple of year shy of 45. Life is not as rosy for him as well. But, he has faith. He believes that GOD created him and will not let him live in poverty. If he happy with his life? Not quite but something keeps him going and he has less stress. The conversation with him allows me to confirm one thing that I had been reading about: Have Faith in order to succeed. Regardless of your religious orientation, FAITH is an important factor that keeps people going.

What do you really need to survive after 45?

FAITH! (survival skill number one)

Have Faith, my friend, for without which, nothing is possible. The pot of gold the down there waiting for us to dig it up. We must have faith.

PS. I am not a Christain and I am not preaching Christianity here. When I said FAITH, I am talking about you believing in yourself and your dream.

Survival Skill Number One!

Life begins at 45

Or is it the end? Life actually begins at 45. Why do I say that? Silly. Well, listen out here...

Before 45, you are invincible. You can do anything you want and you can achieve it. After 45, there will be a little bit more of challenges for you. That is where the real test of life begins.

Firstly, when you read newspaper, you now have to take off your glasses if you used to have myopia. Wow, great! I don't need to read with glasses anymore! Huray!

Next, you started to get a little worried about what is going on in your office. You have been working with this company for 10 - 15 years. Well the atmosphere starts to get a little different these days. You start to pay more attention to what is going on. Have you heard that they are closing down the Australia's support operation? Oh, yeah, 20 people was let go. Well, sorry for them. Hey, what about here? You have any insider news? Are they closing down here also??? Phew!! Luckily not!

Oh, I got to start to get in touch with some "head hunters" (recruitment agencies). Hey, I'd not written a resume for last 15 years. Ghee, where do I start? Huh, no sweat, just surf the web and download some samples. Hey, don't leave your www.monster.com screen on, your boss is passing by.

Aah ha... Almost forgotten! My Uni classmate just started a recruitment firm recently. Must get in touch him soon. See if he has anything interesting... Ah, remember to call him tomorrow.

Hmm.. Oh yeah, almost forgotten to pay my daughter's ballet school fee, what about the arts lesson and piano lesson? Need to make sure that she does her home work and practice her music too later. Huh, she needs to go for a holiday science camp? Oh how much is it? Ah, $235 for 3-days?

Need to pay the mortgage and car instalment too. Let's see how much I have left for my expenses. .... Can't meet my friend for a drink this week... Maybe next month.