616-If_Missing_One_Paycheck_is_a_Problem_For_You_Youre_Behaving_Stupidly
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00:00:31.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:34.040 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while
00:00:38.380 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua. I am your
00:00:42.560 | host and today we talk about making sure that you are not behaving stupidly with your money
00:00:51.240 | so that you will never be in a position of a slave who lives in fear of losing a single
00:00:58.080 | paycheck.
00:01:00.060 | We begin with a short excerpt from this morning's program of Morning Edition on National Public
00:01:05.480 | Radio.
00:01:06.480 | "Air travelers are used to flight delays and cancellations because of the weather,
00:01:11.360 | maybe mechanical problems. Well, it soon might be the partial government shutdown that is
00:01:15.640 | disrupting travel. New planes are not being certified to fly. Security screeners and air
00:01:21.040 | traffic controllers are working unpaid."
00:01:23.400 | Here's more from NPR's David Schaefer in Chicago.
00:01:26.440 | I'm here at Chicago's O'Hare Airport standing next to one of the large CT-80 scanners. It's
00:01:32.400 | essentially a CT scanner for your checked luggage. And the TSA officers who operate
00:01:37.400 | this machine, they're here at work lifting the heavy and sometimes odd-shaped and overstuffed
00:01:43.120 | bags onto the conveyor belt to go through the machine. Even though come this Friday,
00:01:48.720 | if the shutdown continues, they won't get paid. And that presents a severe financial
00:01:53.320 | hardship for many of these officers.
00:01:55.560 | I've been here 16 years plus. I am a single mom.
00:01:59.240 | Christine Vitell is a security screener at O'Hare with a son in college. She's trying
00:02:03.600 | to figure out how she'll pay his tuition and...
00:02:06.400 | I just bought a house. I'm not going to be able to pay my mortgage.
00:02:10.000 | A lot of the officers, they live paycheck to paycheck.
00:02:13.040 | Janice Casey is president of the union local representing TSA employees in Chicago, and
00:02:17.880 | she notes that they're among the lowest paid federal employees. Some average $36,000 to
00:02:23.000 | $43,000 a year, but start only in the mid-20s. And for some TSA workers and their families,
00:02:29.360 | the situation could get dire rather quickly.
00:02:31.880 | If there's no check on the 26th, I have no idea what we're going to do.
00:02:36.080 | 36-year-old Yacinda's husband is a TSA officer in Portland. We're not using her last name
00:02:40.880 | because she fears he could be fired. They have two kids, a six-month-old girl and a
00:02:45.480 | boy turning four at the end of this month. Yacinda says they were planning to buy a few
00:02:49.800 | presents and decorations to celebrate, but now they can't.
00:02:53.760 | Our rent is due. The electric bill is due. Our cell phones are now past due.
00:02:59.880 | Yacinda says her husband's hiring by the TSA three years ago helped lift the family out
00:03:04.320 | of poverty. Now she fears the shutdown will set them back.
00:03:08.680 | I'm scared and I'm trying to be okay because I can't be sad every day for my kids and I
00:03:14.040 | can't be stressed out because it affects how I parent. You know, my husband's stressed
00:03:18.480 | out too and he has to go to work and deal with it at work and you know, he knows he's
00:03:22.600 | working for free, which is ridiculous.
00:03:25.920 | Even more ridiculous, Yacinda says, is that he came home the other day with instructions
00:03:29.740 | on how to file for unemployment while he's still working 40 hours a week. And the situation
00:03:36.200 | is not much better for higher-paid essential government workers like air traffic controllers.
00:03:41.160 | It's a very high stress job and you need to be on your game at all times.
00:03:47.400 | Mick Devine is with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association in Boston. He says
00:03:51.720 | the shutdown is forcing controllers to make tough financial decisions and it weighs on
00:03:57.440 | them heavily.
00:03:58.480 | There is a concern that as this goes on, that the human factors aspect of this shutdown
00:04:03.280 | will take a toll on the psyche and the concentration level of our members and they do the best
00:04:08.720 | job that they can each and every day.
00:04:10.920 | Nearly 20% of the FAA's 10,000 air traffic controllers.
00:04:14.480 | Okay, that's enough. You get the point of this particular report. Now, don't worry
00:04:20.920 | for a moment that today's show will have anything to do with politics. The extent of
00:04:28.440 | my political commentary is this. It's ridiculous that the United States of America is going
00:04:36.360 | through a so-called partial government shutdown. It's ridiculous that the government of
00:04:42.480 | the United States is dysfunctional. This is just simply an expression of the same dysfunction
00:04:48.400 | that has been going on for years and as far as I'm concerned, you can expect it to
00:04:51.880 | continue and get worse. It is ridiculous.
00:04:55.120 | Now, political commentary done. You don't have to worry for the rest of the show that
00:04:59.800 | we'll talk at all about the government shutdown. What I'm going to talk about is you. If
00:05:05.720 | you are living in fear and you're managing your money in such a way that the loss of
00:05:12.560 | a single paycheck, which if you're a government worker is almost certainly a temporary postponement
00:05:18.920 | of a single paycheck, if you are living that way, you are behaving stupidly. You are managing
00:05:28.520 | your money stupidly. You are acting and living like an idiot. Stop it. Don't be stupid.
00:05:46.480 | Now if this is your first government shutdown and you are 18 years old and you just got
00:05:52.360 | your job last week and your mom just died from cancer, your dad just went to prison,
00:05:58.680 | you graduated from high school and you just got your job making $22,000 a year and you're
00:06:04.080 | still broke, I'm happy to extend to you as much sympathy as you need. I'll buy you
00:06:12.320 | groceries. I'll lend you money to get your rent through. I'll help you out and all
00:06:17.840 | of your neighbors on every side of you will do exactly the same thing. So will every family
00:06:23.000 | member. So will anybody in your community. They will get you through. But if you are
00:06:28.920 | a government employee and you're freaking out about the postponement, the temporary
00:06:35.920 | postponement of a single paycheck, this should be a giant slap in your face to recognize
00:06:45.480 | that you are living stupidly. You're managing your money like an idiot.
00:06:55.920 | Now if you are not a government employee, don't all of a sudden think, "Well, I'm
00:06:59.960 | safe because I'm not a government employee." It's especially bad for government employees.
00:07:06.480 | What number of government shutdown is this in the last couple of years, in the last five
00:07:11.280 | years? Come on, at this point, it's a habit. And if something happened the first time,
00:07:16.200 | the very first government shutdown, then maybe again, "Hey, well, maybe I didn't ever
00:07:21.360 | know this was possible. I thought I was working for the government. I can't be fired. I
00:07:24.640 | can't be laid off. I'm just going to collect this check. Everyone says it's a great stable
00:07:27.680 | job. After all, it's the US government backed by the full taxing authority of the United
00:07:30.880 | States." Okay, maybe you were in a situation where you thought that you were totally safe.
00:07:37.960 | But come on, do you not read a newspaper? Are you not aware of the fact that a government
00:07:44.320 | shutdown is signaled months in advance? Did you never conceive that somehow the politicians
00:07:51.160 | who have been using this as a standard operating procedure for resolving conflicts for the
00:07:56.520 | last increasingly again and again and over the last few years, did you not think it might
00:08:00.880 | happen again? Why are you not paying attention to what's in front of you?
00:08:05.720 | Now, back again, if you're not a government employee, do you not recognize that making
00:08:10.480 | payroll is tough for most employers? Do you not think that it could also be you working
00:08:17.080 | in the private market that you might miss a paycheck? Your employer might be late? Many
00:08:24.200 | employers all across the United States of America, when they go into the week on Monday,
00:08:28.920 | they don't know how they're going to make payroll on Friday. I don't know the percentage.
00:08:34.980 | I don't know any way we could find out the percentage, but I do know that the number
00:08:38.480 | is many. I've talked with a lot of business owners. I have been that business owner trying
00:08:46.040 | to figure out how do I pay? How do I make my payments? You face as a non-government
00:08:55.000 | employee, an even bigger risk than a government employee of not being paid this week or next
00:09:03.960 | week or whenever your next payday is. And here's what's worse. At the current stage
00:09:09.760 | of the collapse of the US-American financial system, there is almost no possibility that
00:09:16.800 | the government workers who are currently furloughed and currently not being paid will not actually
00:09:21.080 | be paid. It is almost inconceivable that this particular phase of the financial problems
00:09:29.520 | that the United States is in will not result in everybody being paid back pay. That's always
00:09:34.160 | what happens or so it's happened so far in these particular situations. The government
00:09:38.480 | workers always get their money. They'll be paid the back pay. Once the problem of the
00:09:43.360 | conflict comes to an end, once Congress passes their budget and spending resolutions, they
00:09:47.960 | will be paid. Now, will that be the case in five years, 25 years? I don't know. I wouldn't
00:09:54.080 | be so confident of it if it were 25 years from now. But in today's world, that is almost
00:09:59.180 | certainly the case, which means that all of these people who are facing the loss of one
00:10:03.960 | of their paychecks will eventually be paid. But for you, a private sector employee, you
00:10:12.520 | have no such guarantee. You may show up for work on Monday morning and there's a chain
00:10:19.760 | around the front door of your office. Over the weekend, your employer filed bankruptcy.
00:10:26.700 | Are they going to pay you your back pay? Are they going to make the paycheck? Happens
00:10:32.880 | all the time. The answer is no. Or if it is, there's no certainty of it. Like the government
00:10:39.400 | employers have that virtual certainty, employees, excuse me, have that virtual certainty. You
00:10:43.880 | don't have that virtual certainty. And if you do get paid, it'll probably be quite a
00:10:48.000 | way into the bankruptcy proceedings. Feel free to file your claim with everyone else.
00:10:54.040 | The point is we are all vulnerable to disruptions in our income. Now think with me for a moment
00:11:01.060 | about how utterly ridiculous this particular news story is. Now, first of all, indulge
00:11:10.120 | me for a moment. I find a very hard time. I have such a hard time hearing employer,
00:11:16.800 | sorry, reporters try to engender sympathy by describing that somebody's job is hard.
00:11:24.000 | After all, these TSA employees have to lift heavy and odd shaped packages and boxes and
00:11:30.400 | luggage through the machine. What did you think the job was? That's your job is picking
00:11:35.340 | up heavy suitcases, the people's belongings that they're trying to get through the airplane.
00:11:40.000 | Why don't you feel the same? Sorry for the people who are calling them. It's ridiculous.
00:11:43.280 | That's why you hire people who know my job is to pick up heavy things or the workers
00:11:50.440 | in an air traffic controller. Oh, it's a stressful job. Of course, it's a stressful job. Anyway,
00:11:56.560 | let me continue back to money. We live in the, most of us, the predominant audience
00:12:05.280 | of the radical personal finances base in the United States of America. Okay, let's just
00:12:09.520 | go. The people profiled in this story live in the richest country, not on the continent,
00:12:18.720 | not on their side of the world, the richest country in the world. Not only the richest
00:12:26.800 | country in the world, the richest country in history. Throughout all of recorded human
00:12:33.040 | history, there has never been as wealthy and affluent a society as the United States of
00:12:40.120 | America. We live in the richest country in the history of the world with an economy that
00:12:48.520 | by all objective metrics is doing better than it's ever done. Unemployment rate is extremely
00:12:56.120 | low. Employers all over the place are hiring people. Stock market is mostly up with a short
00:13:03.080 | exception over the last few months. Consumer confidence is decent. Living at the height
00:13:09.720 | of a boom, the height of an economic financial boom. So you live in the richest country in
00:13:19.360 | the history of the world and a great economy, and you are managing your money in such a
00:13:26.400 | way that you can't make it a single paycheck. If you are doing that, you are acting stupidly.
00:13:35.720 | Now stop. I'll show you in just a few minutes, I'll show you how to stop behaving stupidly.
00:13:43.440 | But the first thing that you have to do is recognize that that's what you are doing.
00:13:49.140 | It does you no good to blame your problems on a dysfunctional Congress or on a president
00:13:56.920 | of the United States. You can blame their problems on them. You can talk about the dysfunction
00:14:04.880 | that's going to happen because of them, but it does no you no good to blame your financial
00:14:10.080 | problems on them. Because guess what? They don't have financial problems. The members
00:14:16.320 | of Congress, they don't have financial problems. They're managing their money in such a way
00:14:23.020 | that they're not dependent on their incomes. So you should do the same thing. And this
00:14:29.400 | is not hard. Here's what's utterly ridiculous. You have had time to figure this out. Let's
00:14:36.280 | talk about the two ladies profiled in the story from this morning's National Public
00:14:39.480 | Radio. One of them, a single mom, has worked for TSA for 16 years, according to the report
00:14:48.680 | this morning. If you have worked at a job for 16 years and you are putting your child
00:14:58.240 | through college and you've just bought a house, do you not have ample opportunity to
00:15:08.160 | have saved money? You've had a steady job for 16 years. Or the same for the 36-year-old
00:15:18.680 | woman profiled with the two children. Her husband was hired three years ago. You've
00:15:25.280 | not been able to save a few thousand dollars over the last three years? That is crazy.
00:15:38.880 | That is a crazy way for you to live. And if you continue living that way, you will always
00:15:45.500 | be a slave to other people's decisions and you will never achieve even a modicum of financial
00:15:54.000 | freedom. You will never achieve even a little bit of financial security. You're telling
00:16:02.640 | me you have worked a job with a stable paycheck for the last three years or for the last 16
00:16:09.320 | years, and you haven't saved five or ten thousand dollars? That is called being foolish. That's
00:16:21.160 | called behaving stupidly.
00:16:27.000 | Now I hope you notice the fact that I'm using adult language in this podcast because adults
00:16:34.160 | face the facts and admit and recognize when they're wrong and change. And that's your
00:16:42.680 | job. So if you now recognize that you have been behaving stupidly, that you have been
00:16:51.040 | handling your money in a crazy way, I'd like to give you some suggestions and some
00:16:57.680 | advice that will help you.
00:17:02.500 | Number one, pay attention to what's happening around you. Pay attention and gather all of
00:17:12.280 | the information that you can gather about things that will affect you. Don't be stupid
00:17:19.640 | so as to not even collect a little bit of information about what's happening. This
00:17:25.880 | is the most absurd in the fact if you work for a government agency. It would be slightly
00:17:35.120 | understandable if a vulnerable employee showed up to work on Monday morning who works for
00:17:42.000 | a private, small, family-owned enterprise and finds the doors chained on Monday morning.
00:17:48.520 | That would be understandable because, after all, how would a low-level employee, a dock
00:17:53.760 | worker, a warehouse worker, how would they know what's happening financially with that
00:17:57.360 | employer? That would be hard. So I would understand that. But when you work for the government
00:18:03.500 | of the United States, where all of the information is not only publicly available, the entire
00:18:11.660 | fiscal situation of the United States of America is publicly available. You can read the Congressional
00:18:17.880 | Budget Office reports just like I can. So not only is the information available, but
00:18:23.080 | the information is reported day in and day out. You don't even have to buy a newspaper.
00:18:30.640 | You don't have to pay for an internet connection. All you need to do is walk by the front of
00:18:35.820 | a newspaper stand and see what headlines are above the fold.
00:18:40.600 | A government shutdown is telegraphed weeks and months in advance. And if you are so naive
00:18:48.180 | as to have missed the fact that this is now a regular bargaining tool among politicians,
00:18:54.760 | you're doing it wrong. You are being ignorant. You are willfully ignoring information that
00:19:02.580 | affects your life. Stop it. Pay attention to what's happening. Pay attention to what's
00:19:10.540 | happening at your company. Pay attention to what's happening in your industry. It should
00:19:14.960 | be no surprise whatsoever to you when your employer declares, "Hey, by the way, we
00:19:20.580 | are getting out of the business. We're declaring bankruptcy." Because you should be paying
00:19:24.320 | attention to what's happening in your industry. If you see the fact that the warehouse that
00:19:30.660 | you work in is idling machines constantly, that there have been several rounds of layoffs,
00:19:35.280 | if you see the fact that your town is dying, that your industry is falling apart, pay attention
00:19:41.880 | to that and expect the fact that you are going to be out of a job. If you notice that the
00:19:49.760 | economy is starting to do poorly and the unemployment rate is starting to tick up and there are
00:19:54.740 | new unemployment claims being filed constantly, expect the fact that you could probably lose
00:20:00.720 | your job. And that's the time to start preparing. Pay attention to what's happening around
00:20:08.240 | you. How can you be an adult and be so naive as to miss the fact that a government shutdown
00:20:14.960 | is imminent? Pay attention. Now you say, "Well, I don't know what to do." Maybe you were
00:20:23.120 | paying attention, you expected it to happen, but you didn't know what to do. Well, stop
00:20:27.860 | right now where you are. Take out a piece of paper, write down all of your bills, write
00:20:36.200 | down all the money that you spend, and then say, "If I had to live on half the money I
00:20:40.600 | have now, how would I make ends meet? What would I do?" Make that plan today. No, I'm
00:20:48.520 | serious. Stop what you're doing. If you've never done this, stop what you're doing, hit
00:20:52.800 | pause on the podcast, take out a piece of paper, write down your bills, write down your
00:20:57.800 | expenses and ask yourself, "How would I live on half the money that I have here?" What's
00:21:01.840 | your plan? No, seriously, if you haven't done it, stop and do it. Because you need to have
00:21:13.220 | a plan long in advance of a situation like this. Here's what happens. People don't plan,
00:21:19.240 | they don't think, they don't pay attention to what's happening around them. Then all
00:21:22.740 | of a sudden, they're worried about the fact that they might lose a paycheck, which I'm
00:21:27.720 | not actually sure. I need to go and look and figure out. I don't know that anyone's actually
00:21:31.580 | lost a paycheck yet. The weird thing in that particular story, it was published on January
00:21:35.960 | 9, 2019, but the second woman, Jacinda, who was being interviewed, talks about, "We were
00:21:44.080 | going to have bills being due on the 26th, and what are we going to do if we miss a paycheck
00:21:48.020 | on the 26th?" I think that that would have been recorded back just prior to the Christmas
00:21:52.800 | vacation. So I don't think this is quite synced up with the actual facts. But regardless,
00:21:58.660 | the point is, people haven't thought about the situation. That is such a juvenile approach
00:22:07.400 | to life. An adult pays attention to what's happening around them, looks at the things
00:22:13.540 | that might happen, and makes a plan.
00:22:20.280 | Your plan must be unique to your circumstances. For example, let's say Jacinda mentioned that
00:22:27.560 | her cell phone bill is now past due. Now, should you pay your cell phone bill when you
00:22:35.600 | don't have any money? Well, that depends. If I were working as a real estate agent,
00:22:41.800 | and my cell phone was how I earned my income, paying my cell phone bill would be one of
00:22:47.160 | the first things that I would ever pay. But if I'm working for TSA, and my daughter needs
00:22:57.080 | a life-saving medication, she's insulin-dependent, a cell phone bill would be gone immediately
00:23:04.440 | so that I can keep the medication coming in to keep my daughter going. Now, if you don't
00:23:09.440 | have an insulin-dependent daughter, of course, your circumstances are going to change. But
00:23:13.320 | nobody's coming to save you. It's your job. So pay attention and think about what's
00:23:18.480 | going to happen. You will have to go through your list and consider it yourself about what
00:23:24.720 | you would cut and how you would do it.
00:23:27.640 | Now, the most straightforward thing that you can do right away, even if you don't have
00:23:32.560 | any money, you don't have any savings, the most straightforward thing that you can do
00:23:37.200 | is to cut expenses. And cut expenses like a crazy person. Don't goof around with this
00:23:46.920 | stuff and wait. Cut expenses like a crazy person.
00:23:50.720 | Let me give you some suggestions and let's walk through some specific scenarios. Now,
00:23:57.200 | some expenses are hard to cut. For example, Jacinda mentioned that she doesn't know how
00:24:01.040 | she's going to pay her rent. Well, that's the hardest because moving is expensive and
00:24:06.800 | figuring out where you're going to live and cut your rental expenses. These are all difficult.
00:24:10.560 | Now, in this situation, this is easily solved in the fact that you are a government worker
00:24:15.480 | and the reason for your job loss is plastered all over the newspaper and all over the homepage
00:24:20.800 | of every site on the internet. So it should be relatively simple for you to go to your
00:24:26.160 | landlord and explain to your landlord that, "Look, I work for the TSA. They've sent this
00:24:32.260 | nice little letter home with me telling me how to negotiate with people that I don't
00:24:36.000 | have the money to pay. We are going through a government shutdown. I'm going to lose my
00:24:40.500 | paycheck this month and I'm not going to have enough money to pay you. Now, I understand
00:24:44.440 | that you can go ahead and start filing foreclosure eviction procedures against me. I would ask
00:24:49.200 | you for a little bit of leniency. Obviously, the political pressure that's happening across
00:24:53.280 | the United States of America is going to be brought to bear more and more on the houses
00:24:59.080 | of Congress and the executive branch of the US government. And what has happened every
00:25:03.200 | single other time that this particular tactic of negotiation has been used is as soon as
00:25:09.060 | a spending bill is passed, we're paid all of our back pay. So dear Mr. Landlord, since
00:25:13.400 | I've been a good tenant for you, would you consider please working with me and I will
00:25:19.160 | try to pay you just as very soon as I can."
00:25:23.200 | Now, it's hard for me to imagine a landlord who would not be open to that conversation.
00:25:30.320 | I can't imagine a landlord who, with appropriate documentation of the fact that, "Look, here's
00:25:34.600 | my paycheck from the TSA. Look, here's my letter that they sent home with me." I can't
00:25:40.320 | imagine a landlord who would say, "Okay, I'm going to kick you out right away."
00:25:45.120 | Now, if you're a private sector employee, that'll be a little bit harder for you. If
00:25:50.360 | you've just lost your job, you've just missed a paycheck, you don't have all of those bargaining
00:25:54.440 | tools that a government employee has. You can't take today's newspaper in and talk
00:26:00.400 | to your landlord. So that'll be a little bit harder. But changing your rent or your mortgage
00:26:04.480 | is the most difficult circumstance to be in.
00:26:10.040 | There are other difficult bills to change. For example, if you have a car payment, that's
00:26:14.460 | a hard bill to change. Now, you could call the lender, and you should, and have the same
00:26:19.840 | kind of discussion, but it's harder to do that. But many of the other bills are just
00:26:24.900 | a matter of you making a change. For example, let's say that you can't pay your car insurance
00:26:31.600 | bill. Well, it's time to park one of the cars and pull the insurance off of it. Or
00:26:37.640 | it's time to park both of the cars, or the only car you have, and pull the insurance
00:26:41.680 | off of it and take the bus to work for the next couple of weeks. This is a short-term
00:26:46.800 | thing, and you can ride the bus to work for the next couple of weeks. You can get a bicycle,
00:26:52.160 | you can pedal it down the two miles to the bus stop, you can get on the bus, pay them
00:26:55.720 | their $1.37, take the bus to work, ride your bicycle to the office. You probably should
00:27:00.480 | have done that a long time ago, and you didn't do that. That's why you don't have any money
00:27:04.360 | to get you through a single paycheck. But now it's time to get on your bicycle, park
00:27:08.520 | your cars, and drop the car insurance. That will save you money.
00:27:12.600 | A bicycle is a very effective form of transportation, and your city has a bus system. Use it. Get
00:27:19.720 | rid of your car insurance. That also, by the way, will help you get rid of your gasoline
00:27:24.160 | expense. And if you can't drive your car around, you'll probably spend less money, which will
00:27:29.960 | be helpful.
00:27:32.120 | Now what else can you do? What else can you cut? Well, you don't need a cable bill. You
00:27:36.480 | don't need a satellite TV bill. You don't need a TV bill at all. You don't have time
00:27:42.640 | for entertainment because you're not getting paid. So you might want to continue working
00:27:49.680 | for TSA right now, but you also need to go and get a job so you don't have time to sit
00:27:54.260 | around and watch TV. Cancel your cable. Cancel your satellite. You say, "But I have a contract."
00:27:59.640 | That was stupid. Did you not think about that? Why would you sign up for a contract committing
00:28:07.480 | yourself to making a series of payments over the next two years when you don't have any
00:28:13.060 | money to make those payments?
00:28:18.220 | Turn off the cable. Turn off the satellite. Turn off the internet. If you can't pay your
00:28:22.600 | phone bills, get rid of your cell phone. Turn it off. Say, "Well, I have a contract there."
00:28:27.560 | That was stupid. You can get as much phone access as you need in the United States of
00:28:34.120 | America. If you're not getting the free system under the Federal Phone Housing Allowance,
00:28:38.480 | popularly known as Obama phones, but of course the program was enacted under President Reagan.
00:28:44.940 | So obviously the Obama phone is just a kind of a rather rude partisan slur. But you can
00:28:52.600 | get, even if you pay for it, you can get phone access for $5 or $10 a month. It's easy. Easy.
00:29:00.000 | You can install free apps on your phone and use your neighbor's internet access to make
00:29:06.520 | all your phone calls. So this would be a good time to learn about how to do that.
00:29:11.960 | If you can't pay your electric bill, I concede that you shouldn't have your electricity shut
00:29:17.340 | off. I concede that. But you can shut off every light in your house. You can unplug
00:29:21.980 | your TV. You can turn your thermostat to a more energy efficient number, whether you're
00:29:29.000 | heating or cooling. You can put on a sweater if you're in the cold country. You can go
00:29:33.480 | outdoors and spend more time outside and let your kids play at the water park or put the
00:29:38.040 | hose out front to keep them cool during the day. This is not abuse. This is called normal
00:29:45.280 | life. And US Americans sit around and pretend like, "Well, I'm just a victim of the circumstances.
00:29:51.640 | I'm a victim. I can't take two hot showers a day. My children will roast if we have to
00:29:57.640 | set the thermostat above 78 degrees. They will just die." We can't put on sweaters.
00:30:05.720 | Do you know how bulky and uncomfortable a sweater is? It's ridiculous.
00:30:14.120 | Stop taking so many showers. Cut your water bill. Turn off your sprinklers. Whatever you
00:30:17.840 | have to do, do it to get your expenses as low as possible. That will help. You can do
00:30:25.240 | that right away even if you have no money.
00:30:27.680 | Now, what else do you do? Look for help. Jacinda, I think it was Jacinda in the NPR report,
00:30:42.840 | says, "Well, I think it's ridiculous that my husband should go and file for unemployment."
00:30:46.520 | Yes, it is ridiculous. It is utterly and completely ridiculous. So is the idea that the US federal
00:30:54.720 | government is going to be able to pay all the money that it's promised. That was also
00:31:00.040 | ridiculous, and yet you believe that. So yes, it is ridiculous that you should go while
00:31:04.880 | working 40 hours a week for the Transportation Security Administration that you should go
00:31:08.480 | and file for unemployment. That is ridiculous.
00:31:13.320 | But what's also ridiculous? The fact that you wouldn't go and take money from the federal
00:31:19.280 | government when they're saying, "Here, go and get money from this particular federal
00:31:23.120 | agency." After all, you're behind on your rent, you can't pay your electric bill, and
00:31:28.160 | your cell phone bill is past due. So yes, it is ridiculous, but it's also ridiculous
00:31:33.760 | for you to not go and file for unemployment, because then you could pay your cell phone
00:31:37.800 | bill, you can pay your electric bill, and you could make a partial payment on your rent.
00:31:42.660 | So it's ridiculous that that entire system exists. The whole thing is ridiculous. But
00:31:47.000 | don't be an idiot and ignore your situation. Go, file for unemployment, take the money,
00:31:54.680 | and now guess what? You'll have free money when the US federal government pays you back
00:31:58.600 | all your back pay, and in the meantime, you have money to buy food for your children so
00:32:02.440 | they're not screaming all the time because they're hungry.
00:32:06.440 | You know what's ridiculous? Do you know how many mothers all around the world worry constantly
00:32:12.520 | because their children haven't eaten in days? Thankfully, a lot fewer than a couple decades
00:32:19.400 | ago, but many of them. I've been there, I've seen them. You can walk down to any one of
00:32:26.360 | your neighbors and say, "My children are hungry," and your neighbors will say, "Hop in the car,
00:32:33.520 | we're going to the grocery store." You don't have a thing in the world to worry about.
00:32:40.320 | Every mother in the world should be so fortunate. You can go to any church in your area and
00:32:45.680 | say, "My children don't have food. We don't have food. Can you help?" And you'll be overwhelmed
00:32:52.440 | with the generosity that is shown to you. There are government-run and financed and
00:32:59.080 | subsidized food banks in your town where you can go and get food. Go get them. They're
00:33:05.680 | there for people who are in need. You live in the richest...if none of those things work,
00:33:14.400 | go and start going through dumpsters. Go start looking on the trash pile and you'll find
00:33:19.420 | plenty of food to feed your family. I'm too proud to do that. Well, that's your problem.
00:33:27.920 | There is so much food available that having food for your children is not a problem.
00:33:41.480 | Stop whining. Get to work. Don't talk about how unfair it is. Recognize the fact that
00:33:47.960 | your mother was right. Life isn't fair. Go file for unemployment. Take the money and
00:33:56.880 | use it wisely on the bare essentials. If you cut expenses and you file for unemployment,
00:34:03.280 | you'll have enough to keep things going forward, especially if you negotiate a couple of the
00:34:06.920 | big hairy payments like your rent.
00:34:09.320 | Now, if you can't pay your son's college tuition, what do you do? You go down first to the college
00:34:16.040 | and you say to them, "Look, I work for the TSA. Here's today's newspaper. We can't pay
00:34:21.160 | the money because I'm not getting a paycheck. Are you willing to work with us?" And guess
00:34:25.520 | what they'll say? "Yes, we're willing to work with you." Because you're going to get
00:34:31.240 | your back pay. Don't pretend like you're never going to get paid. You're going to get your
00:34:34.960 | back pay. So they'll work with you. Just go and face it. Tackle it and solve the problem.
00:34:42.120 | Now if you're a private sector employee, there's no guarantee you're going to get the back
00:34:45.600 | pay. So what do you do? You call your son and you say, "Son, I can't make the tuition
00:34:49.800 | payment." So either you have to make it or you need to quit school and get a job. That's
00:34:55.960 | what you do. It's simple.
00:35:03.440 | Now what else could you do? Well, if you have time, if you didn't just lose your paycheck,
00:35:12.160 | you could try saving money. It's a time-honored way of basically not being broke. And the
00:35:21.400 | way that you do it is you don't spend all the money that you make. So what you do is
00:35:28.320 | when you get a paycheck, you don't spend all that money. You save some of it. And saving
00:35:36.300 | means you don't spend it. So that means you take money and you move it somewhere else
00:35:41.080 | where you can save it and not spend it. That's how you save money.
00:35:45.520 | Now sometimes this is hard because you want to spend money, but you look and you say,
00:35:49.280 | "Do I have any money?" And you recognize, "No, I don't have any money, so I'm not going
00:35:53.440 | to spend it." And you don't buy it. There's kind of a good skit on, of all places, Saturday
00:35:59.120 | Night Live that you can go and find out this financial advice. It'll help you. Just go
00:36:05.560 | on YouTube and search for Saturday Night Live credit cards, and I think it'll come up.
00:36:12.600 | So if you just don't spend all your money, then you'll have money. Now here's what's
00:36:18.800 | cool. If you just save a little bit of money, something like a mere 10%, a mere 10% of your
00:36:27.680 | income, every 10 months you'll have an extra month of expenses. Which means that if you
00:36:37.400 | have been working for 36 months, back to Jacinda and Jacinda's husband, who's been working
00:36:44.800 | for three years for the TSA. If you've been working for 36 months and you've only saved
00:36:50.800 | 10% of your income, that means that you now have 3.6 months of income saved. Now what's
00:37:01.400 | cool about that is your actual expenses are lower than your income, because after all
00:37:05.880 | you're saving some of your income. So that's probably at least four or four and a half
00:37:11.680 | months of current expenses, which means that if you do budget cuts, as in change the thermostat,
00:37:17.120 | cancel your CV bill and all the rest of the stupid expenditures that you're doing, you
00:37:21.600 | could probably live on your savings for six months or eight months. And if you have unemployment
00:37:27.320 | coming in and you go down to the food bank and you get some food, you could probably
00:37:34.800 | live for 10 months. Now when you live in the richest country in the world, in the richest
00:37:41.640 | time in human history, during a fantastic economic period, when there's no recession,
00:37:48.720 | there's no depression, there's not high unemployment, don't you think it's reasonable that if you're
00:37:53.360 | working a job and you've been working there for three years, you could at least have saved
00:37:59.240 | at least, you know, five, $10,000? That's how you avoid being a slave to your job. You
00:38:11.640 | save money. And then when you have savings, when you don't get a paycheck, you can pay
00:38:19.480 | for the things that you need. Now here's what else I'd recommend. You should always stash
00:38:28.240 | the stuff that you need to live on. So you should have plenty of food in the pantry,
00:38:34.880 | at least a month or at least a couple of months of food in the pantry. Because can you imagine
00:38:39.880 | the pain of having to look at your children and say, "No, sorry," you know, two-year-old,
00:38:47.520 | your four, sorry, a four-year-old could understand. Can you look at your four-year-old and say,
00:38:54.640 | "Sorry, we don't have any food," because mommy and daddy didn't think to buy some extra groceries
00:39:00.200 | in case someday we didn't have food? Obviously, your six-month-old is not going to understand
00:39:04.960 | that language, but your four-year-old will. Can you imagine how absurd that is? Can you
00:39:13.760 | imagine looking at your four-year-old and saying, "No, we're sitting here in a dark
00:39:18.760 | apartment with no lights on because I bought an iPhone and I'm paying $120 a month for
00:39:31.720 | an unlimited data plan so I can watch Instagram stories, but we don't have any food in the
00:39:38.400 | house because I didn't think to buy some extra groceries?" Does this not strike you as a
00:39:46.680 | little bit irresponsible, a little bit absurd? This is why you stash the stuff that you need.
00:39:54.680 | If your daughter's on insulin, you should have, and I'm using that not because it was
00:40:01.920 | in the news stories, but because that's the kind of thing that is the most difficult situation
00:40:05.560 | for a parent. But if your daughter's on insulin, you should have a refrigerator with as much
00:40:11.320 | of the stuff stored as you could possibly get your hands on, because what would you
00:40:15.440 | do if you didn't have an income and you couldn't go out and buy insulin to keep your daughter
00:40:20.320 | alive? Of course, obviously with insulin, you also need a generator and fuel to make
00:40:25.600 | sure that you're planned to make sure that you can keep that insulin cold so it doesn't
00:40:28.480 | spoil on you, but no doubt you've already gotten there if you are dealing with those
00:40:32.960 | kinds of things. But the point is, think ahead. Store food. Store water. Store gasoline for
00:40:41.840 | your car. Save money. Stash cash. And then you're not living on the razor edge. Do you
00:40:51.720 | know what it's called? When your employer doesn't pay you a paycheck? It's called normal
00:41:00.480 | life. The idea that somehow everyone just sits around and the money flows in because
00:41:07.480 | Uncle Sugar keeps on giving is a very vanishingly unique era in human history. Normal life is
00:41:16.720 | poverty, hunger, cold, death, disease. That's normal. Normal life is bankruptcy, broke companies,
00:41:32.120 | broke governments. That's normal. The opposite of those things are unusual. Now, I think
00:41:45.720 | there's every reason that things could continue on very well. There's no reason why you have
00:41:49.840 | to live broke, why you have to be bankrupt, why you have to deal with death and disease
00:41:54.840 | all around. You can change. But recognize that normal life is not just money flowing
00:42:03.240 | in and food flowing in and free cell phones flowing in. It won't last that much longer.
00:42:12.880 | Which brings me to this. Do you know how you escape this stuff? Go where it's better. Why
00:42:22.240 | would you keep working for a federal government that can't even pay its own bills? That is
00:42:31.720 | not a good long-term plan. Why don't you go work for somebody who will pay your bills?
00:42:37.720 | You say, "Well, because they're going to give me a retirement someday." You so sure about
00:42:42.720 | that? Have you checked the funding level of your pension plan? How's that working? That
00:42:55.400 | would be a good place for you to start. I don't think you need to do it today. Wait
00:43:00.640 | till next month or whenever. You'll start getting your paychecks again. You get all
00:43:04.600 | your back pay. You can go make a payment to your landlord. But when that money comes in,
00:43:09.920 | don't behave stupidly with it. Don't spend it all. Rather, keep your expenses low. Get
00:43:19.920 | rid of any debt. Keep your budget at those low levels until you can start to stash some
00:43:26.720 | cash. Make sure that you don't sign up for those contracts that lock you into expensive
00:43:30.920 | lifestyle. Start developing other streams of income. Develop a household business. Build
00:43:39.760 | up a back source of income. Then start looking at your pension plan. Ask yourself the question,
00:43:48.320 | "Hey, how long is this thing actually going to keep going?" And walk away from a bad employer
00:43:57.160 | who can't even pay its own bills and go find a better one. At least, if you're going to
00:44:07.440 | go through a difficult situation, at least learn the lessons necessary. As the old axiom
00:44:14.960 | says, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Government shutdowns
00:44:25.960 | are nothing new. So if you got fooled by this one, well, shame on the US federal government.
00:44:35.040 | But if you get screwed by the next one, shame on you.