Quitting-your-job-is-selfish_-engineering-your-layoff-is-the-ethical-way-to-go
00:00:00.000 | Hello, it's Sam here from Financial Samurai and in this episode
00:00:03.160 | I'm going to talk about why quitting your job is selfish and why
00:00:06.880 | Engineering your layoff is the ethical and right way to go
00:00:11.360 | So when some people find out that I engineered my layoff
00:00:15.080 | They kind of look at me funny and say well, what is that?
00:00:18.440 | And when I explain to them what engineering your layoff is
00:00:21.740 | They look at me further and say you know what that sounds ethical and that's not right for me
00:00:27.600 | And I'm always always surprised by this response in this day and age of zero job security
00:00:33.640 | Most people do not have pensions anymore
00:00:37.100 | You know
00:00:37.760 | Maybe it's like less than 20% of employees have pensions because I certainly didn't and many people who work in any private industry
00:00:45.680 | Don't have pensions either
00:00:48.280 | Further no longer do employers keep their employees around for decades because the world is just too competitive now
00:00:56.340 | It's cutthroat thanks to globalization and much poorer people around the world
00:01:00.920 | Looking at our lifestyles in America and wanting to eat our lunch dinner and breakfast
00:01:05.880 | And then of course technology has done away with a lot of jobs and have made a lot of jobs redundant
00:01:11.840 | during my days on Wall Street
00:01:14.040 | We would have
00:01:15.920 | traders and equity sales traders and now everything is done algorithmically or
00:01:21.900 | Online electronic trading so clients don't have to talk to anybody and these jobs that once paid
00:01:27.120 | 500,000 to 2 million dollars are really no more
00:01:30.320 | So going back to the ethical comment or the unethical comment of engineering your layoff
00:01:35.280 | One could argue that if you're not doing everything possible to fight for yourself and your family's financial security
00:01:41.460 | You're the one being unethical
00:01:43.820 | That or you're just ignorant
00:01:46.400 | Quitting your job is selfish compared to negotiating a severance
00:01:50.080 | I really want to make this point clear in this podcast
00:01:53.160 | The only way quitting your job is not selfish is if you were a terrible deadweight employee
00:01:59.000 | Who was a cancer to your team in such a scenario you quitting is like?
00:02:04.000 | your colleagues and your managers throwing a party and saying hallelujah because oftentimes it is very
00:02:09.560 | Very hard to remove an underperforming employee
00:02:13.360 | Even though there is a fire at will clause because of potential discrimination lawsuits and so forth
00:02:19.400 | So let's go through in detail why it's always best to engineer your layoff instead of quitting your job
00:02:25.260 | So first of all, if you quit your job, you're leaving your colleagues and your manager in a bind
00:02:31.520 | So if you broadside your manager and colleagues by quitting you're dumping all your work onto them
00:02:36.760 | The reason why you had a job was because you provided more value than you cost
00:02:41.280 | otherwise, you didn't wouldn't have a job right so it often takes months to find a replacement and
00:02:47.320 | Months more to train your replacement to do a proper job for my job in equity sales and trading
00:02:53.440 | It could take easily three months to find a replacement and then three to six months to train someone to take over the accounts
00:03:02.000 | And do all that stuff. So quitting your job creates a lot of lost
00:03:05.960 | productivity and ultimately lost revenue and time
00:03:10.720 | - you hurt your clients who depended on your services if you're in a revenue-producing role quitting your job one day means your clients can
00:03:17.520 | No longer count on you for advice or service
00:03:19.520 | This is especially disruptive if you've been their point person for years and years and years
00:03:24.440 | Clients come to rely on people and by quitting you're telling them you don't care about them and only yourself
00:03:31.160 | Three you're hurting your future job prospects
00:03:34.760 | If you haven't lined one up already and even if you have I got to say if you're so selfish as to quit on your
00:03:41.560 | colleagues and your clients
00:03:42.760 | You will have fewer supporters when you apply for a new job in the future and that will be an inevitability
00:03:48.160 | Or if you want to start your own business people will be a little bit suspect
00:03:52.520 | Nobody's gonna write you a favorable recommendation letter when you didn't give them a chance to properly transition your work and coverage
00:03:59.360 | For you hurt your reputation
00:04:02.480 | Nobody likes a quitter. Let's be honest
00:04:04.480 | Especially if you quit a job to lounge around on the beach for months while your old colleagues and ex-clients still have to work
00:04:10.600 | They will resent you trust me. Although today it's common to job hop every one to three years
00:04:16.160 | Repeatedly quitting your job creates distrust when I'm looking at a resume and I see a new job on the resume every one
00:04:24.720 | Year for the past five six years. There is no way in hell
00:04:28.200 | I'm hiring that person because I know they're gonna quit on me sometime in the future
00:04:32.600 | Your managers will not want to invest time or money in you because they're afraid you're gonna be gonzo, right?
00:04:38.080 | So as a result your reputation does suffer
00:04:40.840 | Next five you hurt your finances at the end of the day. This should be really obvious if you quit your job
00:04:46.760 | You aren't eligible for a severance
00:04:49.200 | You're not eligible for 26 weeks of unemployment benefits
00:04:53.280 | That's for state unemployment benefits during the financial crisis. It went up to all the way to 99 weeks. That was pretty interesting
00:05:00.200 | You're not eligible for subsidized Cobra health care
00:05:03.920 | You don't get Warn Act mandatory federal pay and you don't get any job search help
00:05:10.580 | So if you successfully negotiate a severance
00:05:13.080 | You'll have a financial runway that allows you to be pickier in doing something more meaningful with your life
00:05:18.480 | You won't feel the pressure to take immediately any soul-sucking job
00:05:22.800 | Because of your need for money and think about how much happier you will be as a result
00:05:27.360 | You know, you can spend more time with your family. You can go travel the world. You can explore new business opportunities
00:05:33.780 | You can go back to school having this severance as a financial runway is so awesome for me
00:05:40.280 | I just spend the time writing on financial samurai slowly, you know three times a week
00:05:45.120 | I spend time consulting with FinTech companies and I did a lot of traveling and during this time
00:05:50.840 | I really found myself and I found what I really really wanted to do
00:05:54.440 | So not having to rush into something is really important because oftentimes when you rush into something
00:05:59.920 | You often just rush out because you made a wrong choice
00:06:03.080 | So given these very logical reasons
00:06:06.560 | Why would anybody quit their jobs if they can negotiate a severance and I think there are three main reasons
00:06:13.440 | Why number one people simply don't know better
00:06:17.680 | They think they are powerless employees who have no chance at walking away with money in their pocket
00:06:23.880 | But given there are plenty of free blog posts out there
00:06:27.160 | Free podcasts now out there and also a book teaching you how to engineer your layoff
00:06:33.680 | Nobody can plead ignorance anymore, which brings us to the second most common reason why people quit
00:06:40.260 | Which is selfishness if you are selfish, you don't care if you dump your work onto your colleagues
00:06:46.040 | You're thinking to yourself. Nah, not my problem
00:06:48.380 | Go deal with it. I'm out of here guys
00:06:51.260 | selfish people don't care about the well-being of their clients who've come to depend on them and
00:06:56.520 | Selfish people even compromise the well-being of their family because they're too afraid to negotiate a severance
00:07:03.360 | You know, it really sucks to be selfish if you don't think about other people you're just screwing yourself
00:07:09.560 | Ultimately pretend you're a landlord. Okay, this has happened to me before
00:07:13.080 | Wouldn't you much prefer getting a six months heads up from your tenants saying hey, they accepted a job overseas
00:07:19.840 | Instead of a two-week notice before Christmas. I never got a two-week notice because in the lease
00:07:25.760 | It says give me at least a 30-day notice
00:07:28.040 | But I did get a 30-day notice last year right before Christmas because my tenants said hey, you know what?
00:07:33.520 | We're gonna go and move to New York City. So that really sucked
00:07:36.760 | But the good thing is they found tenants for me because they had friends who are moving to San Francisco from Boston
00:07:44.640 | So that was really nice, but if that didn't happen, I would be really bummed out
00:07:49.360 | So the final most common reason why people quit their jobs instead of engineering their laugh is due to fear
00:07:55.880 | Weak people are afraid of confrontation partly because they lack the communication skills necessary to create a win-win scenario
00:08:04.720 | You know who these people are they'd rather quit or break up with someone by text message instead of calling them on the phone
00:08:12.600 | Let alone seeing someone face to face to relay the news
00:08:16.840 | Heck if they could ghost the other side and I just understood what ghosting means it means to completely ignore someone
00:08:24.520 | They probably would do that as well
00:08:27.080 | but the funny thing is
00:08:29.400 | Managers also fear confrontation. It's the worst thing ever if you're a manager to try to lay someone off
00:08:36.440 | Can you imagine having to go through your employees that you've worked with for years and tell them you know what?
00:08:42.360 | Their services are no longer needed because they're not good enough. They're not worthy enough, you know
00:08:48.680 | Obviously, you're not gonna say that but to sit down and have that conversation to someone you don't hate you
00:08:54.960 | Respect because you probably hired them that they're gonna get laid off is a really really tough thing. So by volunteering
00:09:01.720 | Your layoff
00:09:04.440 | obviously with the servants you're helping the manager make the decision for her and
00:09:09.160 | You're probably saving someone a job
00:09:12.520 | That really needs a job and that's really really powerful. That's the opposite of being selfish. That's being
00:09:19.600 | Magnanimous that's being thoughtful and that's being kind
00:09:23.640 | So some of you may ask what if you're stuck in a toxic work environment?
00:09:27.360 | You can't stand and in such a scenario, it's even more important to attempt to engineer your layoff while concurrently looking for another job
00:09:34.560 | This is where you have power you have leverage
00:09:38.360 | Because you literally have nothing to lose because you would probably happily walk away with nothing
00:09:44.360 | But as a financial samurai as someone who wants to optimize their financial situation and achieve financial independence
00:09:51.640 | You don't want to waste these opportunities where you really couldn't give a damn and would happily quit
00:09:57.520 | You want to use this opportunity to negotiate more aggressively? You just need to do so in a more respectful way
00:10:03.800 | listen, you can tell yourself that negotiating severance is beneath you or unethical or just
00:10:10.680 | Weird, but you'd be lying to yourself
00:10:13.480 | That's the only person you'd be lying to the more you can help provide a smooth transition for those affected by your departure
00:10:21.360 | the better everything will be after you've departed and the better everything will be
00:10:27.080 | The more friends you will have in your industry in your community
00:10:32.080 | Around the globe because people want to work with people and help people who've made things better
00:10:38.880 | So don't let your pride get in the way of doing what's right for everyone
00:10:42.760 | Don't let your fear or ignorance get in the way either
00:10:46.720 | Engineering your layoff is a win for you your family your ex-colleagues and your previous employer
00:10:53.960 | And if you need more examples, just click over to financial samurai and type in the search box
00:10:59.120 | severance negotiation examples
00:11:01.880 | You'll find a lot of examples and you'll also learn why negotiating a severance
00:11:07.240 | Engineering your layoff is more and more feasible today than ever before. Thanks so much everybody