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It's more than just a ticket. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua. I am your host and today we talk about making sure that you are not behaving stupidly with your money so that you will never be in a position of a slave who lives in fear of losing a single paycheck.

We begin with a short excerpt from this morning's program of Morning Edition on National Public Radio. "Air travelers are used to flight delays and cancellations because of the weather, maybe mechanical problems. Well, it soon might be the partial government shutdown that is disrupting travel. New planes are not being certified to fly.

Security screeners and air traffic controllers are working unpaid." Here's more from NPR's David Schaefer in Chicago. I'm here at Chicago's O'Hare Airport standing next to one of the large CT-80 scanners. It's essentially a CT scanner for your checked luggage. And the TSA officers who operate this machine, they're here at work lifting the heavy and sometimes odd-shaped and overstuffed bags onto the conveyor belt to go through the machine.

Even though come this Friday, if the shutdown continues, they won't get paid. And that presents a severe financial hardship for many of these officers. I've been here 16 years plus. I am a single mom. Christine Vitell is a security screener at O'Hare with a son in college. She's trying to figure out how she'll pay his tuition and...

I just bought a house. I'm not going to be able to pay my mortgage. A lot of the officers, they live paycheck to paycheck. Janice Casey is president of the union local representing TSA employees in Chicago, and she notes that they're among the lowest paid federal employees. Some average $36,000 to $43,000 a year, but start only in the mid-20s.

And for some TSA workers and their families, the situation could get dire rather quickly. If there's no check on the 26th, I have no idea what we're going to do. 36-year-old Yacinda's husband is a TSA officer in Portland. We're not using her last name because she fears he could be fired.

They have two kids, a six-month-old girl and a boy turning four at the end of this month. Yacinda says they were planning to buy a few presents and decorations to celebrate, but now they can't. Our rent is due. The electric bill is due. Our cell phones are now past due.

Yacinda says her husband's hiring by the TSA three years ago helped lift the family out of poverty. Now she fears the shutdown will set them back. I'm scared and I'm trying to be okay because I can't be sad every day for my kids and I can't be stressed out because it affects how I parent.

You know, my husband's stressed out too and he has to go to work and deal with it at work and you know, he knows he's working for free, which is ridiculous. Even more ridiculous, Yacinda says, is that he came home the other day with instructions on how to file for unemployment while he's still working 40 hours a week.

And the situation is not much better for higher-paid essential government workers like air traffic controllers. It's a very high stress job and you need to be on your game at all times. Mick Devine is with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association in Boston. He says the shutdown is forcing controllers to make tough financial decisions and it weighs on them heavily.

There is a concern that as this goes on, that the human factors aspect of this shutdown will take a toll on the psyche and the concentration level of our members and they do the best job that they can each and every day. Nearly 20% of the FAA's 10,000 air traffic controllers.

Okay, that's enough. You get the point of this particular report. Now, don't worry for a moment that today's show will have anything to do with politics. The extent of my political commentary is this. It's ridiculous that the United States of America is going through a so-called partial government shutdown.

It's ridiculous that the government of the United States is dysfunctional. This is just simply an expression of the same dysfunction that has been going on for years and as far as I'm concerned, you can expect it to continue and get worse. It is ridiculous. Now, political commentary done. You don't have to worry for the rest of the show that we'll talk at all about the government shutdown.

What I'm going to talk about is you. If you are living in fear and you're managing your money in such a way that the loss of a single paycheck, which if you're a government worker is almost certainly a temporary postponement of a single paycheck, if you are living that way, you are behaving stupidly.

You are managing your money stupidly. You are acting and living like an idiot. Stop it. Don't be stupid. Now if this is your first government shutdown and you are 18 years old and you just got your job last week and your mom just died from cancer, your dad just went to prison, you graduated from high school and you just got your job making $22,000 a year and you're still broke, I'm happy to extend to you as much sympathy as you need.

I'll buy you groceries. I'll lend you money to get your rent through. I'll help you out and all of your neighbors on every side of you will do exactly the same thing. So will every family member. So will anybody in your community. They will get you through. But if you are a government employee and you're freaking out about the postponement, the temporary postponement of a single paycheck, this should be a giant slap in your face to recognize that you are living stupidly.

You're managing your money like an idiot. Now if you are not a government employee, don't all of a sudden think, "Well, I'm safe because I'm not a government employee." It's especially bad for government employees. What number of government shutdown is this in the last couple of years, in the last five years?

Come on, at this point, it's a habit. And if something happened the first time, the very first government shutdown, then maybe again, "Hey, well, maybe I didn't ever know this was possible. I thought I was working for the government. I can't be fired. I can't be laid off. I'm just going to collect this check.

Everyone says it's a great stable job. After all, it's the US government backed by the full taxing authority of the United States." Okay, maybe you were in a situation where you thought that you were totally safe. But come on, do you not read a newspaper? Are you not aware of the fact that a government shutdown is signaled months in advance?

Did you never conceive that somehow the politicians who have been using this as a standard operating procedure for resolving conflicts for the last increasingly again and again and over the last few years, did you not think it might happen again? Why are you not paying attention to what's in front of you?

Now, back again, if you're not a government employee, do you not recognize that making payroll is tough for most employers? Do you not think that it could also be you working in the private market that you might miss a paycheck? Your employer might be late? Many employers all across the United States of America, when they go into the week on Monday, they don't know how they're going to make payroll on Friday.

I don't know the percentage. I don't know any way we could find out the percentage, but I do know that the number is many. I've talked with a lot of business owners. I have been that business owner trying to figure out how do I pay? How do I make my payments?

You face as a non-government employee, an even bigger risk than a government employee of not being paid this week or next week or whenever your next payday is. And here's what's worse. At the current stage of the collapse of the US-American financial system, there is almost no possibility that the government workers who are currently furloughed and currently not being paid will not actually be paid.

It is almost inconceivable that this particular phase of the financial problems that the United States is in will not result in everybody being paid back pay. That's always what happens or so it's happened so far in these particular situations. The government workers always get their money. They'll be paid the back pay.

Once the problem of the conflict comes to an end, once Congress passes their budget and spending resolutions, they will be paid. Now, will that be the case in five years, 25 years? I don't know. I wouldn't be so confident of it if it were 25 years from now. But in today's world, that is almost certainly the case, which means that all of these people who are facing the loss of one of their paychecks will eventually be paid.

But for you, a private sector employee, you have no such guarantee. You may show up for work on Monday morning and there's a chain around the front door of your office. Over the weekend, your employer filed bankruptcy. Are they going to pay you your back pay? Are they going to make the paycheck?

Happens all the time. The answer is no. Or if it is, there's no certainty of it. Like the government employers have that virtual certainty, employees, excuse me, have that virtual certainty. You don't have that virtual certainty. And if you do get paid, it'll probably be quite a way into the bankruptcy proceedings.

Feel free to file your claim with everyone else. The point is we are all vulnerable to disruptions in our income. Now think with me for a moment about how utterly ridiculous this particular news story is. Now, first of all, indulge me for a moment. I find a very hard time.

I have such a hard time hearing employer, sorry, reporters try to engender sympathy by describing that somebody's job is hard. After all, these TSA employees have to lift heavy and odd shaped packages and boxes and luggage through the machine. What did you think the job was? That's your job is picking up heavy suitcases, the people's belongings that they're trying to get through the airplane.

Why don't you feel the same? Sorry for the people who are calling them. It's ridiculous. That's why you hire people who know my job is to pick up heavy things or the workers in an air traffic controller. Oh, it's a stressful job. Of course, it's a stressful job. Anyway, let me continue back to money.

We live in the, most of us, the predominant audience of the radical personal finances base in the United States of America. Okay, let's just go. The people profiled in this story live in the richest country, not on the continent, not on their side of the world, the richest country in the world.

Not only the richest country in the world, the richest country in history. Throughout all of recorded human history, there has never been as wealthy and affluent a society as the United States of America. We live in the richest country in the history of the world with an economy that by all objective metrics is doing better than it's ever done.

Unemployment rate is extremely low. Employers all over the place are hiring people. Stock market is mostly up with a short exception over the last few months. Consumer confidence is decent. Living at the height of a boom, the height of an economic financial boom. So you live in the richest country in the history of the world and a great economy, and you are managing your money in such a way that you can't make it a single paycheck.

If you are doing that, you are acting stupidly. Now stop. I'll show you in just a few minutes, I'll show you how to stop behaving stupidly. But the first thing that you have to do is recognize that that's what you are doing. It does you no good to blame your problems on a dysfunctional Congress or on a president of the United States.

You can blame their problems on them. You can talk about the dysfunction that's going to happen because of them, but it does no you no good to blame your financial problems on them. Because guess what? They don't have financial problems. The members of Congress, they don't have financial problems.

They're managing their money in such a way that they're not dependent on their incomes. So you should do the same thing. And this is not hard. Here's what's utterly ridiculous. You have had time to figure this out. Let's talk about the two ladies profiled in the story from this morning's National Public Radio.

One of them, a single mom, has worked for TSA for 16 years, according to the report this morning. If you have worked at a job for 16 years and you are putting your child through college and you've just bought a house, do you not have ample opportunity to have saved money?

You've had a steady job for 16 years. Or the same for the 36-year-old woman profiled with the two children. Her husband was hired three years ago. You've not been able to save a few thousand dollars over the last three years? That is crazy. That is a crazy way for you to live.

And if you continue living that way, you will always be a slave to other people's decisions and you will never achieve even a modicum of financial freedom. You will never achieve even a little bit of financial security. You're telling me you have worked a job with a stable paycheck for the last three years or for the last 16 years, and you haven't saved five or ten thousand dollars?

That is called being foolish. That's called behaving stupidly. Now I hope you notice the fact that I'm using adult language in this podcast because adults face the facts and admit and recognize when they're wrong and change. And that's your job. So if you now recognize that you have been behaving stupidly, that you have been handling your money in a crazy way, I'd like to give you some suggestions and some advice that will help you.

Number one, pay attention to what's happening around you. Pay attention and gather all of the information that you can gather about things that will affect you. Don't be stupid so as to not even collect a little bit of information about what's happening. This is the most absurd in the fact if you work for a government agency.

It would be slightly understandable if a vulnerable employee showed up to work on Monday morning who works for a private, small, family-owned enterprise and finds the doors chained on Monday morning. That would be understandable because, after all, how would a low-level employee, a dock worker, a warehouse worker, how would they know what's happening financially with that employer?

That would be hard. So I would understand that. But when you work for the government of the United States, where all of the information is not only publicly available, the entire fiscal situation of the United States of America is publicly available. You can read the Congressional Budget Office reports just like I can.

So not only is the information available, but the information is reported day in and day out. You don't even have to buy a newspaper. You don't have to pay for an internet connection. All you need to do is walk by the front of a newspaper stand and see what headlines are above the fold.

A government shutdown is telegraphed weeks and months in advance. And if you are so naive as to have missed the fact that this is now a regular bargaining tool among politicians, you're doing it wrong. You are being ignorant. You are willfully ignoring information that affects your life. Stop it.

Pay attention to what's happening. Pay attention to what's happening at your company. Pay attention to what's happening in your industry. It should be no surprise whatsoever to you when your employer declares, "Hey, by the way, we are getting out of the business. We're declaring bankruptcy." Because you should be paying attention to what's happening in your industry.

If you see the fact that the warehouse that you work in is idling machines constantly, that there have been several rounds of layoffs, if you see the fact that your town is dying, that your industry is falling apart, pay attention to that and expect the fact that you are going to be out of a job.

If you notice that the economy is starting to do poorly and the unemployment rate is starting to tick up and there are new unemployment claims being filed constantly, expect the fact that you could probably lose your job. And that's the time to start preparing. Pay attention to what's happening around you.

How can you be an adult and be so naive as to miss the fact that a government shutdown is imminent? Pay attention. Now you say, "Well, I don't know what to do." Maybe you were paying attention, you expected it to happen, but you didn't know what to do. Well, stop right now where you are.

Take out a piece of paper, write down all of your bills, write down all the money that you spend, and then say, "If I had to live on half the money I have now, how would I make ends meet? What would I do?" Make that plan today. No, I'm serious.

Stop what you're doing. If you've never done this, stop what you're doing, hit pause on the podcast, take out a piece of paper, write down your bills, write down your expenses and ask yourself, "How would I live on half the money that I have here?" What's your plan? No, seriously, if you haven't done it, stop and do it.

Because you need to have a plan long in advance of a situation like this. Here's what happens. People don't plan, they don't think, they don't pay attention to what's happening around them. Then all of a sudden, they're worried about the fact that they might lose a paycheck, which I'm not actually sure.

I need to go and look and figure out. I don't know that anyone's actually lost a paycheck yet. The weird thing in that particular story, it was published on January 9, 2019, but the second woman, Jacinda, who was being interviewed, talks about, "We were going to have bills being due on the 26th, and what are we going to do if we miss a paycheck on the 26th?" I think that that would have been recorded back just prior to the Christmas vacation.

So I don't think this is quite synced up with the actual facts. But regardless, the point is, people haven't thought about the situation. That is such a juvenile approach to life. An adult pays attention to what's happening around them, looks at the things that might happen, and makes a plan.

Your plan must be unique to your circumstances. For example, let's say Jacinda mentioned that her cell phone bill is now past due. Now, should you pay your cell phone bill when you don't have any money? Well, that depends. If I were working as a real estate agent, and my cell phone was how I earned my income, paying my cell phone bill would be one of the first things that I would ever pay.

But if I'm working for TSA, and my daughter needs a life-saving medication, she's insulin-dependent, a cell phone bill would be gone immediately so that I can keep the medication coming in to keep my daughter going. Now, if you don't have an insulin-dependent daughter, of course, your circumstances are going to change.

But nobody's coming to save you. It's your job. So pay attention and think about what's going to happen. You will have to go through your list and consider it yourself about what you would cut and how you would do it. Now, the most straightforward thing that you can do right away, even if you don't have any money, you don't have any savings, the most straightforward thing that you can do is to cut expenses.

And cut expenses like a crazy person. Don't goof around with this stuff and wait. Cut expenses like a crazy person. Let me give you some suggestions and let's walk through some specific scenarios. Now, some expenses are hard to cut. For example, Jacinda mentioned that she doesn't know how she's going to pay her rent.

Well, that's the hardest because moving is expensive and figuring out where you're going to live and cut your rental expenses. These are all difficult. Now, in this situation, this is easily solved in the fact that you are a government worker and the reason for your job loss is plastered all over the newspaper and all over the homepage of every site on the internet.

So it should be relatively simple for you to go to your landlord and explain to your landlord that, "Look, I work for the TSA. They've sent this nice little letter home with me telling me how to negotiate with people that I don't have the money to pay. We are going through a government shutdown.

I'm going to lose my paycheck this month and I'm not going to have enough money to pay you. Now, I understand that you can go ahead and start filing foreclosure eviction procedures against me. I would ask you for a little bit of leniency. Obviously, the political pressure that's happening across the United States of America is going to be brought to bear more and more on the houses of Congress and the executive branch of the US government.

And what has happened every single other time that this particular tactic of negotiation has been used is as soon as a spending bill is passed, we're paid all of our back pay. So dear Mr. Landlord, since I've been a good tenant for you, would you consider please working with me and I will try to pay you just as very soon as I can." Now, it's hard for me to imagine a landlord who would not be open to that conversation.

I can't imagine a landlord who, with appropriate documentation of the fact that, "Look, here's my paycheck from the TSA. Look, here's my letter that they sent home with me." I can't imagine a landlord who would say, "Okay, I'm going to kick you out right away." Now, if you're a private sector employee, that'll be a little bit harder for you.

If you've just lost your job, you've just missed a paycheck, you don't have all of those bargaining tools that a government employee has. You can't take today's newspaper in and talk to your landlord. So that'll be a little bit harder. But changing your rent or your mortgage is the most difficult circumstance to be in.

There are other difficult bills to change. For example, if you have a car payment, that's a hard bill to change. Now, you could call the lender, and you should, and have the same kind of discussion, but it's harder to do that. But many of the other bills are just a matter of you making a change.

For example, let's say that you can't pay your car insurance bill. Well, it's time to park one of the cars and pull the insurance off of it. Or it's time to park both of the cars, or the only car you have, and pull the insurance off of it and take the bus to work for the next couple of weeks.

This is a short-term thing, and you can ride the bus to work for the next couple of weeks. You can get a bicycle, you can pedal it down the two miles to the bus stop, you can get on the bus, pay them their $1.37, take the bus to work, ride your bicycle to the office.

You probably should have done that a long time ago, and you didn't do that. That's why you don't have any money to get you through a single paycheck. But now it's time to get on your bicycle, park your cars, and drop the car insurance. That will save you money.

A bicycle is a very effective form of transportation, and your city has a bus system. Use it. Get rid of your car insurance. That also, by the way, will help you get rid of your gasoline expense. And if you can't drive your car around, you'll probably spend less money, which will be helpful.

Now what else can you do? What else can you cut? Well, you don't need a cable bill. You don't need a satellite TV bill. You don't need a TV bill at all. You don't have time for entertainment because you're not getting paid. So you might want to continue working for TSA right now, but you also need to go and get a job so you don't have time to sit around and watch TV.

Cancel your cable. Cancel your satellite. You say, "But I have a contract." That was stupid. Did you not think about that? Why would you sign up for a contract committing yourself to making a series of payments over the next two years when you don't have any money to make those payments?

Turn off the cable. Turn off the satellite. Turn off the internet. If you can't pay your phone bills, get rid of your cell phone. Turn it off. Say, "Well, I have a contract there." That was stupid. You can get as much phone access as you need in the United States of America.

If you're not getting the free system under the Federal Phone Housing Allowance, popularly known as Obama phones, but of course the program was enacted under President Reagan. So obviously the Obama phone is just a kind of a rather rude partisan slur. But you can get, even if you pay for it, you can get phone access for $5 or $10 a month.

It's easy. Easy. You can install free apps on your phone and use your neighbor's internet access to make all your phone calls. So this would be a good time to learn about how to do that. If you can't pay your electric bill, I concede that you shouldn't have your electricity shut off.

I concede that. But you can shut off every light in your house. You can unplug your TV. You can turn your thermostat to a more energy efficient number, whether you're heating or cooling. You can put on a sweater if you're in the cold country. You can go outdoors and spend more time outside and let your kids play at the water park or put the hose out front to keep them cool during the day.

This is not abuse. This is called normal life. And US Americans sit around and pretend like, "Well, I'm just a victim of the circumstances. I'm a victim. I can't take two hot showers a day. My children will roast if we have to set the thermostat above 78 degrees. They will just die." We can't put on sweaters.

Do you know how bulky and uncomfortable a sweater is? It's ridiculous. Stop taking so many showers. Cut your water bill. Turn off your sprinklers. Whatever you have to do, do it to get your expenses as low as possible. That will help. You can do that right away even if you have no money.

Now, what else do you do? Look for help. Jacinda, I think it was Jacinda in the NPR report, says, "Well, I think it's ridiculous that my husband should go and file for unemployment." Yes, it is ridiculous. It is utterly and completely ridiculous. So is the idea that the US federal government is going to be able to pay all the money that it's promised.

That was also ridiculous, and yet you believe that. So yes, it is ridiculous that you should go while working 40 hours a week for the Transportation Security Administration that you should go and file for unemployment. That is ridiculous. But what's also ridiculous? The fact that you wouldn't go and take money from the federal government when they're saying, "Here, go and get money from this particular federal agency." After all, you're behind on your rent, you can't pay your electric bill, and your cell phone bill is past due.

So yes, it is ridiculous, but it's also ridiculous for you to not go and file for unemployment, because then you could pay your cell phone bill, you can pay your electric bill, and you could make a partial payment on your rent. So it's ridiculous that that entire system exists.

The whole thing is ridiculous. But don't be an idiot and ignore your situation. Go, file for unemployment, take the money, and now guess what? You'll have free money when the US federal government pays you back all your back pay, and in the meantime, you have money to buy food for your children so they're not screaming all the time because they're hungry.

You know what's ridiculous? Do you know how many mothers all around the world worry constantly because their children haven't eaten in days? Thankfully, a lot fewer than a couple decades ago, but many of them. I've been there, I've seen them. You can walk down to any one of your neighbors and say, "My children are hungry," and your neighbors will say, "Hop in the car, we're going to the grocery store." You don't have a thing in the world to worry about.

Every mother in the world should be so fortunate. You can go to any church in your area and say, "My children don't have food. We don't have food. Can you help?" And you'll be overwhelmed with the generosity that is shown to you. There are government-run and financed and subsidized food banks in your town where you can go and get food.

Go get them. They're there for people who are in need. You live in the richest...if none of those things work, go and start going through dumpsters. Go start looking on the trash pile and you'll find plenty of food to feed your family. I'm too proud to do that. Well, that's your problem.

There is so much food available that having food for your children is not a problem. Stop whining. Get to work. Don't talk about how unfair it is. Recognize the fact that your mother was right. Life isn't fair. Go file for unemployment. Take the money and use it wisely on the bare essentials.

If you cut expenses and you file for unemployment, you'll have enough to keep things going forward, especially if you negotiate a couple of the big hairy payments like your rent. Now, if you can't pay your son's college tuition, what do you do? You go down first to the college and you say to them, "Look, I work for the TSA.

Here's today's newspaper. We can't pay the money because I'm not getting a paycheck. Are you willing to work with us?" And guess what they'll say? "Yes, we're willing to work with you." Because you're going to get your back pay. Don't pretend like you're never going to get paid. You're going to get your back pay.

So they'll work with you. Just go and face it. Tackle it and solve the problem. Now if you're a private sector employee, there's no guarantee you're going to get the back pay. So what do you do? You call your son and you say, "Son, I can't make the tuition payment." So either you have to make it or you need to quit school and get a job.

That's what you do. It's simple. Now what else could you do? Well, if you have time, if you didn't just lose your paycheck, you could try saving money. It's a time-honored way of basically not being broke. And the way that you do it is you don't spend all the money that you make.

So what you do is when you get a paycheck, you don't spend all that money. You save some of it. And saving means you don't spend it. So that means you take money and you move it somewhere else where you can save it and not spend it. That's how you save money.

Now sometimes this is hard because you want to spend money, but you look and you say, "Do I have any money?" And you recognize, "No, I don't have any money, so I'm not going to spend it." And you don't buy it. There's kind of a good skit on, of all places, Saturday Night Live that you can go and find out this financial advice.

It'll help you. Just go on YouTube and search for Saturday Night Live credit cards, and I think it'll come up. So if you just don't spend all your money, then you'll have money. Now here's what's cool. If you just save a little bit of money, something like a mere 10%, a mere 10% of your income, every 10 months you'll have an extra month of expenses.

Which means that if you have been working for 36 months, back to Jacinda and Jacinda's husband, who's been working for three years for the TSA. If you've been working for 36 months and you've only saved 10% of your income, that means that you now have 3.6 months of income saved.

Now what's cool about that is your actual expenses are lower than your income, because after all you're saving some of your income. So that's probably at least four or four and a half months of current expenses, which means that if you do budget cuts, as in change the thermostat, cancel your CV bill and all the rest of the stupid expenditures that you're doing, you could probably live on your savings for six months or eight months.

And if you have unemployment coming in and you go down to the food bank and you get some food, you could probably live for 10 months. Now when you live in the richest country in the world, in the richest time in human history, during a fantastic economic period, when there's no recession, there's no depression, there's not high unemployment, don't you think it's reasonable that if you're working a job and you've been working there for three years, you could at least have saved at least, you know, five, $10,000?

That's how you avoid being a slave to your job. You save money. And then when you have savings, when you don't get a paycheck, you can pay for the things that you need. Now here's what else I'd recommend. You should always stash the stuff that you need to live on.

So you should have plenty of food in the pantry, at least a month or at least a couple of months of food in the pantry. Because can you imagine the pain of having to look at your children and say, "No, sorry," you know, two-year-old, your four, sorry, a four-year-old could understand.

Can you look at your four-year-old and say, "Sorry, we don't have any food," because mommy and daddy didn't think to buy some extra groceries in case someday we didn't have food? Obviously, your six-month-old is not going to understand that language, but your four-year-old will. Can you imagine how absurd that is?

Can you imagine looking at your four-year-old and saying, "No, we're sitting here in a dark apartment with no lights on because I bought an iPhone and I'm paying $120 a month for an unlimited data plan so I can watch Instagram stories, but we don't have any food in the house because I didn't think to buy some extra groceries?" Does this not strike you as a little bit irresponsible, a little bit absurd?

This is why you stash the stuff that you need. If your daughter's on insulin, you should have, and I'm using that not because it was in the news stories, but because that's the kind of thing that is the most difficult situation for a parent. But if your daughter's on insulin, you should have a refrigerator with as much of the stuff stored as you could possibly get your hands on, because what would you do if you didn't have an income and you couldn't go out and buy insulin to keep your daughter alive?

Of course, obviously with insulin, you also need a generator and fuel to make sure that you're planned to make sure that you can keep that insulin cold so it doesn't spoil on you, but no doubt you've already gotten there if you are dealing with those kinds of things. But the point is, think ahead.

Store food. Store water. Store gasoline for your car. Save money. Stash cash. And then you're not living on the razor edge. Do you know what it's called? When your employer doesn't pay you a paycheck? It's called normal life. The idea that somehow everyone just sits around and the money flows in because Uncle Sugar keeps on giving is a very vanishingly unique era in human history.

Normal life is poverty, hunger, cold, death, disease. That's normal. Normal life is bankruptcy, broke companies, broke governments. That's normal. The opposite of those things are unusual. Now, I think there's every reason that things could continue on very well. There's no reason why you have to live broke, why you have to be bankrupt, why you have to deal with death and disease all around.

You can change. But recognize that normal life is not just money flowing in and food flowing in and free cell phones flowing in. It won't last that much longer. Which brings me to this. Do you know how you escape this stuff? Go where it's better. Why would you keep working for a federal government that can't even pay its own bills?

That is not a good long-term plan. Why don't you go work for somebody who will pay your bills? You say, "Well, because they're going to give me a retirement someday." You so sure about that? Have you checked the funding level of your pension plan? How's that working? That would be a good place for you to start.

I don't think you need to do it today. Wait till next month or whenever. You'll start getting your paychecks again. You get all your back pay. You can go make a payment to your landlord. But when that money comes in, don't behave stupidly with it. Don't spend it all.

Rather, keep your expenses low. Get rid of any debt. Keep your budget at those low levels until you can start to stash some cash. Make sure that you don't sign up for those contracts that lock you into expensive lifestyle. Start developing other streams of income. Develop a household business.

Build up a back source of income. Then start looking at your pension plan. Ask yourself the question, "Hey, how long is this thing actually going to keep going?" And walk away from a bad employer who can't even pay its own bills and go find a better one. At least, if you're going to go through a difficult situation, at least learn the lessons necessary.

As the old axiom says, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Government shutdowns are nothing new. So if you got fooled by this one, well, shame on the US federal government. But if you get screwed by the next one, shame on you.