Hello everybody, it's Sam from Financial Samurai and in this episode I want to talk about pity city why people don't stand up more for themselves and maybe how the fire movement isn't dead yet. I don't know if you've heard but the CEO of Herman Miller, those Herman Miller chairs for $750 and up ripped her employees for asking about a raise.

How dare they ask about a raise, get stuff done, have a listen and then once we listen we'll discuss more about the fire movement and why it's important to stand up for yourself with some other examples as well. Great question Chris, you know a lot of questions came through about how can we stay motivated if we're not going to get a bonus what can we do what can we do some of them were nice and some of them were not so nice so I'm going to address this head on.

The most important thing we can do right now is focus on the things that we can control. None of us could have predicted COVID, none of us could have predicted supply chain, none of us could have predicted bank failures but what we can do is stay in front of our customers, provide the best customer service we can, get our orders out our door, treat each other well, be kind, be respectful, focus on the future because it will be bright.

It's not good to be in a situation we're in today but we're not going to be here forever. It is going to get better so lead. Lead by example, treat people well, talk to them, be kind and get after it. Don't ask about what are we going to do if we don't get a bonus.

Get the damn 26 million dollars, spend your time and your effort thinking about the 26 million dollars we need and not thinking about what are you going to do if we don't get a bonus. All right can I get some commitment for that? I would appreciate that. I had an old boss who said to me one time, you can visit pity city but you can't live there so people leave pity city, let's get it done.

Thank you, have a great day. Damn, well what do you think folks? Are you inspired by the talk or are you a little miffed, a little irate? Well if I heard that I'd be like wow you know what I'm gonna leave pity city and this job behind and I'm gonna check out what else is there to do because when you're feeling down the last thing you want to do is get pissed on by your boss who it turns out had a 1.29 million dollar bonus in 2022 and a 1.129 million bonus in 2021 and their total compensation in 2022 was over five million dollars.

So come on now if you're making mega million dollars I don't think it's wise to piss on your employees. 26 million dollar order? Man if I got a 26 million dollar order for my products I would demand at least what a 500,000 maybe a million dollar bonus. I don't know is that too much nowadays two and a half to five percent of the order amount as a salesperson?

It sounds to me like these type of orders are more appropriate for a c-level executive earning one and a half to five million dollars. If Andy Owen the CEO received a zero bonus and cut her salary her rally cry for employees to work harder and not care as much about their compensation would have been taken way better.

But she's a top 0.1 percent earner who makes millions a year and unfortunately I just found out she is also a fellow William and Mary alumni. Sorry folks most graduates I've met from this fine public institution are quite humble they're pretty low key so she doesn't speak for all of us.

I think it's very important for all employees to know that public company CEOs care most about profitability second about their people and they only care about their people to the extent that their people their employees are being as productive as possible to generate as much money as possible. You don't see the executives from Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, Credit Suisse saying look I'm going to give you guys back my millions and millions of dollars in compensation from 2021 and 2022 because hey those investment decisions caused our banks our companies to get torpedoed into the ground and resulting in billions of dollars of shareholder value loss and thousands and thousands of jobs lost.

No you don't hear that the reason why is because everybody is out there for themselves. The executives number one goal is to make shareholders money and to make themselves money. Please if you are an employee even a middle manager your job is to not make your job your life instead you should increasingly view your day job as a place for transaction not for spiritual growth.

Your day job is there to mainly make you money so you can have more options to do what you want and that's mostly it. Potentially making friends out of colleagues and feeling like you have a purpose at your day job are side benefits. It's kind of sad but it's true these are side benefits.

If you receive them great but don't expect them. Conversely your boss is there to extract as much productivity out of you as possible to make as much money as possible from you and the firm. Think like management not like an employee. We talked in the past about how meritocracy is declining.

People aren't rewarded as much for their hard work and accomplishments as they were in the past and the reason why is because of society and office politics. Office politics is growing folks. The higher you climb on the corporate ladder the more office politicking you need to do. You need to continuously sell yourself internally as much as you sell yourself externally to get paid and promoted.

After every review you must highlight your accomplishments and the value you have provided to your company. Then you've got to come up with an agreed upon bonus amount, salary amount, title by a certain date. Keep their feet to the fire. You need this all in writing because if you can perform you need to get paid.

None of this hey in the future you know you're sacrificing for the team you'll get paid and rewarded and promoted two years from now if you're a loyal soldier. That two years might never come. Look out for yourself first. A written plan is a must to hold your managers accountable.

I was a manager once and I was managing my managers in my career to get to VP level by 27 and executive director level by 31. But I hit that ceiling that glass ceiling where I couldn't get to managing director. I tried for one year. I held them accountable.

I said this is my performance and then they said sorry you're not going to get promoted and we're not going to pay you as much. You know you got to subsidize the fixed income department. Sorry it's just one team one dream. I get it. So instead of complaining I figured a way out and that way out was to negotiate a severance so I can get all my deferred compensation of three years of cash in stock plus my seven year bullet of this investment in mortgage backed securities out of Japan and other countries that management forced us to make as part of our bonus back in 2010.

And it wasn't going to get paid out until 2017 and there was no way I was going to leave that money behind. So I decided to take action for a suboptimal situation and I'm better for it and that is what I want all listeners to do. It's fine to visit pity city you know the place where you feel sorry for yourself and all your problems.

I think we've all been there before but complaining why life isn't fair is not the financial samurai way. We're all given different strengths and weaknesses. Some of us have serious disabilities to overcome. 15% of the world's population has some disability. How we make the most of our differences is what matters and we're always going to fight on.

Negotiating a severance sounds probably foreign probably weird to most folks. The constant feedback I get from some people is this. Sam I could never do that to my employer and negotiate a severance. I am valued so much. The reality is these are the same people who are too weak to fight for their pay and promotion.

As a result they get passed over for the people who do. I wanted my wife on this podcast to share her side of the story about you know why she didn't want to negotiate her severance for a whole year even though I had negotiated mine in 2012. But she's dealing with a passport fire drill because she lost it and she now needs to find another one before she goes on a trip to Japan.

But what my wife has done is help me update my classic book How to Engineer Your Layoff, Make a Small Fortune by Saying Goodbye that I first wrote in 2012. It's now on its sixth edition. It has 50 more pages of strategy. It talks about life and work post-pandemic and it is the number one source for helping you negotiate a severance for yourself so you can be free.

Just know that soon after you leave your job you will be replaced. Your old bosses and colleagues will forget all about you. Well maybe not instantly but within about a month or two months you're going to be old news folks and another one is just going to next person up going to take your place and do your job.

So please don't get married to your job. Think about it more as a transaction as a way to get money, to save money, to invest more money so you can one day be free. Now if you love your job, awesome. However the reality is only about 30% of folks are engaged at work.

A full 70% not engaged or dislike their jobs. And the longer you do your job, well the less interested you will be in your job. Come on now, think about it. 20 years doing the same thing. I don't care who you are, you're going to get bored kind of going to that amazing conference in Hong Kong or Switzerland after the 20th consecutive time.

This is why unless you work in an organization that provides a golden parachute, a pension package, you need to figure out a way to negotiate a severance. Unlock those golden handcuffs. Today it is exceedingly rare for an employee to remain with one firm for their entire career and receive a pension upon retirement.

The average person changes jobs every three to five years. The average person has three careers in their lifetime. And each time they change jobs presents an opportunity to negotiate a severance package. Given the transactional nature of work, the nature of a severance negotiation implies that an exiting employee provides value in lieu of receiving a severance.

This value can be in the form of cost savings, right? No longer do they have to pay you 500,000 or 200,000, they can hire a cheap replacement. Or you can train your replacement for as long as possible to provide a smooth transition. You can tell your employer, look, I'm getting out of the industry and I don't want to go to a competitor, so don't worry.

And you can say, I also agree not to air any dirty company secrets or say anything bad about you, my manager. The last thing a company wants is a disgruntled employee writing a tell-all article in a major publication about shady things that were going on inside the firm. Reputation matters most.

It can take a hundred years to build and a minute to destroy, especially now, thanks to social media and the internet. Recently, we've seen tons of mass layoffs from large tech organizations. How do they lay them off? They lock their employees out one day at 3am and they send a mass email.

There's not a lot of empathy that goes into laying employees off nowadays, folks. Laying people off is difficult. It's emotionally taxing. So if you can think more like a manager, if you can think about your manager, ironically, and help with the layoff process, it's likely easier to get a better severance package.

And I talk about this in my book, How to Engineer Your Layoff. Please don't get too emotionally attached to your job. I've been out of the workforce since 2012, right? So that's like 11 years. And the people who are most depressed after work, after early retirement, fake retirement, sabbatical, are the people who got way wrapped up in their jobs.

Their identity was their job. They love to tell everybody, "I am the vice president of procurement, of marketing, of business development. I just got a raise and a promotion. I am the big kahuna, LinkedIn profile, update, update, update." You know, these people, man, they suffered the most once they no longer had their jobs, their title, their positions, that steady cash flow.

Be careful. Be careful. Find other outlets, whether it's through friends, families, hobbies, side hustles. And for me, I found an outlet through writing, and now I like to podcast. And now there's tennis and pickleball, right? Fine. Diversify your interest, folks. Don't go all in on your employer. Because in this hyper competitive world, you could find yourself jobless the very next month.

I hope you don't. If you need that job, just know, things are as precarious as ever. So maybe the FIRE movement is going to stay long term. Because FIRE, Financial Independence Retire Early, really is about saving and investing as much money as possible. So you could have as much passive income as possible to cover your basic living expenses.

So you can do more of what you want to have options to live the life that you want. So maybe I was premature about saying FIRE is becoming obsolete, because work is becoming more flexible. I myself am considering going back to work. I think being a teacher, I think in Hawaii, at a couple schools that I'd like my kids to go to, sounds like a good idea.

I could be a teacher in writing, in media, business, finance, or tennis again. I did teach high school tennis. I was a high school tennis coach for three years. And that was pretty rewarding and pretty fun. But that is the power of FIRE, because these jobs aren't going to pay me a lot.

But at least I have the investments to help provide for my family. One final point, and it's on cognitive dissonance. And I think it's real among the rich and the powerful. As I've written in the past, no matter how rich you get, you often never feel rich or rich enough, because so many people have so much more.

It's this constant comparison that creates constant anxiety that's really hard to quell. And so I stumbled across this really fascinating survey. And there's been a number of these surveys in the United States about United States real and perceived income gap. Now, less than 0.5% of American households earn more than a million dollars.

But the survey participants said they believed about 10% of the US population makes a million dollars. Now a $500,000 income is the threshold, the cutoff point for a top 1% income. Survey participants believed that roughly 19% of US households earn more than $500,000. So based on this survey, I think our perceptions about how much money we have, if we have money is kind of warped, and how much money other people have, if we don't have money is kind of warped as well.

So the more you know the facts, hopefully by listening to this podcast, reading Financial Samurai, reading books, the better you will be. More education, the better. So in conclusion, I hope all employees fight to get the best pay possible. If you do, you'll boost your chances of reaching financial freedom sooner.

And if you don't, you may end up bitter as you work way longer than you should. The reality is nobody will care more about your finances than you. Loyalty is an excellent trait. It is a Financial Samurai trait. But loyalty also goes both ways. If your CEO is making mega millions while paying you peanuts and talking to you in a condescending manner, you've got to leave.

Don't spend the best years of your life working for an organization that takes you for granted. Because if you do, you will look back with regret. And regret is the killer feeling that just grows over time. Thanks so much everyone for listening. If you want to pick up the latest copy of How to Engineer Layoff, Make a Small Fortune by Saying Goodbye, check out financialsamurai.com/h-t-e-y-l and use the code SAVETEN to save $10.

I think it'll be the best severance negotiation book, and I think the only severance negotiation book out there on the market that'll help you break free from a suboptimal job situation. Take care everyone and don't forget to sign up for my free newsletter at financialsamurai.com/news. com forward slash news.