Hey parents join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable kids day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones. So you just got some bad news, did you? They laid you off.

Bummer. Well, let's talk about what to do now. And let's talk about what to do practically if this is a tough situation and let's talk a little bit about some radical ways to make this the best news of your life. Welcome to the radical personal finance podcast. My name is Joshua sheets and today we round out our three part series on getting laid off.

Part one was how to make sure you never get laid off. Part two was how to make a plan in case you do get laid off and today we dig into okay, you got laid off. How do we make the best of a bad situation and maybe turn it into a great situation?

Today's show is going to be a mixture of two different themes. Number one, the theme that will face many people because I want this to be a practical show. The theme that if in the coming recession you find yourself in a situation where you're laid off for most people that's really bad news.

And so I want to speak very practically in the beginning part of today's show about what you need to do in that situation. If you are in a tight spot and you are facing a difficult situation and the first half of today's show is going to be it might be more than half but the first part of today's show is going to be speaking to you.

However, if you're listening to the show now then that type of emergency action plan is not for you. We've got a better idea. Now you might still get laid off and if you do then that's what I want you to pay attention to the back half of the show to see some of the more radical ideas of the things that you can do to make this a really great opportunity.

Because even though it might not look at it at the time being laid off for many people is a tremendous opportunity. I'll tell you for me it was one of the best blessings that happened and I'll tell that story later in today's show. The major theme of today's show as far as how you need to filter and sort through the information is what's appropriate.

What's appropriate in your situation. And you need to move with purpose to take appropriate action with an appropriate speed and an appropriate intensity to your situation. So if you've just gotten laid off and you're very close to the edge financially then the appropriate speed and action for you is 100% all out effort.

Everything you've got. I'll explain why. If you've got some margin in your life, you've got some reserves built up, you've got some plans in place, some projects, well then in that case then you need to take appropriate action to get closer to your goals. And one of the key things would just be how do we transition intelligently.

So let's start with all out effort because many of you listening to this show, I hope this is a resource if you've just been laid off and that you'll find it because somebody sends it to you. But many of you are not prepared for what has just happened. And if you haven't planned, you're in a tight spot.

If you've gotten laid off and you've lost the primary source of your income, maybe you have a little bit of unemployment income or maybe you don't, and you have few or no reserves built up, then you've got to move fast. And there are several reasons why you need to move fast.

But this is going to be a common theme for you to consider. Many times people simply move way too slowly. I think the primary reason why people move slowly is because usually the emotional shock and surprise of getting laid off deeply affects them. I know it did me. When you think you're doing a good job and you think everything's going great and you think you're a valued member of your company, then all of a sudden you find yourself sitting there and the layoff papers or the termination of your contracts or however it was structured, your papers are sitting there and they're saying, "Hey, you're not valuable to us." That's a deeply affecting thought.

And so most people that kind of puts us back on the ropes and we're kind of staggering, not knowing what to do. I'm going to give you a day or two to get past that, but not much longer because you've got to move fast. You've got to move fast so that you can buy time for yourself and so you're not pushed up against the wall to have to make a decision in an emergency situation.

The best decisions are usually made slowly and without pressure. And the worst decisions are often made quickly and with mounting pressure. You also need to move fast because especially if you've been laid off because of overall recession, you might see recession starting to impact, but you don't know whether it's going to get worse or get better.

If it's going to get better, meaning that we're on the upswing out of an economic cycle, then there's no loss to you from moving quickly. But if it's going to get worse, then there's massive loss to you if you don't move quickly. And so you need to move quickly.

You need to get out in front. You need to be applying for the jobs up front. But let's deal with the emotional side of it as much as we can. I don't pretend for an instant that you're not facing a difficult situation. I don't pretend for an instant that it's not tough, that the emotional impact and the emotional distress is not deep and hurtful.

It is. But it doesn't really matter how you feel about it. You've got to move in spite of the feelings. And the overall way to do that is to focus on keeping your confidence, whatever it happens to be right now, and/or building your confidence up from wherever it is right now.

Being laid off or being fired has a huge impact on your personal confidence. The first thing that we all do, certainly that I did, is to go and say, "What's wrong with me?" And the problem is the longer that you go without work, the worse it gets. Some of the saddest meetings I've ever had are with people who are among the long-term unemployed because what happens is their confidence in themselves and the ability and the value that they bring to the marketplace is shot.

I remember a client of mine specifically, and this is a different client than the one I told you about yesterday, but this is seared into my memory. This client had a wonderful middle-class job, and then they got laid off. This was back in '08, '09. They got laid off.

So they thought it would be nice to go ahead and enjoy the time off and enjoy the unemployment. So they didn't look seriously for work. They focused on just enjoying the severance pay that came in for a period of time and just kind of enjoying life. They didn't have a massive amount of reserves built up so that they could really build on this, but they had some savings enough that made them feel like they were well cared for.

So they didn't get after it, and they continued to be unemployed. Well, the time went on. Six months turned into a year. A year turned into a year and a half, and I first came into the situation about a year, a year and a half after the layoff. And at that point in time, the unemployment was still flowing.

At this point in time, Congress had extended the unemployment compensation to 99 weeks, and they finally started to get serious with their job hunt. But the problem is by that time, their skills had atrophied. Their personal network had grown stale, and most importantly, their confidence was completely destroyed. They were going and applying for jobs and doing interviews, and the problem was they weren't getting a lot of traction.

And because all they had done was play, and play without purpose, their confidence was shot. And so they stopped applying for jobs at a level which would have been more appropriate, and they started applying for the most basic entry-level jobs, way below where they should have been looking. And it hasn't been an easy situation as I've watched this client.

It's been tough. Your confidence can be rebuilt, but it's probably rebuilt slowly. So recognize that anything you can do to build or keep or increase your personal self-confidence is going to be tremendously important. I believe one of the keys to doing this – not the only key. I'm not a trained psychologist in any way.

I'm sure there are many things. But one of the keys that I've observed, or at least that is helpful to me, is action. Work keeps the mind focused. Action gives you a sense of purpose. If you study things like, say, backward survival advice, you know, your car breaks down in the middle of the wilderness and you've got to figure out how to survive in the wild, or your plane crashes in Alaska, and you read those types of books.

I've had a soft spot ever since I was a kid for that kind of thing, spending my hard-earned money on the SAS survival manual. One of the keys that you read in there is the importance of staying busy and focused and moving with purpose. Now, you first stop, assess your situation, and make a plan, but then you've got to stay focused because if you're busy, if you're focused, if you're working, then you don't feel helpless.

It's when you're not doing anything that those feelings of helplessness come in. So, stay busy. Stay busy looking for work. Look for work like you actually mean it, and we'll cover that in a moment. If you don't have work, then stay busy volunteering, or stay busy working on your house projects, doing all those things that you haven't had time to do.

One of the most valuable things you can do if you're not feeling good about yourself is stay busy helping others who are less fortunate. Anytime we spend time helping others who are less fortunate, we always feel better about ourselves. Even if you need to, just simply focus on staying busy, cutting your budget, cutting your expenses, doing everything you can proactively to reduce the economic outflow from your household.

Stay busy. Another reason why action is the key and why you need to move quickly is the clock is ticking. If you study some of the research on the topic of what happens to people when they're unemployed, and especially when they become unemployed for longer, you will see a clear pattern that the longer you're out of work, the harder it is to get a job.

The AARP has done some research on this for older people, and it's especially tough if you're middle-aged or older. You slowly become, in a sense, damaged goods, at least as far as the employment market is concerned, if you've been out of work for a while. It's not that you can't recover from it, but for every month that you continue unemployed, it becomes much more difficult to get reemployed.

Think about it from the employer's perspective. Let's assume that you're an employer and I'm coming to you and asking you for a job. I come to you and I tell you, "Hey, here are all the things that I'm good at," and you're looking at my resume, and as I record this, it's May of 2015.

You look down and you're like, "Wait a second. Little dates here on the resume. I can figure out that you were last employed in February of 2013. That's over two years." So naturally, you would just simply ask me about that. Now, if my response is, "Well, I haven't been able to get a job," you're going to be looking down and saying, "You haven't been able to get a job in two years doing anything?

Anything in two years? That will impact your thinking about the type of person that I am." And so it's very important to have some kind of job or some kind of answer to those types of questions. And there could be many ways to do it. First of all, you can write the resume in such a way that it doesn't make it obvious that you've been out of work for two years.

That's very important if you've been out of work for a while. Number two, there may be many reasons why you've been out of work. Let's say that you were caring for an ailing parent. Those are very important things, so you need to make sure that you know the reasons why you've been out of work.

But even if you've taken some kind of job, think about the answer of you, the prospective employer, and me, the prospective employee, and I come to you and I say, "I haven't been able to find anything in two years," and you say, "You haven't been able to find anything in two years?" Versus I come to you and you can tell I'm applying for a nice middle-salary professional job and you look down and you see that I've been doing some basic, more entry-level job.

And you ask me about that and I say, "Well, listen, I haven't been able to find a job in my field. I'm in the field of marketing and I've barely been looking, but it's been tough and I haven't been able to find something, but I needed to make sure that I fed my family.

So I took this entry-level job to make sure that I could feed my family and I've been working hard at that while I've been on the job search. So that's why I've been working at this job that's very different than the one I'm applying for, but I'm perfectly qualified for the one that I'm applied for." Now, think about that.

As an employer, my guess is that's going to sound more like the type of person that you'd like to hire. So there's a big difference between my coming to you and saying, "I've been working at a job that's not quite what I'm trained for and it's not what I'm applying for, but I've got to make sure that I'm working," versus my coming and saying, "I haven't been able to find anything in two years." So remember, the clock is ticking and every month that you go by continuing in the ranks of the unemployed makes it tougher and tougher and tougher to get a job, which is why one of the debates that happens when you study official unemployment statistics is, "Well, these people are still unemployed.

They're just not counted because they're not looking for a job anymore," and it's true. It happens. So take a week or two to lick your wounds, but you can't take months. You've got to get working and you've got to stop that ticking unemployment clock. And again, this is especially focused if you're tight financially because there are alternative ways to run this scenario, which we'll cover after we cover this emergency session, so to speak.

Next, look for work like you mean it. If you need money and you want to work, then go and look for work like you actually mean it. And if you do that, I guarantee in any city, in any market, and in any economy, you'll find work. Filling out a job application a day online is not looking for work like you mean it.

Maybe filling out 12 or 15 applications a day is, but not one or two. Think about this. Think about looking for a job like getting started in sales, and this is why upfront action is so incredibly important. Let me tell you about what it's like to start any kind of sales job.

The number one most important thing you can do any time you start a sales job is to take massive, massive action up front as quickly as possible. The reason is that all things are sold in a cycle, and that sales cycle could range from very short to very long depending on what you're selling.

If you're selling men's sport coats in a men's store, your sales cycle is probably pretty short. If you're selling a life insurance policy, it's a little bit longer. If you're selling houses, it may be longer. If you're selling 777s to airlines, you have a very long sales cycle. Let me give you an example from the life insurance business.

Just as an example. It applies to anything, but because I have a lot of background in this, I know this, and I know some of you are interested in life insurance. Let me tell you about the life insurance sales cycle. Here's about the fastest possible life insurance transaction that I can think of happening.

If I'm totally broke and I'm going to go start selling life insurance again to feed my family. I pick up the phone and I start making appointments with people. I call them up and I ask for an appointment. You pick up the phone and you say, "Sure, Joshua. Come on out.

I may or may not need some life insurance. We can talk about that. But yeah, come on out." We set an appointment for a week from today. That would be normal. Most of us plan our calendars about a week out. We meet together one week from today and you share with me a little bit about your situation.

You say, "Yeah, I need some term life insurance. I just had another kid. I need to run some simple calculations." You say, "I need a little bit of term life insurance." "Okay." So we schedule a follow-up appointment for a week later. I come back and I run some quotes with some different companies and I run some different solutions.

I come back and we do the follow-up meeting. Now, most likely in most larger life insurance transactions, you're going to wait a little bit to make the decision. Although there are certain types of the life insurance industry where they focus on the one call close type of thing. In 2015, those markets are mostly dying if not dead.

At least if you're working with mainstream normal like middle income people, you never ask for anything on the first close. You don't do this kind of pressure tactics like they did in 1972. It doesn't work anymore. So I give you another week and we schedule another appointment a week out.

That week out, you think about it. You call your friends and you decide, "Yeah, this policy that Joshua recommended is a good deal." So I come back out and I fill out applications with you. We're now three weeks from the date of my first telephone call. Excuse me, four weeks from the date of my first telephone call.

Then the nurse comes to see you and I turn in the application. It takes about three weeks for the underwriter to issue the policy and maybe a few days to get it back to me. So we're now at about seven weeks. And I call you up and say, "I've got the policy," and I either mail it out to you or I come see you and I deliver it.

And now we're about eight weeks out from the date of my initial call. I turn in the paperwork and then I get my commission check about a couple weeks later. That's about ten weeks total. Now, there are exceptions. It can happen faster. Again, there are still markets of – there's something called final expense insurance where these insurance agents still sell these very small policies and it's basically one call and that's it.

They use very aggressive sales tactics. I don't like that kind of business, but some people do that. But it can happen faster, but usually it's about ten weeks. Now, that ten weeks is – excuse me, it's not usually about ten weeks. That's about the fastest I can imagine it happening.

Most of the time, it's far slower. Because I call you up for next week, but all of a sudden next week you forget about that it's your nephew's birthday party and so we have to cancel and move another week out. You need a little bit more time to think about it because you're busy.

You haven't had a chance to talk with your CPA and get their input, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And basically the whole process gets stretched out. And then even more importantly, the bigger the sale, the longer it takes. So a simple, normal middle class life insurance sale for a normal middle class couple, term life insurance, very simple, relatively inexpensive, those sales go pretty quickly.

Much bigger sales, sophisticated business needs, sophisticated estate need, it might take years to get those things put into force. So when you start in sales, you need to know that not only is the sales cycle going to take a long time, but the majority of people aren't going to buy from you.

So you've got to fill the funnel. Now every sales industry has a different ratio of prospective clients to clients or prospects to customers, however you refer to them in your business. But the key is to fill the funnel quickly because only a small percentage of the people that might buy from you will buy from you.

So if you call on 20 people in the first week, maybe four of them are interested and maybe two of them wind up buying from you. But you still had to spend a lot of time calling on 20 people. If you call on 20 people every week for your first four weeks in the business, then you might start running business 10 weeks out.

But if you call on five people a week, you might get lucky, but most of the time you go broke. It's the same in every kind of sales job. So getting a job is a sales job. You're selling you and the services of your personal services corporation to a prospective employer.

And you need to get things going quickly because it will take time. And in the same way that a very big life insurance sale is going to take a lot more time – I wish I could remember what the biggest life insurance sale was. I don't know if I had a news story on it, but it was hundreds of millions of dollars and I think it was a deferred compensation program.

I had a friend that told me about it, but the agent on the sale made – I wish – tens of millions of dollars at least on the commission on the case. But I'm sure they were working on it for years to get it pulled together. It's very different than going out and selling a one-time small life insurance policy where you get paid quickly.

And so in the same way that it takes much longer to make much bigger sales, but yet the compensation is much nicer, if you flip it around and apply it to the job market, generally the higher-paying jobs are going to take a lot of time. You can pretty much walk into a McDonald's on the corner or whatever local retail establishment and have a quick conversation and you might be offered a job on the spot if they need workers.

But you're not going to make much. But if you're going to get into a great high-paying job, it's going to take a lot of time and there are going to be multiple rounds of interviews and negotiations. At the highest levels, the hiring process will take months and months and months.

You've got to get approved by the board, you've got to have multiple interviews with all the key stakeholders, and it varies all along that course. But in general, plan that the higher the dollar amount, the longer it's going to take. So you've got to get busy now and fill that funnel.

And you've got to tack it quickly and do as much as you can up front because then once you get that cycle going, then you can afford to pull back. But don't make the mistake of starting slow and then as your finances dwindle and your bank account empties and the unemployment runs out, then you start to get more serious.

Because what happens is at that point in time, you don't have the ability to wait and you've got to take whoever makes you the first offer instead of being able to have multiple offers and taking the one that makes you the best offer. So where do you start? Well, start with knowing what you want to do and, if possible, knowing where you want to do it.

You've got to be targeted with a job search. As I mentioned yesterday, my biggest frustration is when friends say, "I'm looking for work. What do you want to do?" I don't know, just anything. Anything doesn't work. Even if you're not 100% sure what you want to do, then you still have to pretend that you know what you want to do and make a guess and pretend that you know where you want to do it and then just ask people for that and then follow up with saying, "Oh, but do you have any good ideas about something else that you think would be better for me?" You've got to have some kind of destination in mind.

You can't wander up to the ticket counter in an airport and ask for a ticket to anywhere. Even if you were willing to pay for it, you've got to give some kind of guidance. So, the ticket counter person needs to ask you a question and you need to at least be able to say, "Okay, I want to go somewhere with beaches or mountains." Then they can look down and say, "Well, we've got some planes going to these beaches.

Pick one." And, "Some planes going to these mountains." There's got to be a destination in mind. The best jobs are always going to come from a targeted approach to specific companies that match your goals and the skills of your personal services corporation. And usually, they're not going to be advertised.

You might be able to get a job that's advertised, but it's not going to be the best job or it's not going to be the best way to get the job. You want to get in there before the job is advertised. If you think the best way to get a job is by spending time browsing the listings on online job boards and sending your resume out with a cover letter, respectfully, you're wrong.

And although I'm not a job expert, I've had a little bit of practical experience and I've read enough books by the experts and every one of them says you're wrong. So, consider doing something different and I'm going to cover that in just a moment with a couple of citations.

Before we get to how to approach a company and make a targeted approach to a specific company, I would just mention briefly that I would start not with that, but actually by activating your personal network. Put the people that you know to work for you because most of them are probably going to like you.

And even if they don't like you, they may at least, if they're neutral towards you, may still be willing to help you. As human beings, we naturally want to help other people. And the best opportunities are probably going to fall in your lap from people that hear about something and suggest it to you.

And if you activate their awareness by telling them that you need a job, you'll be casting a wide net for potential ideas and potential options. Think about how the government tracks people down. FBI puts out a most wanted list or they're looking for somebody and they activate the law enforcement people all over the country and everybody gets, "Hey, we're looking for this guy or this gal." Now, ultimately, only a few people or maybe one person is going to find that, the criminal, find the person.

And maybe nobody will, but at least then they've got people all over the country looking for the criminal. And your friends want to help. So, make your first priority activating all of the people that know you and like you and want to help you. And in today's world, it's easier than ever to do this.

Start with make a Facebook post. Make a LinkedIn post or put it out on Twitter and Google+. Put a frowny face with your story of getting laid off on Instagram. Maybe make a quick YouTube video and put it on your YouTube channel or add a blog post to your blog and tell the story and just say what you're looking for and ask people to help.

Recruit them. Say, "I got laid off. I'm looking for work in marketing or I'm looking for work in better. I'm looking for work in marketing at oil companies," or whatever your version is. And make it public and let people know. Then, more importantly, go through your contacts list on every social media platform and individually message each and every person there.

A quick note, asking them to keep their ears open. If you don't have time to do that, hire somebody for $8 an hour to do it for you. But in today's world, you've got to work harder and harder to get seen and just tossing something out on Facebook isn't enough.

Individually message each and every one of your friends. And make it simple. Make it quick. And ask a quick question at the end so they can respond. Maybe something like, "Hey, I'm looking for work. If you know of any opportunities, please just let me know. And oh, by the way, I was trying to figure out what would be a better fit for me.

Do you have any ideas of anybody in any other industry or something that you think would be a better fit for me?" Just inviting them to connect with you. Email every person in your address book individually. Text every cell phone number in your phone. Call every name in your phone and tell them quickly your story.

Leave a voicemail. Ask for help. Even if you just simply let people know, tell them, "No need to call me back, but I wanted to give you a quick notification," then that person is likely to start listening. And the same way that you've done this many times for your friends, activate your social networks.

If you had a good reputation at your previous company, meaning you were laid off but you did good work, you didn't get fired because of some egregious breach of protocol, then ask all your former coworkers for help. Wherever you work, you should do your best to get hold of the company directory and make sure you have that in your files so that you have a database of your former coworkers so you can keep in touch with them.

If you're on a non-profit board of some kind, call all the board members and tell them what you're looking for. Go through your church directory and call everybody there or call all the recruiters back who've been calling you. And of course, you took the advice to put them onto a list and make sure that you activate all the recruiters that you know and tell them you're looking for work and maybe one of them will be able to find you an option.

Call your university or high school and talk to their career department. Look at the alumni directory and if worse comes to worse, start cold calling all the people in your alumni directory. My guess is that you won't be a third of the way through those ideas or those lists before you stumble across dozens of opportunities.

Now, those opportunities may or may not be what you want. Again, remember I'm primarily targeting people who need work quickly. If you need work quickly, it's good to have a bunch of opportunities in hand. Keep careful notes as you talk to everybody and follow up on all the leads.

If you call up your Uncle Mark and your Uncle Mark says, "Oh, you know what? Here, call this person," call the person. Tell people what you're looking for but also if you are open to any opportunity, then be open to any opportunity. So maybe it takes you a week of work to contact everyone you know.

It's probably worth it, especially if you're open to, again, a variety of opportunities and if you aren't hunting specifically for let's call it the elephant job. You'll start hearing of opportunities everywhere and then you can start to sift and sort. Now, if you are targeting a very specific upper level job, there's no need to do this broad blanket approach.

If you were the CEO of Home Depot and you just got fired, you don't necessarily need to put a post out on your Facebook page that you're looking for a job. The Wall Street Journal will take care of that for you. But the process is the same. It's just more targeted.

You still activate your network. It's just a slightly more exclusive, slightly more focused network. That's the way the world works, with networks. So at whatever level this is appropriate to you, move quickly. If you got fired as the CEO of Home Depot and you want to get another job, you're going to make a bunch of phone calls pretty quickly and put the five or six people who are going to be most helpful and most important on notice that you're available.

Once you've activated your social network, then you need to start a targeted process of approaching specific companies who might be good candidates for the output and products of your personal services corporation. Remember, you're in a sales job. You sell a product with certain features and attributes. And you've got to find the right fit for that product.

There are a bunch of great ways to do this. Start with going to the library and getting some books. Go and get Dan Miller's book, 48 Days to the Work You Love. Go and get Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters. Go and get What Color is Your Parachute? There's dozens of them.

Go through the books and take the ideas and start implementing them. And be targeted and focused on exactly what you want and start the process forward. Remember this, filling vacant job positions is some of the most difficult work that employers do. This is why if you're a great worker and you contribute great value, you're unlikely to get laid off or fired.

Because finding a replacement is hard and it's expensive for employers to find your replacement. But there are some keys and strategies that you can use. I won't go into this in detail, but I do just want to mention one thing. As I was preparing for today's show, just checking a couple of those books.

I've read those books in the past, the Guerrilla Job Hunters and Dan Miller's. I happened to look over at the blog for What Color is Your Parachute? That book is by a guy named Dick Bowles. And his book, he's been around forever, he updates it every year. And he had a little chart here, and I'm just going to tell you this chart.

It's about how employers prefer to hire people versus how job hunters look for jobs. So this is the path that an employer would prefer to use to fill a vacant position. Their number one choice would be to hire from within. The promotion of a full-time employee or promotion of a present part-time employee or hiring a former consultant for in-house or contract work or hiring a former temp full-time.

The employer's thoughts are these. I want to hire someone whose work I have already seen because that's a low-risk strategy for the employer. So if you're a job hunter, see if you can get hired at an organization that you've chosen. As a temp, as a contract worker, as a consultant, aiming at a full-time position only later or not at all.

The number two way that the employer would prefer to hire is using proof. Hiring an unknown job hunter who brings proof of what he or she can do with regards to the skills needed. So that was why we talked about things like websites being an industry representative. The implication for job hunters, if you're a programmer, bring a program you've done with its code.

If you're a photographer, bring photos. If you're a counselor, bring a case study with you, etc. Number three, for an employer, they prefer to hire using a best friend or business colleague. If you've seen someone whose work a trusted friend of yours has seen, perhaps they worked for him or her.

So implication for job hunters, find someone who knows the person who has the power to hire at your target organization and who also knows your work and will introduce you to. Number four, an employer would prefer to use an agency that they trust. This may be a recruiter or search firm the employer has hired or a private employment agency, both of which have checked you out on behalf of the employer.

Number five, they can hire using an ad they placed online or in newspapers, etc. Number six, they can hire using a resume, even if the resume was unsolicited, if the employer is desperate. Now typically, the cool thing about this chart, and I'll link to it in the notes, but the cool thing about this chart is that's typically the exact opposite of the approach that most people take to getting a job.

Most of the time, they send out resumes or reply to ads. That's what they most popularly do instead of taking some of those alternative strategies. Don't get stuck in the job advice of the 1970s. It doesn't work anymore. So read some of those books and start implementing what they encourage you to do.

Be targeted and focused and pursue the opportunities and work your way through. And because you're doing a lot of work up front, you should be able quickly to select and collect various opportunities among which you can choose what's most appropriate for you. Don't forget about some of the radical strategies that you can employ, things like working for free.

I haven't done it. I'm sure there are people that have done it, but I didn't look up any stories to prove it. But I've often thought to myself that one of the things that I would do if I knew there were a specific company that I wanted to work at is I would trot in and I'd get as high up as I could.

I'd walk into the board meeting or the CEO or something and I'd say, "Listen." I'd do a little bit of work and make the presentation a little bit better. But in essence, listen, I really want to work here. I think I can bring a tremendous amount of value. I'd like to work for you for free for a month.

And you could check me out and vet me, but I'll work for you for free. And if at the end of a month or two months or whatever, depending on how valuable it is, then go ahead and hire me or not. But I am committed to this company and I believe this is what I want to do.

You can get through a lot with polite pestering. Now, obviously, there's an art to it to not be annoying. And you've got to be able to discern between those, but a little bit of polite persistence goes a long way. If you're desperate for work, draw a ring around your house and start going door to door.

Walk in and talk to the receptionist, talk to the business owners, leave your card, tell them your story. Nobody does that, but I guarantee you'll get hired. I can't imagine you not getting hired just because you're out there actually showing initiative and doing things. Sometimes people need workers and they're just too busy to go and find them.

So take massive action and something will turn up. Now, on the personal finance side of things, what do you do? Take action and cut expenses quickly. Look at your expenses and figure out what your margin is. Calculate how many months of wiggle room you have based upon your level of savings and then respond appropriately.

Let's say you normally spend, say, $6,000 a month and you have $30,000 in savings. Well, at that rate, you have a five-month window to find a job. Now, if you can cut your expenses to $4,000 a month, now you have a seven-and-a-half-month window. That's a massive difference of time.

You can do a lot in an extra two-and-a-half months, especially when you're taking huge action in the first month or two. So cut, cut, cut quickly and do it up front. Stop buying expensive foods, no packaged foods, less or no meat. You've got time to cook. Cut your auto expenses.

Park the second car. Drop the insurance. Sell the car. Ride the bikes. Cut your entertainment expenses. Cut your utilities. Pull the kids out. Do it quickly because if you do it quickly, you buy a ton of time. Let me give you a simple example. You have $30,000 in savings and you spend $6,000 a month.

That means you have five months of window to find a job. Now, you could if possible – let's say in the first month, you can cut your expenses from $6,000 a month to $3,000 a month by moving quickly. Now, you have a ten-month window. You have doubled the time.

But what most people do is they continue spending $6,000 a month for three months. That burns up $18,000. You're left with $12,000. Now, even if after only three months, you cut your expenses to $3,000 a month, you still only have four months left. So you have a total of seven months of expenses under that scenario versus ten months if you move quickly.

The faster you can cut, the more time you have. And the more time you have, the pickier and the more selective and choosy you're able to be. The more options you'll be able to collect, gather, and the better this experience will be. Now, again, apply this to your life as is appropriate to your scale.

Maybe you don't make everything in the first month. You don't cut everything and just go to nothing. But at least have your bias be towards let me move quickly not knowing how much time I'm going to need. Let me always increase spending later versus let me move slowly and try to keep our lifestyle the same and then all of a sudden, we're really sunk.

Have a bias towards action and towards moving quickly. Once the money's gone, it's gone and it ain't coming back. So make sure it leaves very, very slowly and make sure it's been pinched and squeezed and hurt on its way out. Because cash buys you options. You don't want to get to the point where you're trying to make a life transition and you don't have cash.

Next point, it is closely related but just a different look at it. If things start looking desperate, be strategic in your decisions soon for the sake of your family. Let me give you an example. Let's say that you have $3,000 saved but you have a $1,500 a month mortgage payment.

This would not be unusual in today's world. This is what many families are in. Hopefully not you if you've been listening to Radical Personal Finance for a while. But this would be a situation that would be common for many families, an average balance sheet for many middle class families.

You got $3,000 in the bank and you got a $1,500 mortgage payment. Now you got laid off and you've been looking for work for a few weeks but you're realizing it's tough. It's a problem. Now hopefully you're going to start to be pushing out some options pretty quickly. But sit down and triage your expenses soon.

Don't wait until you're right on the edge and you've run out of cash and you're living on the credit cards. If you get the sense that you're going to have to make some hard decisions, make the hard decisions sooner rather than later. So keep your cash on hand and make sure that you pay for food and utilities and put gas in the car and stop paying the mortgage early if you have to.

Don't wait until you're stuck. Now obviously I don't want to stop paying the mortgage payment. But if you've got to do what you've got to do, then do it early and protect yourself. Do the honorable thing. Call them, tell them what's going on and work like crazy to find any kind of work to stay current.

Don't spend all your money keeping the big bills going and then be stuck without any cash trying to move to another place and not having any cash to do first, last and security deposit on another place to live while you've got a job on the other side of the state and not having anything to eat.

The whole point is try not to get your back up against the wall where you're broken desperate. If you were in that situation and you knew that was going to – what it was going to be, if I were in that situation and I were facing that financial situation, I would work like crazy for a couple weeks to get a job and I would immediately stop paying the mortgage because it would take months and months and months for them to foreclose on you.

If you get a job, you can quickly dig yourself out and get caught up. Okay, a few months of deficiencies, you quickly get caught up. It's no big deal. But if a month later I've lost all what little savings I had and my family hasn't eaten in a week, it's going to be hard to feel confident about doing what needs to be done to get that job.

Now, hear me right. I hate the idea of being late on bills. I've done hours and hours of shows to minimize that possibility. But if you find yourself in a desperate situation, don't wait. Make the difficult decisions quickly. Make them up front and try to keep from putting yourself in a desperate situation.

If I were stuck in a middle class lifestyle, I got laid off, assumed no unemployment, you run these scenarios through your own situation, but I don't have any unemployment, I've got $3,000 in the bank and I'm used to spending $3,000 a month of which $1,500 is my mortgage. I'm not making the next payment.

I got to keep my $3,000 in the bank until we get cash flow coming in because I might need that $3,000 to go buy a lawnmower so I can go start making money mowing lawns. Keep your options and your decisions open to you and take control of the situation.

Now, I hope these ideas are useful to you if you are at the edge or if you find yourself in that difficult situation. But many of you listening are not at the edge. And here I'd like to adjust the tone a little bit and talk about the opportunities that can be presented with a layoff.

And if you're in the edge now and you're listening to the show but you haven't been laid off, get yourself into this situation and into this position now so that you're never in those desperate straits that I just referenced. If you've got margin, you've got cash, and you've got time, and you've got – I guess margin is the best word, then consider seeing the layoff as a tremendous opportunity and take advantage of it in every way you can.

Take advantage of the opportunity to fulfill a dream if you can or to use it to advance something that you usually don't get an opportunity to advance. When I was a young financial advisor, I had the opportunity to call on a guy who was – he's a construction guy.

And he was here in Palm Beach County. And I won't give the type of construction, but he was a construction guy and had been a construction guy for a long time. He was in his 50s. And when I called on him, it was one of these very challenging scenarios where construction guys – they're a unique lot when it comes to their personalities.

You've got to be a little bit gruff and you can't be scared and you've got to be willing to follow through because they're used to dealing with people in a straightforward way, which I like. I always have gotten along well with blue-collar construction guys. But you've got to work a little bit.

You've got to be willing to stay in there and press through the bluster. So this guy pressed through the bluster and I impressed him enough that he kind of took pity on me as this young, baby-faced – I don't know, 24-year-old financial advisor or something like that. Let me share with you a story.

He says, "My business" – this would have been '09, '10, something like that. He said, "My business has declined some massive percentage in the past months." He says, "I used to run crews of 50 guys and I'm down to six." And with the absolute destruction of the South Florida construction market, his entire business had collapsed.

But he said, "I'll tell you what. This is not my first rodeo. I've been through this a bunch of times." He says, "The first recession that I went through as a young business person, that one almost sank me. And I swore I would never get put in that position again." He said, "I don't owe anybody money.

The majority of my employees were not employees. They were contractors. I don't owe a dime of debt on any of my business assets." He said, "All these guys have parked their trucks and I just didn't renew their contracts." He said, "My overhead is low." He was some grimy little office on the back of a gas station.

It was kind of a crazy thing. And he said, "And I just bought a boat from another guy I know who had bought this big, fancy boat and he got it for a tiny amount of money compared to the value, 30 cents on the dollar." He said, "I paid cash for it.

I'm going fishing every day." "I got my assistant here answering the phones and I go fishing every day and I just wait it out. I got enough money. I can sit back and wait it out." And the point of it was that when the market was bad, instead of freaking out and saying, "How can I get the business back?" he just let things coast and enjoyed the break.

But you can only do that if you've prepared for it. Now obviously there are business techniques to say, "How can I keep my business going even when times are tough?" You can pivot, you can adjust, you can change. But for him, he had a long, well-established business and it was just a matter of the business cycle, the market coming back.

And he put himself into a position where he didn't have to chase all of the hard work with very low margins when everybody's beating you up on price and he could sit back and he could wait. That inspired me. To say, "What can I do to be out of sync with the economy?" Frankly, a lot of wealth and wealth creation simply has to do with fortunate timing.

If you look at overall statistics sometimes on economic growth, say for example in the United States, sometimes it's all about just being at the right place at the right time and even though you might like to attribute it to your own personal skill, it may or may not have been.

The problem is that most people are very in sync with the economy and they increase their consumption to match their income. Don't do that. When your income is high, enjoy it and stash it aside. And if you keep your expenses low relative to your income, then you'll have options when the income disappears or is adjusted.

If possible, set yourself up to do that. So getting laid off could be an advantage to you because it might give you that opportunity that you need to go and travel the world. You've been thinking about it. You've been planning for it. You've been saving money, but man, you're just making a lot of money and this has been good and do I really want to walk away?

Well, decision was made. Go ahead and buy the ticket or get in the car and start driving. Get the RV or whatever. Go and travel. Dump the monthly expenses if possible and just stretch yourself out and use it as an opportunity to adjust and to reestablish yourself. What happens is we often get locked into the corporate world of career growth and minimum time and maximum expenses.

And we're trying to build our life around the two or three week vacation opportunities. It's not about early financial independence. That's great. But what if you're halfway there and then you get laid off? Well, maybe this could be the opportunity to go ahead and try it out. You're halfway there.

Take some time. Take a few years off and go and start doing the things that are on the list. You might even be fortunate enough to have some unemployment checks. That can be cool. If that's the case, you have an incredible opportunity. Take that money and see if you can adjust your lifestyle to make maximum use out of it.

Maybe this is the opportunity to start the business that you've always wanted to start. Or again, maybe this is the opportunity to rent your house out. Even if you just break even on it, go and buy the sailboat and use the unemployment checks to cover your marina fees. Now obviously, you have to take care of the simple administrative things to take care of those checks.

But recognize this. Last recession, they put those things out to 99 weeks. They'll do it again if it buys votes in the next recession. Remember, politicians always have to be seen doing something. It doesn't matter if what they're doing is helping or actually hurting in reality. They're not going to listen to anybody that says that what they're doing is wrong.

They're just going to continue blustering forward. It's not until years later after they're out of office that people look back and settle into the proof of what they're doing. It's all about the perception now that I'm doing something. If you've been planning and you're hardcore and you have low expenses and a lot of savings, just sit the recession out.

Turn it into a mini retirement. You may have some severance pay. I know for me, when I got laid off in 2008, I had – I can't remember. A couple of months of severance pay. It was awesome. I bought a plane ticket. I think I went to Columbia. I went somewhere.

Enjoy it. Now I don't know – here we get into a question of the ethics of unemployment. I'll share this here. We were talking about it in the irregulars group. I am very conflicted over the ethics of unemployment. I have not been able to figure this one out. And so I challenge your thinking with it and if any of you think I'm wrong or think I'm right, you let me know.

But in general, I'm in favor of no intervention and no support. So if I had my way, I would quickly eliminate the vast majority of the social net programs from governmental control and I would transition them over to private economy. I would – I believe it's my responsibility to take care of me.

And if I can't take care of me and you see me needing help as a private individual, then it's your opportunity as a private individual to render charity and aid. But I can't force you to take care of me. That's immoral. So when I was laid off, I specifically didn't file for unemployment because I didn't – I was prepared.

I was ready to take care of me and I was trying to live in accordance with my ethics and not take advantage of that even though I was fully qualified. Now looking back, I wish I had done something different because what I didn't realize was that my employer was forced to make those payments.

Regardless of whether I used them or not, they had no option of opting out and that that had been a part of my compensation. And looking back, I should have taken the money. And it really bothered me when I started seeing a lot of the social programs advertised. But here, take the money.

Go ahead. Take the money. I watched in '08 and '09, watched the unemployment get stretched out to 99 weeks and the majority of the people that I interacted with, not looking for work all that hard. And so that started to really put in me, "Well, how did I get mine?" So I've never been able to figure out the ethics of the unemployment situation.

I'll leave that up to you. If you have comments on that, feel free to let me know whether I was right or wrong or what I should have done. But let's stay focused. Get out of sync with the economy and keep yourself in a situation where you are able to focus on living the best life without necessarily referring all the time to what's going on around you.

Getting laid off could be a tremendous opportunity because if you've been paying attention to knowing what you want to do and have some ideas, maybe you've always wanted to learn to code. And you decide, "You know what? I'm going to rent the house out. I'm going to move into a camper and I'm going to spend 12 hours a day taking online coding lessons." Well, maybe you can make that work.

And maybe the unemployment or the severance pay gets you into your new career. Use these times as transitions if you have the ability. Look for economic opportunity. Move if you need to. Retrain. Reskill. Reset. And hopefully, put your dry powder to work. Every recession, every difficult economy gives you an opportunity to take advantage of something at low prices.

So if you're in that situation, look for the deals. Look for the depressed real estate values. Look for the depressed company values. Look to buy the franchise that nobody wants. Look to buy the stocks that are out of favor. Look for the deals. Above all, stay flexible in your thinking.

I'm convinced, as I mentioned in the first part of this series, that our mental chains and ways of thinking keep us in a certain course of action when in reality there are many other opportunities that we could do. If you have trained yourself to think flexibly and to look for opportunity, then you could take advantage of it.

And if you're not a slave to your lifestyle, you can quickly adjust. I love the quote, "He is not rich who has the most but who wants the least." If you start to practice that, then all of a sudden you are able to take advantage of more opportunities. We don't often think about how really incredible our lives are and how we've gotten used to a certain level of comfort and we can't seem to think about doing anything different.

Think about this. There's people all throughout the world who live in tents. That's the way they live their entire lives. And throughout human history, many people have lived in tents. Even today, millionaires go and live in a tent for a few weeks while they're on a safari in Africa.

And millions of us go camping with our families and live in tents for a few weeks. So, living in a tent is a lifestyle that some of us voluntarily participate in, even those of us who are the wealthiest. Why not do it voluntarily to achieve a goal? Now, I'm using this as a metaphor here, but recognize how great your lifestyle is and how great it can be even with a few changes.

My wife and I saw the first hand the tent cities of Port-au-Prince, Haiti on our honeymoon. We came back to our 274 square foot apartment and it felt like luxury. We all get used to a certain way of living and we think it's the only way and we forget that it's simply one way that we can do things.

Think about how amazing our lives are today. A story that stands out to me, my father tells stories when he was younger. His parents were from California and they were living in Colorado and they would travel between Colorado and California. When they were driving back in the 40s and 50s, they would make the drive and what they were accustomed to is when it was dark and they needed to sleep, they'd just pull the car over on the side of the highway and walk out in the grass and lay their sleeping bag down and go to sleep.

That was what they did. Now, I can't even imagine doing that to my family today and I doubt any of you can. I wouldn't do that. We have to stay in a hotel. So, recognize how incredible our lives are, but also recognize how a lot of that is in our head.

I hope some of these kind of interesting strategies or ideas can spark some creative juice for you to look at your situation. We're blessed. Every one of you listening is in the top, I don't know if it's 1%, but I would say the top 5% of the world's income and wealth.

We're blessed. We live in an amazing time and an amazing world. I use tents as an example, not to say you have to go live in a tent, but I'll tell you what, I could sleep on a cot in a tent and pull out my phone and have the world's best entertainment from all over the world.

Unlimited music, unlimited learning, unlimited education, unlimited everything right there. Is it really so bad? If you find yourself in a situation of layoff, turn it into an adventure in some way. Whether it's by necessity, you're forced to do something quickly, or whether it's by choice, you have the opportunity to adjust your life.

Try to learn and gain from it. If you do, I think you'll look back and, as I say about the time I was laid off years ago, it was a blessing. Didn't feel like it, but it was a blessing. Hope these ideas have been helpful to you and I hope this series has been helpful to you.

I've been wanting to do it for a while and I just watched and felt like it needed to be done. But if you implement the ideas progressively of 192, then you're probably never going to be laid off. You're going to be transitioning from one company to a newer and better opportunity before it happens.

Make a phone call, or if it does happen, you make a phone call out of one job and get into another one. And if you implement the ideas in 193 and you have the plan, you're not going to be forced with your back up against the wall of trying to just choose between do I put food in the pantry or make the mortgage payment.

But if worse comes to worse, implement the ideas in the beginning of this episode, but make sure you get yourself in a position where, if you have the opportunity, use your severance pay, use the unemployment, and use that as a point of transition. Take a little mini retirement. Move from one side of the country to another.

Move from one side of the world to another. Move from a dead economy to a living economy. Keep yourself in a position of strength, most importantly, so that you can help those around who really need it. The best way to help the poor is start by not being one of them, and then focus on helping them around you.

Because there are a lot of people around all of us that need the help. And difficult days are ahead. There always are. I'm not making a prognostication of when there are difficult days. Good days are always ahead, and difficult days are always ahead. But it's what you do now that will make a difference in those days.

Thank you all so much for listening. If this has been useful to you, if you enjoy this content, if it benefits you, if it puts direct financial impact in your pocket, I would ask you to consider becoming a patron of the show. You can do that at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. Thank you to the 177 of you who are currently doing that.

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