Marty Nemko's Blog, page 279

Compassionate Conservatism: No, it's not an oxymoron

The term “compassionate conservatism” was one of President Bush’s slogans but as my PsychologyToday.com article today, I offer my own version and so take all blame and credit for it.

The Prudent Millionaire: A short-short story.

Robert would always would rather save than spend. In the 1st grade, Robert had already started putting money into a piggy bank. In the 3rd grade, he opened a savings account. He loved watching the teller update his bankbook, seeing his balance increase and especially, the red entry for interest. He was amazed that the bank would pay himfor safekeeping his money.

Robert started taking after-school and summer jobs starting in the 7th grade. He saved most of what he earned, only occasionally buying, for example, firecrackers for July 4. And for those, he bargained hard, usually walking away to test if he had negotiated the lowest possible price.

To save his family money, Robert went to community college and then transferred for his bachelor's degree to the nearby  public university, where he could live at home and, along with having taken a work-study job, be one of the rare students who graduated college with no student debt.

As an adult, Robert made a middle-class living as a librarian but remained unusually thrifty. He bought a studio condo in a ‘bad” neighborhood and furnished it from garage sales, Craiglist ads, and Ikea. He always drove an old, gas-stingy Toyota until it dropped. He bought his clothes at Wal-Mart or thrift stores. He mainly ate at home, and economically: chicken, vegetables, tuna, fruit, etc., and when he ate out, mainly at hole-in-the-wall restaurants. He bought most other items on Amazon, which, because of its Marketplace, enabled him to get the lowest price from among many vendors. His vacations were driving rather than flying ones, and he stayed at airbnbs or low-cost motels. 

He always paid the credit card bill in full, never paying a penny in interest. He invested 10% of his paycheck in his 401K and another 10% in the highest yielding bank CDs. (A master list is on Bankrate.com.) When he was dying, he left instructions that he be cremated and inexpensively: “No fol-de-rol.”

So by the time Robert died, despite having only earned a librarian’s income, his estate was worth $1.5 million. He thought about leaving it the National Association for Gifted Children, which lobbies for more money for under-served high-potential kids. But his friends and family said even the $1.5 million would be only a drop in most nonprofits’  bucket, much would go to “administrative expenses,” and, because gifted education is out of favor, would probably result in less benefit than if he left the money to family. He didn’t quite agree but yielded to the pressure: He left his money to his brother and sister.

With the inheritance, his sister traded up to a larger house in a fancier neighborhood. His brother bought a Jaguar, added a recreation room to his home, and took his family on safari. He put the remaining inheritance in risky stocks. “After all, it's found money.” As of this writing, he lost 40%.

And so went Robert’s prudence. 

I read this on YouTube.

The World's Shortest Course on Your Money: Making it, spending it, investing it

School teaches many things but gives short shrift to money: making it, spending it, investing it.
My PsychologyToday.com article today offers the most important things you need to know. The advice is aimed at young adults but may well be worth reading by people of any age.  It is the advice I’d give a family member.

The World's Shortest Course on Money

A Life at the 40th Percentile: A counter to Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now

Johnny was average: looks, personality, and brains: He scored between the 30th and 50th percentile on most standardized tests, from the 2nd grade reading and math achievement test to the SAT.

Johnny went to community college and three courses short of his A.A., dropped out, in part because he had taken the required math course three times and couldn’t pass it.

He took a job at Evergreen Nursery, unpacking shipments, hauling soil to customers’ cars, answering customers’ questions, too often having to turn to the Sunset Garden Book.

After work, Johnny played schoolyard basketball or just vegged out, whether staring out the window at drifting clouds or at the snow falling, or cooking. He considered such activities as peeling potatoes or watching water come to a boil as meditative.

Johnny got promoted to assistant manager with an increase in pay to $15.25 an hour. But Home Depot’s, Lowe’s, and Wal-Mart’s selection and prices trumped too many customers’ desire to shop local and so Evergreen Nursery, like many mom-and-pops, closed.

Nervous, Johnny wanted a job fast so he applied to Home Depot and was hired as an assistant manager in its nursery department at $17.75 an hour. Although his nearest Home Depot was just two miles from his apartment, the nearest one that had an opening was seven miles away, and with the ever worsening traffic, it took him an hour each way—Mass transit would have taken him much longer still. As troubling, with the commute expense, Johnny was now making even less, net, than at Evergreen.

The good news was that the job was easier because he didn’t have to fill in with delivery unloading or soil carrying when employees called in sick. There were fork lifts and if a worker in the nursery department wasn’t there when a delivery arrived, the store manager would just reassign someone from another department.

And for a few years, all proceeded reasonably well. Although Johnny’s rent and other living expenses increased, he got small raises every six months and so remained solvent. He was even able to replace his 30-year-old 19” Magnavox TV with a 55” Scepter that Wal-Mart was selling for $279. He didn’t even have to, as he usually did, pay for it in installments. He bought it for cash.

On his 40th birthday, Johnny sat at his window, staring at the autumn leaves falling and saw his future as just hanging on and when the inevitable layoffs and then illness hit, there'd be no money for retirement, so he'd have to move to a welfare hotel and live on food stamps, and then possibly die early because of an overwhelmed health care system.

The U.S. alone has 150 million people at or below the 40th percentile, with an IQ of 90 or less. Meanwhile, the jobs such people used to hold are being ever-more automated, offshored, and converted into temp gigs. A McDonald’s in Phoenix has replaced clerks with kiosks and burger makers with robots. Amazon is only the most prominent of retailers that are automating warehouse work. There are farms in Japan with no workers. The Tesla factory floor has lots of big manufacturing machines and few humans. And the more benefits that government mandates, the more employee lawsuits, the faster employers will replace U.S. workers.

Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is a hot book, indeed is Bill Gates’ favorite. It points out society’s progress but ignores important realities—like what’s going to happen to the world’s 3 billion Johnnys.

I read this on YouTube.

"Crazy" ideas to consider about your worklife

The text of this video is HERE.

Tried and Trues

Tried and Trues: Ideas and Products That Have Stood the Test of Time

Many people have a bias toward “new.” We infer "new” to mean improved or at least fresh. Such thinking leads us to give short shrift to the tried and true, proven ideas and products that have survived and thrived through the decades. 

So, I thought, as my PsychologyToday.com article today, it might be helpful to offer a list of tried-and-trues. Maybe you’ll find one or more you’d like to, well, try, perhaps try again. Or better, this list might trigger your own tried and trues—things you’ve tried but perhaps forgotten about or want to try again.

My Best Career Ideas

My Best Career Advice

As part of the touring exhibit, "Working in America" I’ll be giving a talk at the Oakland, California library next week. My PsychologyToday.com article today offers an advance look at what I’m planning to say.