A harsh reality is becoming very apparent in the job market - if you're over age 50 and lose your job, you are likely not going to be able to return to a replacement full-time job.
According to a recent Forbes article, the few new jobs being offered by corporate employers to folks over 50 are often part-time or temporary, neither great ways to rebuild your battered retirement savings.
Last week, a commentator on National Public Radio seemed to sum it up when he said: "Many out-of-work boomers over 50 are retired from the corporate world and just don't know it yet!"
Well, let me bring you some very good news to offset the dire outlook in the job market...
There is a work "Plan B" at your fingertips!
Many corporate hiring managers today are under age 40 and to them your age is often a deterrent to hiring you.
But, guess what? When you run your own business, your customers or clients don't care how old you are - they just want to be sure you'll deliver what you promise.
Even if you're able to find some kind of full-time corporate job, you must understand that for the past decade real job wages have not grown, not even by a fraction of one percent.
So in the corporate world today you work your butt off and you still don't get ahead financially.
In contrast, when you're self-employed you largely control how fast and how far you can grow your personal income.
For example, I sit down each January and figure out what level of personal income I would like to receive for the year. Then, I make a mini-marketing plan to achieve my goal.
Over the twenty-three years I've been self-employed I've made my goal many more times than I've missed it.
In today's drastically downsized corporate world a typical senior manager (which those of you over 50 should be by this point) is probably doing 2, 3 or more jobs at the same time.
When I drive by the commuter train terminal in the downtown of my Chicago suburb at 8:00 at night, I see dozens of older individuals in business dress get off the train. They've probably been away from home for fourteen hours or more.
Being able to work on a flexible schedule is one of the major rewards you gain by running your own business. Over the past decade members of my family have suffered some serious medical problems that required that I take off a lot of time to help.
In the corporate world, I'd have run out of sick leave within a couple of months and when I continued to be absent, they would have likely fired me.
So, your "Plan B" is to seriously explore ways to turn your skill and experience into an entrepreneurial income opportunity.
Monday, June 25, 2012
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I think it is my duty to share the experience I had with Jeff Williams from Bizstarters.com and his book “Earn Big”. I will try not to make any judgement; I will just put the facts on the table and leave it up to the readers to make their own judgement.
ReplyDeleteLast December I read a reference about Jeff’s e-Book “Earn Big” in a Start Up community similar to this one and clicked on the link to find out more about it. In his site (www.bizstarters.com), Jeff says that, with this book you will “Learn 175 ways to turn your knowledge and experience into a great business. Guaranteed!”. Sounds like a magical formula as many others you find out there to which I don’t normally give much credit. Additionally, it was a quite an expensive purchase, US$ 49, especially for an e-Book (it is now being marketed for US$ 19 – a 60% drop in two months!). But, as the site had a “100% satisfaction guarantee or your money back” statement, I decided to have a look, bought and downloaded it. The book has 45 pages, of which 28 are tables with blank spaces to be filled-in. It has a total of 7,165 words and 38K characters. As one can see, quite a hollow document, especially for the price. Anyway, I read it in its entirety in a mere one hour, including filling in the questionnaires and, at the end, I confirmed that, as feared, what I found was not exactly what I was looking for and it did not add much to my knowledge or my ability to create a new business.
Not to worry, I said to myself, I will write back to them, thank for the opportunity for having had a look into their book, explain it was not to my satisfaction and request the refund. Which I did.
On December 4th Jeff Williams himself answered to my email saying that my credit card would be credited “in the next couple of days”. In the same e-mail he offered to arrange a short chat with me to discuss my business ideas, for free. I found it, at the same time nice and strange but, again, as it was offered for free, I decided to give him a credit and have a go. In reply on December 6th, he said that, as I was located in the UK, instead of a chat, he proposed that I put my ideas down in an e-mail and promised to reply back to me with his “appraisal, with usually includes some thought-provoking questions” in a couple of days. I then took time to write him a comprehensive view of my ideas, without going into too much detail which could give away some competitive details.
After a month without any reply from them about the refund and the offered appraisal, I wrote back to him on January 4th asking what the situation was. Jeff replied on the next day saying that he could not offer any appraisal on my ideas because they didn’t have much detail. One can wonder why someone would offer free appraisals for business ideas that need to be described in detail. He also said in this email that he would have another look at the refund question.
Another month passed without any news from him or about the refund. On January 25th I wrote a more assertive email giving him 72 hours to process the refund or run the risk of further actions I could take to pursue my rights. Only then he offered to expedite the refund but not without saying that I should “pat yourself on the back for being the first one in browbeating us into doing it”.
I leave any judgement up to you.