Unemployment can mess with your pocketbook, certainly, but it can also mess with your head and heart—I get that! I have no statistics to back me up on this but I have an empirical sense that long-term unemployment leaves a lot of ruined relationships in its wake.
But do you see the real problem here? The real problem is the dependence within the general adult population on full-time employment. And, conversely, if any individual, in particular, was not dependent on a steady, full-time paycheck, then that is someone who is not subject to all the problems associated with long-term unemployment.
It is your responsibility to protect yourself from the slings and arrows, right? No one owes you a job. Your livelihood depends on you and your ability to make yourself independent of the need for earned income. And the way you do that is to manage your life and finances in alignment with that goal.
The entrepreneur is almost a deity in our society along with the millionaire. But, the reality is, most people are not cut out for self-employment at the most basic level, much less have the skills to build some large enterprise.
Most of us, in fact, just barely cut the mustard as employees—we slack off, we bitch and moan about our bosses and co-workers to our bosses and co-workers, we gossip, and what we work hardest at is trying to figure out how to get away with doing as little work as possible.
But the actual problem is as old as the fable of the grasshopper and the ant—we fail to make hay while the sun shines. In order to break your dependence on earned income—and the job you need to keep it coming—you need to build passive income.
Let me define the two terms integral to that last statement:
Earned income is money you are paid for work—whether as an employee for someone else or through self-employment.
Passive income is money you receive outside of that work-for-pay transaction. And the classic form of passive income is money we are paid as interest on our savings.
If you are paying interest and dependent on earned income you are in serious jeopardy! And I do not mean that it is just your financial well-being that is at stake, your whole life in on the line.
It is said that many of us are just a few missed paychecks from being dependent on the kindness of others. Is that really the way you want to live? Tick, tick, tick...
