The Guaranteed Way To Prevent Unemployment

This whole coronavirus pandemic has really got me thinking about all of our children’s future. The world is suboptimal for us adults now. But what will their world be like in this already brutally competitive place full of constant rejection?

Our country already has over 22 million Americans unemployed as of April 19. By the end of summer, the unemployment figure will likely exceed 40 million if we do not open up at least parts of the economy by then.

In big cities, expect to spend up to $1,000,000 providing for your child through college. In 18-hour cities, expect to pay at least $250,000. Either way you cut it, raising children is expensive. Now imagine spending all that time and money and not being able to find a job, let alone a fulfilling career? Terrible!

If extremely wealthy and famous people are willing to risk their reputations and their freedom and bribe their kids’ way into well-ranked private universities for better employment opportunities, what hope do the rest of us have?

We need career insurance.

Career Insurance For Our Kids

As someone who has experienced unending rejection since childhood, I fear my children may experience this same level of hardship or worse.

The optimist believes perpetual hardship will make them grow stronger. But it’s also possible that frequent rejection will break them into a thousand pieces.

There are some very angry, bitter people out there who wouldn’t be so terrible if they had experienced more love and support growing up. Having a meaningful career and a loving partner makes a difference.

Therefore, I ask all of you how much insurance would you pay to ensure that your kids find meaningful jobs so they don’t grow up extremely angry at the world?

My answer: Everything I have short of going bankrupt.

Let me share a couple stories that demonstrate why too much work or not enough work created unhappiness and hate.

Insurance As A Protection Against Unhappiness

When I talked to my softball buddy, Biff about his upbringing he said that his parents were never home when he got back from school. As a result, he hung out with some unmotivated kids who experimented with drugs and liked to skip class as much as possible. He was hardly ever happy.

When Biff was a Junior, the girl he had a secret crush for laughed at him when he presented her with a rose on Valentine’s Day. As a result, he began to resent every pretty girl in school. His self-esteem had been crushed and he began to gain a lot of weight.

He also stopped studying hard, not because he was stupid, but because he began losing hope about the future. His parents were never home to talk to him and provide him the immediate love and support that he needed. Sometimes, his father would disappear on business for weeks.

Solution: Have at least one parent be a stay at home parent to always be there when their child or children come home. By having a parent to always talk to and check in with, a child should feel more loved and get into less trouble. When a parent is never home, the tendency may be for kids to stray.

The cost to the parent is his or her career and income. The alternative sacrifice is finding a more flexible jobs that allow you to work from home or have more flexible office work hours. Hopefully the coronavirus pandemic will encourage more employers to have work from home options.

Insurance To Prevent Hate & Bitterness

I traded e-mails one day with a reader who hailed from Georgia. She had started leaving nasty comments so I reached out to try and understand her story. Let’s call her Karen.

After a couple exchanges, she admitted she grew up in a racist household where both her parents used racist terms to describe all minorities. She became accustomed to using those terms because that was the environment she grew up in.

When I asked her why she thought using racist and hateful language was OK, she attributed her language to her father losing his job at a textile mill. Her father’s former co-worker told him that three months later after he was let go, that his old employer had hired a Black person to do his job.

Ever since that incident, her father has been very belligerent towards any minority group. He believes the Black guy took away his dignity and ability to provide for his family. There was no looking inward by the father on how he could have been a better employee.

Karen blamed her rejection from the University of Georgia on its perceived lowered admissions standards for minorities. As a result, she also adopted her father’s bitterness towards all minorities, including myself.

Solution: As a parent, create your own business so you won’t have to depend on an employer to provide for your family. You also won’t stress about your kids not getting into college or getting into an expensive university and having to pay for it. Heck, you might even prevent your kid from growing up with racist tendencies because your livelihood is more secure.

In order to create your own successful business, you need to put in extra hours developing your business while working a full-time job. This is the safest route to travel. You could also spend time learning about a business before buying one. Or you can call all-in with the help of some seed funding. But I wouldn’t recommend this path.

If you are currently unemployed, take advantage of the expanded unemployment benefits and use this time wisely to start building something for yourself.

How Much Insurance Would You Buy To Help Your Kids?

My main financial goal since I left work in 2012 is wealth preservation. If I wanted to still rapidly accumulate more money, I would have simply stayed at my miserable banking job instead of negotiate a severance. Every person looking to retire early or leave their job should learn how to negotiate a severance instead of quit.

My main parental goal is to provide a better life for our children. One way to preserve wealth is to sell Financial Samurai, lock in gains, and reinvest the proceeds conservatively. Although I don’t think it’s wise to sell a high margin, cash flow positive business in an extremely low-interest rate environment, selling is definitely a possibility for the right price.

However, if I sell, I lose my insurance policy that I would sacrifice all my wealth for. Therefore, logically, the only way I would sell Financial Samurai is if I could get more than my existing net worth.

Despite being an optimist, I’m also a realist. I know with at least 70% certainty that my children:

• Will get bullied in grade school
• Will experience racist encounters
• Will not get into a top 25 university
• Will not land a fulfilling job that keeps them mostly engaged for years
• Will need to commute during horrible rush hour traffic
• Will need to put up with office politics
• Will get backstabbed by colleagues
• Will one day get laid off
• Will get passed over for a raise and/or promotion
• Will get rejected from dozens of job applications
• Will waste a lot of time finding the right job opportunity
• Will graduate in or near a recession
• Will experience an existential crisis

I’m pretty sure many children will experience similar types of difficulties as well. By keeping Financial Samurai, I could mitigate some of these negatives.

Yes, part of growing up is getting to experience all these things above. However, I’m not sure all that time and stress is worth it. Do you? If we have the ability to save our children time, heartache, and suffering, we probably should.

Therefore, creating a family-owned small business that can be managed from home or anywhere there is internet access is a no-brainer. It is one of the best insurance policies against a suboptimal life for our children. And if you already have a family-owned small business, keep it going until your kids decide they don’t want to have anything to do with it.

As my children grow older, I will implement all the things I wished were incorporated in work or all the positives that made work fulfilling:

• A constant correlation with effort and reward
• The ability to transfer to different departments once a skill is mastered or boredom sets in
• The ability to take charge and grow a business unit
• The ability to help people solve important problems
• The ability to develop new positive relationships with clients
• The ability to work from home and have better work life balance
• The ability to make a positive difference to people

Yes, I know all this may sound crazy. But nobody thinks it’s weird to buy life insurance to insure our lives, flood insurance to protect our homes from big storms, or auto insurance to fix our cars after an accident. So why is creating a career insurance policy any different?

Creating an environment to earn and learn is a much better path than just giving your children money. Otherwise, we may raise unmotivated, entitled brats who still depend on their parents well into adulthood.

Having insurance helps protect against terrible unforeseen events. But in this case, we know what these unforeseen events are.

It is clear life is getting more difficult because of globalization, hyper-competition, stagnant wages, outrageous healthcare and tuition costs, and a rigged system for the ultra rich. Therefore, creating a career insurance policy makes logical sense.

If my children want to go their own way, they are more than welcome. I plan to keep the insurance policy going just in case.

Related posts:

Why I’ll Always Regret Selling My Business For Millions Of Dollars

Staying Unemployed: Why I’m Giving Up On Going Back To Work

Readers, how much in insurance are you willing to pay for your children to have a good life? What are some of the things you’re doing now to insure that your children don’t have an unncessarily difficult life. If you have the ability to help your children in their careers, should you? What are some things you shouldn’t help with?