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1. No job is secure unless you work for yourself.
2. Working for yourself is not secure unless you can be certain you won't run out of paying work.
3. The information age is slowly destroying most high paying jobs in this country. That isn't going to change. However, in a recession it becomes even more pronounced.
4. Low interest rates and deficit spending help turn an economy in recession around.
5. The time it takes to turn the economy around is longer than most people can understand.
6. Recessions bring out extremists. We've seen too many Paul Krugmans (who would have spent even more than our government did spend) and too many Tea Party types (who believed policies like "balancing the budget" would have helped this economy).
7. Older and younger workers are extremely vulnerable when an economy turns south.
8. Most of the cost of a recession is paid by the lowest earning workers.
9. Bank failures can and do happen even with federal deposit insurance.
10. Real estate prices can fluctuate more than people can imagine.
Doesn't matter. I can't act on them. I have not recovered and never will. I hope my kids learn from my predicament that they need to save as much as they can as early as they can. I planned my retirement savings as if I was going to be able to continue to save until I retired. The loss of my engineering job stopped my ability to save. When I started teaching my plan was to put 50% of my raises away for retirement because I simply cannot live on what I make but there have been no raises. Thanks to the pay cut I got this year, I now make less than I did when I started in this district 5 years ago. At this rate, I will never be able to save for retirement again. In fact, I will likely have to start pulling money out of my IRA for living expenses because my pay is going down not up and prices are going up even if it is slowly. I'm in survival mode. If I could do it again I would have maxed out my 401k savings while I was an engineer. I didn't think I needed to because I was supposed to get a pension and I thought I had 20 more years to work as an engineer. The pension is gone and teachers don't get raises anymore. I'm very irritated because whey they hired me they showed me the pay increases I'd get and if I'd gotten them I'd be making $10k more than I am now but they didn't materialize. I don't expect a pay raise any time soon.
Here's how my pay has "progressed" since I started teaching:
The year I started the teachers took a pay cut, the next year pay was frozen, the following year I got one step increase (2%), then they froze our pay for the next year and this year we got a 5% cut. At this rate, I'll be paying them to work for them before I retire. A starting teacher salary is not enough to live off of and save for retirement but at least I'll have a small pension from this job....I HOPE I thought I'd have one for my engineering job and don't now. 17 years with one company down the tubes in a bankruptcy.
Get a Life/Health insurance license along with a licence to sell securities and sell insurance and investments part-time and during your summer break. You can make potentially good some very good money.
Depending what state your in with no licensing requirement if you don't want to go the financial services route consider selling legal and identity theft plans.
Three good things that have developed from the Great Recession:
1. The decriminalization of the phrase, "I can't afford it."
2. The so-call mancession, which (unfortunately) hit male breadwinners hard, thus forcing their formerly unemployed wives to get jobs. Women in the workplace! YES.
3. It put the lie to the advice, "Buy as much house as you can afford." No more idiotic phrase has ever been spawned. It should have been (and should always be) "buy only about as much house as you need."
I think we are in a depression. Masked by steadily increasing debt. And accounting tricks. The fed prints,i think its 80 million dollars a month just to pump into the markets. With all the unemployment and empty commercial buildings. Do you really see a 17000 stock market because the economy is smoking along? Job's have been leaving the U.S. like crazy for years, much of it because of NAFTA and other lousy trade deals made by our leaders.
Were lucky if a black swan event dosen't happen. Try this web site, The burning platform. It will really cheer you up with the truth.
What do you think the main cause of the "Great Recession"(oxymoron) was also what is/are the lessons you learned from it? Have you recovered?
Too Much Leverage is a big problem. If I ever see asset prices going up to far in excess of fair valuation based on incomes or profits, due to injections of borrowed money, I'll turn around and run!!
I can echo others here. I learned that a lot of people and entities I thought I could trust (government, banks, professors at the time, etc.) really don't have all that much more information, capability to make accurate predictions or solid enough organization to save the day. I had learned that the rich will usually get richer (regardless of ethical or even legal transgressions), the economies of western cultures are in a major transformation. I have enough evidence to believe I ought to always live lightly: eschew consumerism... it has very little meaning when the S hits the F... have an incredible amount of savings and a highly diversified investment portfolio.... minimize life concerns to just 3 or 4 priorities, all of which are centered around survivability (economic vitality) and value system.
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I thought I'd have one for my engineering job and don't now. 17 years with one company down the tubes in a bankruptcy.
