January 31, 2019

Escape The 9 to 5

Brian Wealthy Affiliate Debt, Job, Unemployment, Wealth 18 Comments

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Most of us have a traditional day job in various fields. It is what we’ve been taught to do as we grew up as children. Our educations system is based around that concept and it is widely taught that the more you learn especially in certain fields, the better the job and income from it that you’ll earn.

There was a time, especially in the US, where that was fine as companies valued workers that had loyalty and people working for most of their adult life for one company was common. Companies used to give pensions for workers so that way they could live comfortably during retirement.

Well folks, that time has come and it has gone and I want to share with you today about ways to escape the 9 to 5 job that many of us have. If you enjoy your job, then that is fine, and this won’t pertain to you very much, but a lot of people are not happy with their occupation and dream of getting away from it. Let’s take a closer look at why it actually might be good to get away from the 9 to 5 job.

Lack of Job Security

I’ve had a total of 6 jobs so far in my life and with each one that I’ve had, I’ve usually ended up being there longer than the last one. The first 2 jobs I had were just generally minimum wage jobs working at 2 different fast food restaurants and then after working the second one, I quit and went to work in retail.

After working retail for 2 and a half years, I finally got my first true full time job at a call center. My call center job is where I was able to finally move out of my parents house and also buy a car for the first time. It took me a little while to catch on the flow there as I had never worked in a call center before, but I eventually got the hang of it and was constantly in the top 10 of best performing call center agents for this particular company.

Now before I go any further I want to say that with my first 3 jobs, I left them voluntarily. The first one I only ever worked there for 3 months as it was just a summer job to get some extra money before I headed off to college out of state (it ultimately didn’t work out for me there). The second one I worked at for 2 and a half years like I mentioned above, but that last year of it, things got really bad especially with management and just became a very stressful place to work. I of course hardly any bills at that time and so I was able to save up a nice enough cushion to where I was able to quit and didn’t have to find work immediately.

Around this time period I became friends with someone new and got to know him and his wife pretty well. I told him that I was in need of a job and his wife worked retail and was needing to hire workers for certain positions at a store in the mall. I gladly accepted and worked there for just slightly longer than my previous job. The manager I worked for when I got hired eventually got offered a better position somewhere else and so she left and the reason I eventually left was because I wasn’t getting enough hours and so it wasn’t worth the drive and time for me to come in.

That’s when I applied for and got a job at the call center that a former co-worker thought I should try out for as she now worked at that call center during that time. As I mentioned above, I eventually got the hang of things and really liked working there because as a perk for being in the top 10 of best performing agents, they got to choose their own schedule and so I worked four 10 hour days which was really nice because I would work Monday and Tuesday, off Wednesday, worked Thursday and Friday and then off on the weekends.

Eventually though I noticed that things started changing. For one, call volume started dropping and a lot of times they would send people home early or at least gave them a chance to voluntarily go home first. Then the company introduced a new business concept they would be trying at our center because the current business model was rapidly decreasing in volume and profit.

Late in 2011 I came in one day (later in the day because I had half the day off) and hardly noticed anyone was there as the parking lot was practically empty and so I went inside and eventually found a co-worker and asked him what was going on. “You don’t know?!”, he asked me. I told him I was out half the day and then he let me know that the call center was going to be shut down in 2 months and everyone was going to lose their jobs. They let people go home to cope with the news.

This was a kick in the gut for me and the first time I came face to face with losing a job because of layoffs or a shutdown. It scared me to death because I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I was told I would automatically be enrolled in unemployment and also be given a letter of recommendation because of good performance.

Well, December 31st came around and that was the last day the center would be open and even though I had been looking for a job before then, I was not able to find one even though I had a few interviews. Nothing had ever come from them though. Well after that day I was on unemployment for the first time in my life. The good news I will say though is that I wasn’t on it for too long.

Why am I talking about all this? Because it shows that job security is not a guarantee anymore, no matter how well you may perform. This was my first taste of sudden job loss and it wouldn’t be the last either. Read on to hear of my next job experience.

Unemployment Ends

The scary thing about unemployment is that you get less than what you were making at your job. It was just barely enough to cover the bills for me at the time, but thankfully I was on unemployment for three weeks. I was able to find a job at that time at another call center in town.

I’m now no longer at that call center, but it turned out to be one of the craziest and best employment experience I ever had. Before all was said and done at this new call center, I had been there for a total of 5 years which is the longest job I’ve had to this day. I was also able to move up in position more than I ever had at any job prior and also led to a position where I was salaried for the very first and so far, the only time in my working life.

Unfortunately, almost similar to my previous call center job, things suddenly change and the business I was doing work for (I was really employed by the 3rd party company that was contracted by this business) suddenly decided to pull out of our center and I was in a management position at that time. It was really a massive blow to me because of how hard I worked for this company, especially to get the position I did even when that meant being demoted briefly and then soon being promoted for my specific position.

I was able to work another 3 months at that call center after that particular business moved out because the call center director was able to convince another company to come in, even though it would be temporary, to try and save as many jobs as possible and fortunately my position would get to go to this new business project, but I also knew that I was on borrowed time.

As the new project came in and I started working over there, I realized that I was getting burned out with my position and I really was ready to get out of there, but I only had about 3 months before I would be in the same position that I was just in with the previous business project. Fortunately, a good friend of mine told me that her cousin, who is a manager at a bank in my town, was looking for someone to fill a specific position and she mentioned my name. I put in an application at the bank online and soon I was granted an interview. I did so well with it and passed the testing they had that even though I didn’t get the position I was applying for, they offered me another position which I took even though it meant a decrease in pay from where I was coming from.

That leads me to the 6th and current job that I have and while it’s stable and I’m doing well at it, I do need more income especially with the situation that I’m in and really want to get out of. I will talk about that next.

Debt

Debt affects so many people and is a big reason so many people live paycheck to paycheck. I’m unfortunately one of those who’s in debt and my current income is not enough to cover all of my monthly bills. I could look for a second job and in a way, that’s what I currently have as I’ve been doing food deliveries for a smartphone app called DoorDash, the problem is that they’re just not offering enough hours for me to work it after I get off of my main job so it has not been of much help lately.

If you can, stay away from payday loans and other lines of credit. They will eat you alive on every paycheck especially with very high interest rates. It’s a lesson that I unfortunately have to painfully go through and credit card debt is not a pretty thing either.

Another bad thing that a lot of people do is to get loans specifically to payoff credit card debt, but the problem is that if you can’t control your spending habits, you’ll be right back where you were with the credit card debt in the first place as well as having to pay the loan or loans back that you got in order to pay that debt off in the first place. Your credit score will start to suffer especially using large chunks of your credit and not paying your cards or loans on time. It can be a vicious cycle that you got yourself into and some start to consider bankruptcy at this point if the can’t get a debt relief company to help them.

There is another way you can get out of this and it will take some time, but if you have great work ethic and stay consistent, you’ll start seeing results sooner rather than later.

My Experiences Can Help You

The reason I’m sharing all of this with you is because I’m just like you, I’ve been forced out of jobs twice, I’ve had to deal with pay decreases, and I’m dealing with going from paycheck to paycheck. Now while it sounds like doom and gloom for me, it’s not completely. Why? Because I’m working hard to get back to being financially secure.

We’ve all had to deal with struggles in our life especially financial struggles and you may have had job experiences similar to mine. There’s probably a time you’ve had emergency expenses come up such as car troubles or medical issues. Living paycheck to paycheck is just no way to live at all.

Trying to figure out how to pay your bills all the while have enough left for the necessities such as groceries and what not can cause a lot of stress especially if you have a family. The good news is that there are definitely ways to get out of that specific rut, but you have to be willing to educate yourself as well as take action. When doing those things only then can you get out of the massive financial hole that we’ve all gotten ourselves into.

The Internet Today Yields Many Opportunities

There are more ways to make money and become wealthy today than in any other time in history. The internet and technology allows that to happen, but it will not happen magically or overnight even though we can communicate and do other things in almost an instant anywhere in the world.

You can create your own online virtual store, you can review products in any given niche letting people know which ones are the best or which ones to stay away from, you can have your own side hustle such as proofreading, writing articles for others, doing online research, and more. There’s just so much out there, but there are also plenty of scams so you definitely have to do a bit of research.

Anything that claims to make you thousands of dollars without hardly any work or just a few simple clicks is what you definitely want to stay away from. If you want to become your own boss and be financially free, you have to put in the time and effort.

I’m part of something that teaches you how to build a thriving online business, but they are also realistic on what it will take to be successful and that you won’t be making thousands in a day, a week, or even months. They do say however that if you follow the training and take action by working consistently, you will definitely see success and sooner rather than later. The average that people start earning anything for the first time is anywhere from 3 to 6 months, but again this is no guarantee. It all depends on how much you learn there and how often you take action. You can read a great article of mine where I talk about the importance of consistency.

I will tell you this, on my very first website there, I didn’t always work as consistently as I should, but I still did put in the work when I could and when I had the motivation to move forward. It took me awhile to make anything at all, probably longer than a lot there, but eventually it did happen and the timing couldn’t have been better because I was seriously to the point where I was thinking about quitting. I went to check statistics on something regarding my website and lo and behold that is when I found I had earned something for the very first time from my website. Now it wasn’t a lot as it was just seven cents, but that meant so much to me because it showed that the training at this platform I was at, really does work.

Now I have made more since then, but I’m not rolling in it because like I mentioned above, my issue has been getting on and staying on a consistent work schedule for my site. With the platform that I’m a part of, they teach you how to earn revenue through Affiliate Marketing which is getting commission from the sale of a product from another site, mainly merchant sites such as Amazon, Wal Mart, and Best Buy to name a few. There are others though that pay more of a larger percentage of commission than what I just listed.

Even if Affiliate Marketing isn’t something you’re interested in, there’s still other things to try online. You could do what’s called Retail Arbitrage where you find items on sale or marked down and you can do a few different things with them. You could do what’s known as Amazon FBA where you create a 3rd Party store through Amazon and you send Amazon the products (those that you bought marked down) and sell them for what they normally retail at. People are actually making some good money that way. You just have to do your own research and find what appeals to you most. With what I do, it is absolutely free to try out so just click on my link below to read my full review of it and sign up to see what it’s all about. Go on, you know you want to escape the 9 to 5 job. Post your thoughts below. 

 

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