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ronaldmrashid · 5 years

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Productive Things To Do If You’ve Been Furloughed With Back Pay

One of the greatest benefits of full-time work is getting paid whether you work or not. I miss that.

How awesome is it to paid when there is a snow day? How good does it feel when you’re out sick for a week and the paycheck continues to roll in? When you’re sipping Mai Tais on the beach thanks to your four weeks of paid time off plus national holidays, life is pretty good!

Now imagine if you got furloughed for a month or more during the holiday season. What a wonderful opportunity to spend time with the people that matter the most to you.

Although you miss the bi-weekly paychecks, you’ll eventually get paid once the government reopens for business. Almost all government workers got paid during the previous government shutdown. Expect the situation to be no different during the 2019 shutdown.

Now compare this work and pay situation with that of an entrepreneur or freelancer. If the entrepreneur doesn’t work, and if his or her employees don’t work, the entrepreneur does not get paid. Entrepreneurs don’t have a safety net as their full-time colleagues do. And therefore entrepreneurs must always have contingency plans.

In 2018, I got something worse than a furlough. I freelanced the entire month of October but didn’t get paid because the company I partnered with decided not to pay their contractors. But not to worry, the company paid all its employees for the work they did in October and provided 1-2 weeks of severance pay.

Freelancers like myself, however, got screwed.

So you see, if you are furloughed with back pay without having to work, life could always be worse. Therefore, it’s always good to focus on the positives and take every opportunity to do good.

In my case, I took my October robbery and decided to aggressively diversify my clientele. Further, I now insist on more upfront payment just in case. And don’t worry about me. I have plans to make them pay me what they owe. Nobody ever welches on a Financial Samurai and gets away with it.

Productive Things To Do If You’ve Been Furloughed

1) Spend time with your family. The #1 complaint working people have is their inability to find work-life balance. It’s usually the case where the complainer is working too much and feels guilty about not seeing enough of his or her family.

Well now is the time to spend quality time with your family even if it’s for no other reason than you have nothing else better to do. When your kids flee the nest or your parents pass away, you will regret having not spent more time with them.

2) Do a deep dive into your finances. Most people set it and forget it when it comes to their finances. Use this time to discuss your budget, your expenses, your savings rate, and your financial goals with your partner or family members. Make adjustments as you see fit. Managing your wealth should become routine, like brushing your teeth.

After a tremendous recovery since 2009, you may want to spend more time protecting your capital. What a shame it would be to make so much money only to lose it all.

3) Start the side hustle you’ve been putting off forever. A furlough is a good reminder of how dangerous it is to depend on only one source of income. The key to financial security is to generate as many income streams as possible so that if one goes down, your team of other income sources can keep you afloat.

The average financially independent person has at least five different sources of income. Meanwhile, no one income source accounts for more than 40% of their entire income. It’s important to build new sources of active and passive income to truly be free.

4) Brand yourself online with a website. During times of uncertainty, you want to plant your own flag on the internet. The law of attraction dictates that if you put yourself out there, other people with similar interests will come.

Don’t let the big social media sites own your brand. They’ve already gotten filthy rich off you in the process. Build your own internet brand and get rich off yourself.

5) Take an affordable local vacation. Given you don’t know exactly when the furlough or financial troubles will end, you probably don’t want to take an international vacation or a vacation that is hard to get to. Instead, consider vacations within a five-hour drive so that you can return to work more easily.

6) Follow up with neglected friends and family. There is undoubtedly a long lost friend you haven’t contacted for at least a year because life gets in the way. Make a list of three people whom you used to have great relationships with and reach out. Use this time to meet up and get reacquainted.

Happiness is all about having a good network of people you enjoy and trust. If you want to increase your happiness, work on building your relationships.

7) Look for a new job. If you’re furloughed or your company is going through financial difficulties, you should probably aggressively start looking for new work opportunities before things get worse. A furlough of any kind means there is serious dysfunction.

Getting ahead of the curve will likely increase your chances of finding new work. Just like negotiating a severance before mass layoffs will likely not only garner you a bigger severance and more job choices.

8) Build a larger emergency fund. Most people shouldn’t feel too much anxiety during a furlough because most last no more than one or two months. Further, if you’re going to get your pay eventually, covering a couple months worth of expenses shouldn’t be that excruciating.

However, if you are feeling anxious, then it’s important to not only build new income streams, but also ratchet up your savings so you won’t feel the same level of anxiety during the next emergency. Bad things happen all the time, so it’s wise to have at least six months of liquid living expenses liquid at any given moment.

9) Work on neglected house projects. Houses, cars, and machines tend to get neglected over time because we’re too busy doing other things. Use the furlough to fix broken items around the house, clean up the yard, change your house filters, clean the gutters, tune up the car, and grease those old tools. You’ll feel great catching up with all the deferred maintenance. You’ll likely save money in the long run as well.

10) Pretend you’ve retired early. If you’ve ever wanted to test drive early retirement life, now is the time to pretend you are retired. See how life is like without a steady paycheck. Record your feelings, good and bad.

If you’re feeling great during the furlough, then you just might be closer to retirement than you realize. If you feel incredibly anxious because of financial worry and you also don’t know what to do with your free time, you should probably keep on working.

Make The Best Of Difficult Situations

When we were growing up, we’d get three months of summer vacation and at least two weeks off for winter vacation to unwind. Once we started work, long vacations became a thing of the past.

Over time, we lose our physical and mental health. Stress starts building up inside our increasingly overweight bodies. Our minds start to deteriorate as we don’t give our minds enough time to reset through meditation and creative work.

Take advantage of a furlough. Use this time off to unwind.

Life is never going to go exactly the way we planned. But we can always take some action to improve our chances for a better life.

If I ever get the opportunity to be furloughed from a job with back pay, I’d use part of the time off to catch up with my family. Then I’d use the rest of the time off to aggressively look for more meaningful work with more stability.

I won’t be beholden to the government or to a single company for money. It’s just too risky not to diversify my income streams.

Retirement Savings By Age Show Why Americans Are Screwed

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How To Negotiate A Severance As A High Performing Employee

What are some things you’d do if you got furloughed? Would you be OK to miss a couple paychecks so long as you eventually got paid? Will a furlough help motivate hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people to bolster their finances so that they can better withstand another financial delay the next time around? What do you think it will take for people to save more and diversify their income streams?

The post Productive Things To Do If You’ve Been Furloughed With Back Pay appeared first on Financial Samurai.

from https://www.financialsamurai.com/productive-things-to-do-if-youve-been-furloughed-with-back-pay/

#Financial Samurai

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adambstingus · 5 years

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Leicester City and Carolina Panthers: a friendship founded on underdog success

Cam Newton and Co play in the Super Bowl this weekend as the Foxes ride high in the Premier League. And the two teams have exchanged admiring glances

Their bandwagon has beer. Charlotte gets the swag and the bromance, but Leicester Citys true Carolina hearts actually rest two hours north and west of Bank of America Stadium, nestled in a mountain range.

If ever an official mid-south Foxes supporters group were to see the light of day, the odds are good it would probably spring from Asheville, North Carolina, dubbed Beer City USA four years in a row, a soccer-friendly burg of 83,000-plus thats home to more than a dozen craft breweries. A burg where Chris Watts has been preaching the gospel of blue for more than 15 years now.

Its like a dream, says Watts, a Leicestershire native who has called Asheville home since moving to the States almost two decades ago. My brothers a season-ticket holder and he gets to the games. I was over there in October, against Crystal Palace and Watford, and it was just unbelievable to see where we were. And you keep thinking, Is this going to keep going? Its a bit like a dream. At the same time, its brilliant.

Pinch him, he giggles. And why the hell not? Watts has been a Carolina Panthers fan for more than 10 years and a Foxes fan for pretty much the last five decades, through thick, thin, and thinner. Some eight years earlier, he had shepherded a group of US friends back to Leicestershire for his 50th birthday and a series of matches in the Midlands, including a pair at the King Power, then the Walkers Stadium.

Five minutes into the [match], one of those friends, Tim Branson, recalls of his initial Foxes experience, I saw four guys carrying out two.

But he was hooked.

The second game, they got the skybox treatment. Watts landed a program signed by the team which, as it turned out, would become the first Foxes side ever to be relegated from the Championship to the third tier of the English football pyramid.

Ive still got it, Watts chuckles. Ive got a signed program, in a frame, of Leicester at their lowest.

And look whos laughing now.

The Panthers prepping for the biggest single event in North American sport, Super Bowl 50s NFC gatecrashers. The Foxes are atop the most popular soccer league on the planet. First, they were cute. Then a curiosity. Then a fluke. Then a stubborn anamoly. They werent supposed to here, either of them.

The parallels are valid and real enough: theyd finished their previous seasons on an unexpected, almost desperate hot streak. Theyd been dismissed by the experts, were under-appreciated outside their own province, middling brand names turning in gold-caliber performances, week after week, month upon month. Leicester City looked at the Carolina Panthers, 3,924 miles and an ocean away, and saw well, themselves.

The beginning of the year, [Leicester City] didnt have great expectations and kind of the same goes for us, says Panthers kicker Graham Gano, one of four Carolina players to receive customized Leicester City shirts from the surprise Premier League leaders last month. Theyve done really well this year, and so have we. So they kind of thought their season was similar to ours and they pulled for us and thats how we got the jerseys.

Before their NFC Divisional Round test against Seattle on 17 January, Panthers players turned up at work to find that the Foxes had sent over customized blue shirts for quarterback Cam Newton, cornerback Josh Norman, linebacker Luke Kuechly and Gano.

Carolina have had an incredible season, the Leicester left-back Christian Fuchs told the teams official website. Like us, they ended last season really well and again, like us, some people didnt expect them to do what theyve done this season, even after the great start they had.

Leicester City (@LCFC) January 15, 2016

#KeepPounding, @Panthers!@vardy7 and @FuchsOfficial on #lcfc‘s pick for #SuperBowl50 https://t.co/3nAsHdpXzA pic.twitter.com/78I9uVyeE6

Before long, they shared a narrative and a hashtag: #KeepPounding. The Panthers returned the favor, and Leicester shared pictures and videos on social media of striker Jamie Vardy, centre-back Wes Morgan, Fuchs and goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel decked out in Carolina black, tossing and kicking an NFL football around.

They were natural at it, Gano says. It would be interesting to see them kicking field goals and what it would look like. Obviously, their form looks good, but I never saw the ball going through the uprights. Its a little different swing than [it takes] to keep the ball under the posts. But Id love to have an opportunity sometime to have a kick around with some of the pros over [there], and compare how I match up with those guys.

But he thinks theyd probably be thick as thieves, especially after the Foxes posted a video to YouTube of Fuchs attempting a series of keepy-uppis with the oblong American football.

I was in the airport in Chicago and Im sitting at the bar and got talking about football American and English, Watts recalls. And I pulled up [the Fuchs video] to show a few others. Its pretty neat to see an English soccer player, albeit an Austrian, keeping up an American football. They thought it was pretty cool.

In one corner, the Panthers, unloved, slapped with 22-to-1 odds to win the NFC back in May and 40-1 to win the whole shebang. In the other, Leicester, dismissed almost universal preseason favorites to be relegated this term, 2000-1 odds to win the league at the start of the campaign.

Its not quite the same, Watts says of the two franchises and their comparative roads. But nobody was expecting the Panthers to be where they are. A lot of my friends, when they saw the stuff about the shirts [coming over], and then the Panthers sent shirts back the other way, its been neat.

Carolina Panthers (@Panthers) January 15, 2016

.@LCFC pic.twitter.com/Eo8yFJuwtO

Carolina are playing in their first Super Bowl in 12 years; since 2003-04, 13 different NFL teams have qualified for the title game. Leicester are the first squad other than one of the Big Five clubs [Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea] to be leading the Premier League in the last week of January since Newcastle in 1995-96.

Being on both sides, [the more remarkable story is] Leicester City, for me, just because of what theyve had to do, the fight, where theyve had to come from, says Branson. Going down to the third division and going back into the second and having to fight their way back to the top. Ashevilles got a single-A [baseball] club. It would be like them somehow winning and if they did promotions, getting promoted to the majors. In a little city like Asheville, it doesnt happen very often.

Youve got to have respect for them, Gano says of the Foxes rise. I havent been able to catch a ton of their games weve been pretty busy over here, so I havent really had the opportunity to catch up with them.

And, full disclosure, Gano is a Bayern Munich fan, having grown up bouncing from Scotland to Germany to Scotland to Canada as a Navy brat (I used to have a thick accent, he chuckles, without a trace of brogue.) Born in Scotland, he also maintains a bit of a soft spot for Rangers.

But I didnt have a favorite English team, the kicker says. So I guess I can pull for [Leicester] now.

After all, theres plenty of room on the wagon. And in Asheville, the best beer on the continent never tasted better.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/leicester-city-and-carolina-panthers-a-friendship-founded-on-underdog-success/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/181466020937

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datingadviceonreddit · 7 years

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Ok i need some advice,So I've know this girl for roughly 1 and half years. She just got out of a long term relationship and in last 5 months she we've get along close.I'm one of the few who know the real her and not the facade she displays on social media and to the real world.I'm introverted, brutally honest and quirky plus she understands my humour that takes a bit of intellect to find funny. We have no lies between each other, we tell it how it is. Her terms zero bullshit. We click on so many levels which i find extremely rare and we enjoy each other's company as friends.So for the last couple months we have been catching up on the weekends and we've have been messaging each other constantly , to the extent we say night to each other. I'm unsure what to make of this.So last couple of weeks ive felt her pulling away, ghosting my replies and flaking out when i wanna catch up. Whether there's a bit of sexual tension quite possibly. She's very attractive and way out of my league thus just friends but mainly i can't deal with the insecurity and caring what other people think.Anyways she told me she meet this really cute guy and she intrested in getting to know him.I'm happy for her, but i guess i let my own insecurities get the best of me and said we need a breather as friends.She didnt take it too well and im trying to come up with a reasonable explanation.I guess my logic behind it was why prevent the inevitable, shes going to invest more of her time getting to know this new guy and we will probably end up talk and hang out less.I'm also sure if she was in a relationship and we maintained the same level of contact he partner would definitely get jealous and we would have to do exactly what i predicted.I've obviously over reacted considering its early days and they havent gone out. But i feel like im going to become obsolete and I'm investing too much time in our friendship considering the final outcome...Can anyone give me some insight, what level.of friendship can i except? I just don't wanna spend time hang out with her and then all of a sudden i can no longer do just that.Thought please via /r/dating_advice

#dating #dating advice #reddit

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