Job Insecurity in the Lion City

What drives you in your quest for financial freedom? What is your motivating factor for reading this and other blogs about achieving financial independence through passive income and multiple source of income?

Why did I start fivecentstencents?
I started this blog partly because I have an interest in personal finance and being able to choose when and how I can retire or semi-retire by working for fun rather than slaving for my debts. Hence, this blog "Five Cents Ten Cents" was conceived out of personal interest combined with my love for articulating my thoughts and ideas out in the written form.

I became fascinated or even obsessed with striving towards financial freedom because I had a close encounter with job insecurity when I was working in a local IT company during 2000 to 2005.

Headcount reduction up close and (almost) personal
Back during the days of the dot.com boom, IT was the rage and the industry was growing amidst close competition, however, the dot.com bubble burst sometime in 2000 and the industry was starting to see consolidation and restructuring. Fortunately, I was working in IT consultancy in a niche area and was relatively unaffected, but my colleagues in innovation (research type of department) and in training were effectively retrenched. Only, the company did not use that mechanism, they were counselled to go. One was asked to go as his department dealing in innovation was more a cost centre and was not a core IT infrastructure or services type of profit centre. In addition, his age (39) and salary was higher than the median. The other colleague who was in the training department was also counselled out as he was (40) and a lot of the training functions too were being restructured (management buzzword for downsized with headcount reduction).

I knew those who were asked to go
What made these headcount reduction impact me so much was that I knew these two persons. They were not digits in a report that spells of xx numbers of people retrenched or laid off. These were real people with families (one of them just had new born daughter) who would be directly impacted by the management decisions to lay them off WITHOUT compensation by asking them to resign. It was not that their performance was poor, it was because the company wanted to show a healthier profit (the company had been profitable for the last few years but wanted to show profit growth).

This adversely affected my morale and my belief in the company as the naive old me finally saw what corporations were about. Naked profitability and we as employees are all means to an end. Some corporations take care of their employees, many do not. The Singapore labour marketplace is tilted in favour of the employer. There are very few mechanisms that protect the worker from unfair treatment by the employers as my example above shows if you are non-bargainable and outside the ambit of the Employment Act.

You create your own financial security
Job security or rather job insecurity is the prevailing situation in our economy. Thus, it is for each of you to think, plan and develop your own financial security to provide your own safety net should your job be outsourced or eliminated due to the shifting economic forces affecting the Singapore economy.

How do you navigate the winds of change that are constantly blowing across the bows of our ship that is heading towards financial security?

You do this by living within your means, saving and investing for the future.

Robert G Allen puts it across very well in his book, "Multiple Streams of Income" where he uses the analogy of seeing each dollar that we save as money seeds sowed that will grow into a money tree that yields future cash flows.

Job insecurity is here to stay in Singapore.

Do you want to be better prepared for it?
Do you want to be in control of your financial security?
Do you want to choose when and how you retire?

Choose to live within your means, save and invest!

Be well and prosper.