---
title: Early Retirement Extreme Forums • View topic
date: 2014-01-11T16:37:31Z
source: http://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?t=4613&p=65591#p65591
tags: finance

---

jacob wrote:

However, over the past 20-40 years, the advantage is swinging away towards defense again as the average person has been rendering vulnerable by specialization and consumerism-dependence. This is thanks to technology, mass-advertising (psychology), and a overly complicated legal/contract system. **People are no longer beholden to themselves but to a complicated system that they are largely clueless towards dealing with. Because of that, it's now very hard for the average person to defend against lay-offs. The consumer can't walk away from a bad situation, due to lack of assets, nor can he attack due to lack of alternatives and lack of wherewithal to do so, only considering a "job" to be a solution.** This lack of power to be free is being sold as "safety" but it's a sucker move meant to consolidate power back to the asset side. The safety really exist on the corporate side rather than the consumer side who are anything but.


So true. One example: our company's president gave us a huge lecture during our staff meeting, during which all of us sit in a room for 2 hours to hear news from other places in the company and just high-level stuff from the executives. Attendance is mandatory, unless you have direct approval from the CEO or President. The president pointed out that some of us didn't have short-term disability insurance and that some % of the people who didn't had less than 7 days of sick leave. He showed a bridge that quickly crumbled, and he asserted that most of us couldn't last until day 90, when LT disability kicks in.

I didn't take a lot of notice (I do not have a problem with surviving without pay for 90 days). I went to lunch with two Mustachians, one of whom is employed at my company, and he spoke out about it. He thought that it was absurd. He said that he had quit his former job, because the place where he worked expected him to come in after hours and put in unpaid overtime. There's a lot of power in having FU money, and he used his.

That talk from the company president showed that the company doesn't expect people to have any FU money; if we lost our jobs, we'd evidently be out on the street in a week. It was really weird to think about not having enough money to tide me over until the next job or past the next paycheck. Barring an unforeseen catastrophe, that should not happen; the idea that my well-paid coworkers lived paycheck-to-paycheck was a strange awakening. I'm in the one of the two worst-paid roles, and I live on less than half of my net pay without even scratching the surface of any sort of self reliance or DIY ERE power. I wantonly spend whatever I want on my grocery bill (granola that other people bake for me? done!). I'm better than the average Mustachian, but I'm definitely not at Jacob levels of awesomeness. I don't know how much truth there is to the president's statement, but that the idea even exists that we all just barely survive on our paychecks and REALLY need them was so strange.

But only because I've been reading ERE since 2009 (as mneiae, then), I guess.