I support a strong public healthcare option on extremely pragmatic reasoning, that it would benefit my bottom line, the bottom line of my employees, it would increase flexibility, freedom and responsiveness. Haha, I almost sound like I’m using “Randian” analysis here.

I’ve checked it out. I could get a decent insurance plan through Costco Small Business. But, the simple fact is that it is a huge hassle, and it has nothing to do with my business.

Yes, I could get group insurance once I had a pool of employees. But, it would require that I continue having these employees, since there is a minimum participation level. Also, it would hide benefits I am paying out. If I offer a programmer $40 per hour, that should be what they get For me to offer health insurance will either waste time for me, checking it out, administrating it, paying for part of it, documenting the options to my employees, or it will require me to hire someone else to do that for me. Either way, a waste of time, attention and money. All of that is hidden to my employees, who correctly see what I am paying them as the bottom line.

Employer based healthcare simply limits my options. Why should I care? Because it is traditional in the U.S.? Thanks but I’ll pass.

I believe that a viable, strong public healthcare option in the U.S. would lead to a huge growth in small business. We would be freed of an onerous, time-consuming, expensive task which has nothing to do with our core competency.

In my opinion as a small businessman, the reforms needed are simple and straightforward:

1) Remove all tax benefits for employer-based health insurance.

2) Remove the right of insurance companies to exclude pre-existing conditions and to exclude people based on “inaccurate information” once they contract an expensive disease (called “excission”, this is criminal, IMHO).

3) Require all citizens to buy insurance. Subsidize those who are too poor to pay for it.

If we did this, we would radically increase the flexibility of small business, and of the work force to move to the best available position. As it is, many people are simply trapped by the circumstances of their healthcare at a job which has long since ceased to be the right match for them. This benefits no one.

Technorati Tags: healthcare, socialized medicine, politics, uhc

Each day, in my morning planning/emailing time, I do at least one thing which is purely intended to create future business for myself or my company. I got this idea from Dan Kennedy’s book “No B.S. Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs”, where he says:

It may be a small thing: tearing out a magazine article that should interest one of my clients, scrawling a note on it and mailing it. It may be answering one item of correspondence, getting one fax sent, identifying a new, potentially useful contact, jotting a note or sending a book.
[...] Most professionals stop selling while they’re delivering, so they have dry spells, roller coaster ups and downs. I have had more demand than supply of me and waiting lists of clients for many years because of my daily discipline of doing at least one proactive thing to attract business every single day.

For me, I find that this site and my programming blog are incredible sources of contacts and opportunities. So, doing a simple blog post like this one definitely counts as my seed for the day.

When I mention my new business venture to peers, many say “I did that, but I went and got a job after a few months. I just didn’t like the roller coaster ride.” I believe that this discipline is a key part of avoiding those problems. It is so tempting to just dive right into the mountain of programming I need to accomplish for my current clients, but it is a mistake. I plant the seed, and only then dive into the coding, letting the day pass by in pleasurable obsession.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, sales, time management

One observation which is a bit different than expected is just how many people are out and about during the day. When I was working, I guess it was just natural for me to think that “everyone works during the day”. Now, I’m noticing that this is just not true. I attended a kickboxing class on Friday at 9:30am, full. I tried going to Costco at noon, and it was just as busy as it is on a Saturday afternoon.

Another observation is just how much time there actually is in a day. Cutting out the hour commute to Dotster sure adds a lot of productive time to my day.

I’m also quite pleased at how much better I am at my daily “contact” tasks. Call this person, email that one. I set aside a time every morning to take care of those tasks and then I do it. No coworkers come by to chat, no “fires” start burning out of control, and I get things done. Amazing and so satisfying.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, employment

This is the first time in my life I’ve quit one job without having another fulltime one lined up to replace it. It is truly a leap of faith for me to go 100% on my own.

The Universe hasn’t let me down

Contract jobs and opportunities are lined up to the point where I can pick and choose. I literally could not do all the work offered to me, were I to accept it. I’m not saying this to brag, although I am proud of it, but because it is validating a belief I’ve been building for some time. Take a committed step, and the Universe will arrange itself to fulfill your needs.

I have two more days to finish up at work and then I will be working from home full time. I am so eager to get going, and to regain some family time. You see, that’s how I knew I was ready to transition from employee to consultant, when I’d made more consulting in my off-hours than from my job. I needed to do it, to make sure I enjoyed the work and to build my portfolio, but the toll on my family life was more than I want to bear in the long term. I just can’t take 20-30 hours a week away from my family and stay happy for long.

Technorati Tags: consulting, freelancing, resignation

Now, snickering never feels nice, but in this case it made me really think about what caused that reaction, and to a certain degree how my financial growth is distancing me from many of my coworkers.

In fact, I used to hide my reading of books like that from coworkers and bosses. I felt like I was putting on airs or something. Like I would never be wealthy anyway, and that reading these books was akin to “get rich scheming”, that bugaboo label of poor people everywhere. That was before I really began my mental shift from wage earner to entrepreneur. From paycheck-to-paycheck to actual financial planning.

These days, I read tons about wealth and moneymaking. I listen to business audiobooks almost every day on my 90 minute commute. I don’t hide the books anymore, and I am finding a very interesting reaction.

Reactions

My coworkers are almost universally dismissive. At least my peers are. This is strange to me, since these are professionals making decent corporate money. I don’t know their salaries, but I’d be shocked if some weren’t in the low six figures, and most are probably in the $75-90K range. They are definitely making enough that they could be investing and taking an interest in investment. But they don’t, or most don’t anyway.

However, those above me in the corporate food-chain are interested. Actually, I think it makes them more interested in me. For example, I like the Financial Times newspaper, and it is often sitting on my desk. I think it is interesting that the most successful salesperson in the company made a point of talking with me about how much he likes that paper too. My boss has made a point of talking with me about some of the tactics I’ve learned from such books as “The Single Best Investment: Consistently Creating Wealth with Dividend Growth” (Lowell Miller) and “Opportunity Investing: How To Profit When Stocks Advance, Stocks Decline, Inflation Runs Rampant, Prices Fall, Oil Prices Hit the Roof, … and Every Time in Between” (Gerald Appel).

An Observation

I’ve read many times that you can predict how much money a person makes by observing his friends. Generally, people make within 10% of their friends. I think this is part of how that happens. Subtle social disapproval and enforcement of the norms.

Technorati Tags: wealth, langemeier, embarrassment

I work in “the internet field”, for one of the largest domain name registrars in the world. I’ve pretty much always worked in a similar environment, one where IT and development were a huge part of the company. I now see that each one of them had this one thing in common, the presence of self-proclaimed heroes in these departments.

These are the people who will pull all-nighters to bring in the project on time, or to bring the servers back up after a disaster. Usually men, at least in my experience, they are the ones who know everything in their domain, and they’ve made themselves absolutely indispensable.

Probably this is not unique to IT/Development, I’d be surprised if it was.

I love these people, I admire these people, and I used to be one of these people. I was the guru, the self-proclaimed master who was too busy to extricate himself from the work to bother documenting what I was doing. I was the unsubtle gatherer of what I thought was job security. But I’m not one anymore. I’m still knowledgeable, and I still work overtime occasionally. But I no longer make a point of volunteering and martyring myself for doing so. Instead, I’ve passed that torch.

I have noticed a couple things since dropping the hero persona. One is that I don’t really receive any less rewards or appreciation, possibly I receive more. Another observation, somewhat surprising initially, is that someone else always appears to play the hero role. I make a point of letting them do so. They love it, and I appreciate their work. My family also appreciates me working fewer hours.

In fact, I now believe that this is the natural order of things in companies like mine. I hope it doesn’t sound too cynical, since I think of it as a positive, maturing process. The young people learn a lot in their self-imposed trial-by-fire. Hopefully they will eventually mature, realizing that they are walling themselves into their positions. You can’t simultaneously be absolutely indispensable and get a promotion. The company needs the “heroes” where they are.

Technorati Tags: hero, employment

OK, 2.5 offers

Well, not really three. I have two formal and one informal offer. The nice thing is that the lowest paid of them is still more than a $5,000 raise. Yay! I’m definitely ruling out the one at the big, faceless, behemoth company. It was “plan C” for me. Now, I need to choose between the one formal and the other informal offer. The informal offer is for more money at a more established place. I would be making six figures there, for the first time in a couple years. The other is for less money at a startup, but includes a load of stock options, is closer, has more interesting technology.

I’ve got a lot of thinking to do this weekend, and I’ve got to see if that informal offer can get more formal in the next very few days.

I’m so grateful and happy that I am in the position of choosing between offers. I won’t have to dip into emergency funds, and with my severance pay, I’ll actually have a small windfall. I’m amazed at how calmly and matter-of-factly I’ve taken the whole job hunt this time. I wasn’t even worried 95% of the time. That’s progress! That’s me living up to the name of this blog.

Technorati Tags: jobhunt

One thing that’s been bothering me about the job hunt is how readily and how early people ask about my "rate". I hate answering that question, and I’m starting to think I should refuse until a later stage of the interview. The truth is, I have a cutoff number, below which I seriously cannot go without entering a downward financial spiral.

Everything above that is negotiable depending on how much I like the job, its security, the people involved, and the potential for advancement. None of that nuance is communicated by the flat "what’s your rate?". Writing this out makes me realize I need to be firmer and simply refuse the question until I know enough to negotiate properly.

From now on, the only time I’ll answer it is if it is going to be a "1099 contract", when I’ll say $65-70/hour. If I have to hassle around, pay quarterly taxes and get my own insurance, someone’s gonna pay for that. I suppose I could do it through my new LLC though. That’s a useful thing about having a company of your own that I hadn’t considered. Hmm.

Inspiration

Last week, I read an inspiring and thoughtful article about how to negotiate for a better salary. I’m still trying to apply it to my own circumstances. I think I simply need to claim my own considerable strength and really go for the wage I deserve. If that means way more responsibility than I’m used to, so be it, if that means I have a written, negotiated performance incentive, so be it.

Another article from the same site gets more directly to the point with this advice:

Here’s an E-Z way to make more money the next time you change jobs: Do NOT tell the HR department or hiring manager of the company with which you’re interviewing how much you make in your present job. Trust me, they’ll always ask “How much are you making now?” Do NOT tell them! They’ll look irritated and ask again, as if you might not have understood their question. But simply stick to your guns and politely say “Until we reach an agreement, I’d prefer to keep my W-2 figures private. I understand that the salary range for this job is $___, and that is acceptable for me.” End of story.

OK! I’m sold on the strategy, now I just need a job.

Technorati Tags: employment, unemployement, pay, salary, negotiation