Jeanne Sahadi has a good article on CNN Money. Titled “Secrets Your Company Doesn’t Want You To Know”, its discloses some of the misconceptions surrounding how your actions at work affect you. Here’s a snippet.

The typical rationale for layoffs is the need to reorganize and cut costs.

Pish-posh.

Sometimes those reasons are genuine. But Shapiro has seen companies push select employees out of their jobs or layoff an entire department just to get rid of one or two people without incurring liability.

And those select employees may never know they made a manager’s blacklist.

One easy way to get on it is to insult the boss or be overly negative about the company on email, in a meeting, or at the water cooler.

Being a top performer may provide some protection. But if you and your boss don’t get along and he has to get rid of two people, he’s likely to go for the people who make his day difficult, Shapiro said.

Being among the most highly compensated employees in your office will only give him added incentive.

Treat difficult bosses and colleagues as you would if you were a small business owner dealing with annoying clients: professionally at all times, she said. Otherwise, you’ll lose the account.

You’re also at greater risk of a layoff if you’ve:

• First announced that you’re pregnant or need medical leave to someone other than your boss. If she hears about it from someone other than you, she could lay you off and claim she had no idea about your personal situation.

• Taken a medical leave or filed for worker’s compensation recently.

• Filed a complaint against the company or your boss.

Ok, so this isn’t really an article on how to get fired. Maybe I’ll work on that some other day. In the meantime you can read the rest of the article here

CanadianBusiness.com has some really good articles that are worth reading. Here’s another one.

How we retired in luxury — on $2,000 a month
Herman Heynen as told to Camilla Cornell
From the May 2006 issue of MoneySense magazine

Seven years ago, when I was 60 I took early retirement from my job in the customer service department at CP Rail. The company was reorganizing and I didn’t want to start another job, but the result was that I took a cut in my retirement pension. My wife, Anne, who is a year younger than me, wasn’t ready to retire yet, so she continued to work until 65 as a legal assistant and I just sat at home, on our acreage outside of Calgary, dreading the winters and watching the snow fall.

Every winter we would go down to Mazatlan, Mexico, where we owned a timeshare. We loved the warm weather (usually 25° to 29°C during the day in the winter months) and the long sandy beaches and the very Mexican feel of the place. We started off visiting for two weeks a year, then it became three. At first, we stuck to the tourist areas. But Mazatlan is a good-sized city of about 600,000 people and after a while we discovered what’s known as El Centro — the city centre — and we really liked it. The houses are old there — some go back to the late-1800s — and they’re very affordable. As well, there is lots of local culture, great shopping, an open-air marketplace and plenty of restaurants and cafes.

Four years ago, we decided to buy our own little place there. It was the year before Anne retired, and we bought a small two-bedroom house that was completely restored. It cost us only $45,000, which we put on our line of credit. Our home is in a traditional Mexican style, painted a salmon color, with pretty ironwork out front, cool ceramic floors and a shady little patio with a nice garden, about a 10-minute walk from the beach. Everything was in there, including furniture, appliances, linens, towels, dishes, cutlery and even a TV, because the owner’s original intention had been to rent it out.

When Anne retired, we sold our house outside of Calgary, which had 10.5 acres of land. With the proceeds from the sale, we paid off the house in Mexico and bought a 14 x 44-ft mobile home in a beautiful RV park south of Calgary. Now we spend November to April in Mexico and the summer months in Canada.

Overall, I’d say living expenses in Mexico are between a third and half of what they are in Canada. The two of us can live very well on about $2,000 a month. When we worked out our monthly expenses, we were paying about $135 a month for shelter, including utilities, property taxes, Internet and telephone.

Some costs seem absurdly low to Canadian eyes. Our property tax, for example, is just 381 pesos per year ($40), although we pay an additional bank trust fee of $422 annually because our house is within 50 km of the ocean. Even with air conditioning in the hot months, our electricity costs have averaged $16 a month. Of course, we never have any heating costs. If it gets chilly at night, you just throw on an extra blanket. Fire insurance is not necessary except for contents because all the houses are built of concrete.

Food is cheap. You might pay $2 for a 1.9-litre bottle of milk, 43 cents for a kilo of tomatoes and $2.50 for enough large fresh shrimp for a meal. Services cost even less. You can visit the dentist for $20 to $30, hire a cleaning lady for the day for $10, have your hair cut for $4, and get your laundry done for about $4.50 for three kilos.

We don’t need a car — the bus system is great and the local bus costs 4 pesos (41 cents Cdn.), or you can pay 8 pesos for the air-conditioned bus, which is mostly for tourists. That means we can afford to dine out often. On Valentine’s Day we went all out and had dinner at a Mexican-Greek restaurant. We had a large margarita, a bottle of wine, a delicious meal, a dessert flambé and cappuccino for about $50 including tip. Normally, we don’t spend that much. There are many places where the two of us can get a simple meal for $10.

Another advantage to being in Mexico, as opposed to, say Thailand or Costa Rica, or some of the other places where Canadians can live cheaply during retirement, is that it’s fairly close to home. The flight to Calgary costs us about $700 so if we need to go back to see the kids, it’s not a problem.

I would advise those considering retiring here to be realistic about what you’re used to. We eventually decided that the original layout of our little home was too small, given the amount of time we are spending down here, so we are building another floor onto the house with a large bedroom, an extra bathroom, a large balcony, and a back deck. It’ll cost us about $20,000, which is still very cheap.

You have to budget a little extra for health care. We have an FM-3, which is a special visa allowing us to live here for one year. It also allows us to buy into the IMSS, the state-sponsored medical plan, at a cost of about $580 a year for the two of us because we’re over 65. We have that plan just in case we get run over or have a heart attack, which would be costly without insurance. For the most part, if we go to our family doctor — who is well-educated and speaks perfect English — we pay directly. It’s only about $20 a visit, and if you need an X-ray or ultrasound, you’ll pay another $20, but you’ll get the results immediately and the care is top-notch.

We’ve been very happy with our decision to move to Mexico for half the year. Right now the skies are blue and its 29°C, yet at night it cools down and you sleep well. People ask us what we do down here. They’ll say, “You can’t sit on the beach for six months. Aren’t you bored?” The short answer is, no. We can go to the Angela Peralta Theatre, which is beautifully restored, and see a flamenco performance for less than $14. Movies are released at the same time as in Canada, but in English with Spanish subtitles, and cost $3 a ticket. And we have an endless round of barbecues, fundraisers and get-togethers, mostly with other Canadians and Americans, but also with locals.

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Here’s another inspiring story on getting out of the rat race.

How I escaped the rat race
Carole Dobson as told to Duncan Hood
From the May 2006 issue of MoneySense magazine

I used to work full time at a stressful job making a six-figure salary. Then, about 10 years ago, I started planning what I call Carole’s Freedom 48 plan. Today, I’m 50, and I only work when I want to, doing things I love to do. I’m living on less, yet I own a 1,700 sq-ft house in a leafy neighborhood in Calgary. I have a three-year-old Chrysler Concorde with leather seats and I managed to travel for three months out of the past year. That included almost a month in Venice — and I flew there business class.

There is no magic involved in how I’ve chosen to live my life, nor are there any hidden trust funds, wealthy relatives or hardship. To an outsider, it looks like I’m living on air. But once I decided that I’d rather be rich in experiences than in money, I figured, why wait until I’m too old? Instead of one big job where I’m not in control, why not have several smaller sources of income, each one related to something I can enjoy?

Before the switch, I worked for agricultural supply companies in Alberta. It was a lot of fun at first, but the fun was wearing thin. I was raising two teenagers, and my job was high-pressure work, because it was very seasonal. I was responsible for sales of crop inputs — seed, short-line equipment and so on — and about 60% to 80% of my sales would occur in a six- to eight-week period. To make matters worse, I seemed to be spending all of my waking hours involved in a systems project that didn’t work. It was initially supposed to last six months, but three years later we were still working on it, and it still didn’t work. People began losing their jobs. I was let go in 2000, before Christmas — and right before they handed out the year-end bonuses. I just said, “Fine. I’m outta here.”

A few months after being laid off, I landed a job as dean of agriculture at Lakeland College, which is about 300 km north of Calgary. Again, it started off fine, but we were soon faced with very severe budget cuts that had to be implemented overnight. Many jobs were lost and it was a wrenching time for the whole college. Eventually, I thought, what am I doing here? And I left in 2003.

It was then that I decided to launch my Freedom 48 plan. It started when I realized that after decades of diligent saving, my RRSP wasn’t going to save me much in taxes. By my mid-forties, I had managed to accumulate several hundred thousand dollars — which was great on one level, but meant that by the time I reached 69 and converted my RRSP to an income fund, I would probably have to withdraw such a large amount each year that I’d be paying as much tax as I was when I was working. Not only that, but my income from those government benefit programs would be clawed back. You’ve heard about people who don’t save enough? Well, I had the opposite problem — I had saved too much.

So I went to my financial planner and said, I want to have enough to retire on, but my lifestyle is not about making as much money as I possibly can. I want to slow things down between the ages of 48 and 65, and I still want to work a bit, but not at a frantic pace. I want to volunteer more, and spend more time with my friends and family. Can I slowly collapse my RRSP in a systematic way so that I can enjoy some of the benefits of all that saving while I’m in my prime? So my planner took a look and found that if I began taking out about $15,000 a year, I’d still have enough to last me until my mid-80s. My challenge was to make another $20,000 or $30,000 a year doing part-time work. So far I’ve succeeded even better than I expected. I haven’t even had to touch my RRSP yet.

I’ve earned much of my income from the homes I’ve lived in. Every three to five years, I’ll buy the dump of the neighborhood and fix it up, and later, I’ll sell it. I’ve learned how to fix a house so that my cost is minimal and I earn the maximum amount of revenue. Typically, after all the expenses of moving and legal costs, I’ve been able to clear about $50,000 a house — and all of that profit is tax-free because you don’t pay taxes on gains on your principal residence. An extra $50,000 every few years is modest enough, but it costs money to live somewhere, and this way I get it back. I consider the gardening, painting and upgrading that I do to be a part-time job. I actually enjoy doing it.

To help even out the income I get from my house, I take out a line of credit, secured by the house. I do that because even if I systematically withdrew $2,000 a month from the line of credit, the cost of that will be a heck of a lot less than taking that $2,000 from my RRSP. When I sell the house or earn extra income, I pay off the line of credit.

In addition to my savings and my real estate income, I earn a third stream of income from part-time work. When I was first laid off, I reported to the EI office and they suggested that I take an entrepreneurship program offered through a local accounting firm, which taught me how to get going. I started out doing contractual work and French translations of technical documents for agricultural companies — my family is from Quebec and French is my first language — but now I’m zoning in on landscape design and teaching art.

My love of gardening was what convinced me to get my landscape design certificate. Now I help people design yards that will enhance the value of their homes and do well in this temperamental Calgary climate. It’s seasonal work, but that was exactly what I was looking for. I also sometimes take on a fun, low-paying job, like working as a tree expert at my favorite gardening centre. I’m paid the princely sum of $10 an hour, but I love it, and I see it as sort of a paid fitness program. I also teach mosaic art at the Alberta College of Art & Design, where they put on a 15-hour program every other month.

The income I’m living on isn’t as high as what I was making when I was working, but you come to realize that when you’re working long hours and you’re stretched for time and feeling stressed out, you’re paying a lot of money for things you don’t have much time to enjoy anyway. Once you strip away your excess costs, you only need about $30,000 to $40,000 a year to live quite comfortably, even with an expensive teenage boy at home. I’m remarried, but my husband spends much of his time on his grain farm, and doesn’t contribute to my living expenses. Now I’m living on less, but my standard of living is not low. The truth is that somewhere between the people who read yesterday’s newspapers and eat week-old bread, and those who work flat out for a six-figure salary, there’s a middle ground.

I’ve found that the main thing is to eliminate your major sources of overhead, things like car payments and your mortgage. I’m now in a position where I’m fortunate enough to be able to pay cash for my houses and cars. I save money by cashing in Air Miles to go to the movies, and I put all of my purchases on a CIBC gold credit card for Aeroplan points. I volunteer for several non-profit organizations, such as the local arts society, and when they send me to a conference or other event, I’ll piggyback my personal vacation onto the trip. I shop the second-hand markets, I use a flat-rate Internet phone plan, I’ve done an energy audit on the house and I put in more insulation to lower my heating bills.

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