If you’re reading this while on vacation, great for you. If you’re reading this at work, having just finished your short summer vacation, I hope your time off was as relaxing. But if you work in Corporate America, you most likely won’t get another day off work until December’s holiday season. Corporate America and vacations just don’t mix.
This may surprise those who have just spent hours stranded at airports or idling in a hot line for a ride at an amusement park. But a quarter of American workers gets no paid vacation or paid holidays. And on average, those private-sector workers who do get paid time off are granted only nine vacation days and six paid holidays each year, according to government statistics analyzed by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
This think tank analyzed paid vacation and holiday leave policies among the U.S. and nations with comparably developed economies—the European Union, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The predictable portrait is one of the United States as a nation of workaholics.
In the rest of the industrialized world, a month or more of paid vacation is typical, and often required. Many Americans know that. And there are can-you-top-this supplements to this surfeit of paid time off. Such as: In Austria, workers who labor at “heavy night work” get two or three extra days off. Also in Austria—as well as in Sweden and New Zealand—workers are actually paid at a higher rate when they’re on vacation than when they’re at work.
Stingy Corporate leave policies in the United States go hand and hand with weekly work hours that exceed those in many industrialized countries. And they parallel skimpy sick leave and family leave policies that give millions of Americans no effective safety net when illness or emergencies strike. Nearly half of private-sector workers—57 million people—have no paid sick days. The problem is particularly acute for low-wage workers, more than three-fourths of whom get no paid leave when they are ill.
In theory, all this hard work is supposed to spark a more robust economy that is, in turn, an engine of greater upward mobility than what is found in the supposedly coddled precincts of, say, the European Union. But lately, it hasn’t.
In 2007, researchers for the Economic Mobility Project studied the relationship of adult children’s incomes to those of their parents and found that the United States now lags behind France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark in this measure of upward mobility. “There is little available evidence that the United States has more relative mobility than other advanced nations,” they reported. “If anything, the data seem to suggest the opposite.”
Comparing the incomes of American men who were in their 30s in 2004 with males who were in their 30s in 1974, the researchers found that today’s men actually earn about 12 percent less, after inflation, than their fathers’ generation did. “There has been no progress at all for the youngest generation,” the group reported. The American family stays afloat because its total income has been swelled by women’s paychecks.
So you may be asking yourself:
“What’s the point of this Alexis? You are obviously against government intervention to change market set conditions. You are not going to change my companies vacation/sick leave policy. Are you telling me to move to Europe?”
No I am not. I love being an American and all the freedoms we are so lucky to have. My solution is quite simple. Do not participate in the corporate game! Just follow my path…
I made the decision to leave Corporate America 20 years ago, when returning from a one week trip from Hawaii. I wanted to stay for another week, but that was not an option for my boss. That was the straw that broke the camels back. Within 6 months, both my husband and I quit our “high paying jobs” and started on our full time Foreclosure Investing path.
Was it painful to make that jump? YES!
Did we have financial hardships for some time while we paid our dues and learned on the street of hard knocks, what to do and what NOT to do, in growing our foreclosure business? YES!
Did we have any time off for vacations our first few years? NO! Did we love our life and the freedom to do WHAT we wanted WHEN we wanted to? YES!
Did we ever regret our decision? ABSOLUTELY NOT!
So here I sit, enjoying a vacation with our children, who have no idea how lucky they are. They get a mom who can drop them off and pick them up daily at school, and both parents to join them for an early dinner and family time nightly. They get to hike our countries beautiful mountains and visit National Parks this summer and exhilarating ski resorts in the winter months.
So, I invite you to take the leap. Take advantage of all that ForeclosureS.com has to offer in the foreclosure investment business. Listen to our webinars, sigh up for our home study courses. You’ll be glad you did…and so will your family.
Don’t miss this invaluable opportunity! Listen in on Wednesday, August 11, 2010, 6 pm PST to our Free Webinar for Foreclosure Investors: New Market, New Plan. Make Big Profits, With None of Your Own Cash!
Attend our exclusive, interactive Live Mastering Clients Private Study Session Webinar on Tuesday, August 17, 2010, 6 pm PST. Alexis, a 25-year veteran investor, will lead you through everything you need to know about Step 5: Contracting and Flipping Your Deal.
