All right, welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head. I came in podcasts about individual emergency preparedness, rocking an incredible life, and learning to do the things to make yourself more self-reliant in a chaotic world. Sit back, grab a beverage, and take charge of your life. All right, welcome back to the Ottawa studios of Inside My Canoe Head.
Today we're going to talk about getting fired. And this was an Instagram post that generated a lot of interest that I put up yesterday. And it's about nobody really thought that they were going to get fired in a pandemic, and they got fired. And luckily, the government came swooping in and provided some form of assistance.
But eventually, you have to put yourself back up on your own two feet. So today's episode is all about what are we going to do, what's the process, and how do we get ourselves prepared for that day when your boss comes in and says, you're fired, or you get an email. Notice if you were a PBO employee in England at their fairy line. And one day you showed up and found out you were all fired by a message from the CEO in the morning.
We've seen enough of that that's happened. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a pandemic. It can be a whole bunch of series of events that basically just put you in a place where you got up, ready for work, you're planning on a great day, meaning some wonderful people. You walk into the office and there's somebody from HR meeting you in a conference room with a bankers box full of all of your personal goods.
Nobody wants that to happen, but it happens far more frequently than I think all of us are really willing to admit. So how do we get ready for that? So today we're first going to talk about blanket and responsibility. So we understand that in emergency preparedness, the most important question that we ask ourselves is, who is responsible for your outcomes?
And obviously, it's you, you're going to have to take on responsibility for what happens in your life. In other words, you choose not to adopt a victim mentality. You choose not to blame things on exogenous and external events that have caused hardship and strife on you. Those are out of your control.
Those will always happen. There's nothing you can do about it. The idea of a preparedness plan is that blanket. It is about your whole life, all aspects of your existence.
So if you sit down and you think about your incredible life that you're living right now, you have friends, you have family, you have leisure activities, you have maybe sports that you like to do, you maybe like to go for walks, there's a whole life that you have there that is not your income, it's not your job, it's you as a human being, and preparedness is about all of those elements of your life. So it protects your ability to conduct the life as you see it. And that's, it's like a form of insurance, right? We call it an industry risk transfer.
So when you buy a house and you have a mortgage, you're required to have insurance, fire insurance on your house. So that when it burns down, there's an insurance company that's going to pay to rebuild the house to protect the lender's interest, right? That's risk transfer. It's not you that has to rebuild the house.
It's not the mortgage company. It's the insurance company. So it's a form of risk transfer. Preparedness is exactly the same, right?
So the whole idea of what we're going to talk about today is wrapping your income and your life in a blanket of preparedness. Now, when we think about it, income is necessary, right? We'd love to live in a utopia world where the magical government prints magical money and puts it into our bank account every month, and then we can just la, la, lolly, gag around. Well, in reality, that doesn't work.
The human animal excels when they are innovating, the human animal excels when they are contributing and doing things and helping that synaptic response between the axon and dendrites in your brain work exceptionally well. So you need an income. Now we all get incomes from various different sources, and it really doesn't matter where you get your income from. But the lowest unit that we look at in this podcast and in preparedness planning is your family unit.
So however you define that family unit, that's completely up to you. So the old days of the nuclear family of Ward Cleaver, where you have mother, father, and two kids at home, the woman is a homemaker, and the father has this great job, and then he comes home and he mows a lawn on the weekends, et cetera, et cetera. That doesn't exist in this world as the majority position. So your family unit is going to be defined however you choose to do that.
And prior to preparedness, we say that is the second step after accepting responsibility, is the first then determined who you're responsible for. So knowing that the best information out there in literature, in academia, in professional, and people like myself, that profess to be somewhat of a guru in this field, is your family unit needs about three to five lines of income. Now that's not three to five jobs. That doesn't mean everybody has to have a second job.
That means you have varying degrees of different sources of income coming in, and they are exclusive by nature, which means if you are a waitress and you serve tables, you earn an income in tips, those are not mutually exclusive, so they're not two lines of income, because you don't get the tips if you're not called into work, right? You see how that works? So three to five lines of income in the family. And that generally can mean a side hustle, you might knit stuff and sell it on a Facebook marketplace.
A lot of, which is really popular now is people go to yard sales, take beat up old furniture, they like to refinish it, make it nice, resell it. Anything along those lines is considered a line of income. Something, and so you're probably asking yourself, like why three to five lines of income? Where does that number come from?
That number comes from lessons learned. And it comes from the fact that multiple lines of income are seen as insurance agents against each other. So if you think about, for example, my household, I have lines of income, my wife has lines of income, we probably in this household have six or seven lines of income. Some of them are as little as $300 a month, like we're not talking several thousands of dollars per line of income, you have a primary line of income, there's no doubt about it.
There is a principal position for which you occupy to help society, you run a job, you own a business, you do something, that's your principal line of income. Some other lines of income can be small as $300, $150 a month, $200, bucks every two weeks, whatever it may be, those are lines of income. And you can call it that because they're dependable sources of money that you can count on in some time of it. Now, why multiple lines of income?
Well, lessons, folks, lessons learned. Pandemic, March 2020, no one probably thought their job was at risk. No one thought that their entire industry would be ground to a halt. If you were a restaurant business owner, a restaurant manager, if you were a casual employee or a lying cook or somebody in this massive restaurant and tourism industry, the hospitality industry, you probably didn't think that your entire industry would be shut down.
Businesses go in and out of business, it happens all the time. That industry has to be fairly mobile to move between businesses, et cetera. But nobody really thought a pandemic would come along and shut that down. We've also seen natural hazards realize, like Hurricane Katrina is probably the best studied North American disaster that's happened probably since the great earthquake in Alaska.
And when we look at it, you see a tire neighborhoods, they're just gone. Like the neighborhood is gone. So every business that existed in that neighborhood is gone. And all the clients are gone.
And that's another thing that really happened at Katrina, that a new line of research that opened up is it's not just that the business closed in Katrina. It's that all the customers were evacuated and may take a year or two to come back or never came back. So it's not just the fact that the business closed. It's that your customer base disappeared.
I mean, we have a lot of other situations where you might be in an oil and gas industry and you have a turn down in the industry. You may be a trucker. And then we have, well, not right now, but we had times we had issues for truckers getting miles and loads around the country. You could be a factory worker and the company could go under.
And you're in a one horse town. You're in a factory town. The General Mills Food Factory employs 75% of the full-time workers in the town go to this one factory. The company closes that factory where nobody's gonna get another job in that town.
There is no other jobs, right? So that making the choice to live on a single primary income with no backup is placing yourself at an exceptional level of risk. Now, some people are quite happy living at that level of risk. I think it's a bit risky.
I always encourage people that I work with to extend their lines of income beyond that. But if you're choosing to do that, just remember that if that factory closes and there's not much of a severance pay because of bankruptcy, you're not getting much. And then all of a sudden your house value is gonna be dirt poor. You won't be able to sell your house to extract the equity because people aren't gonna be flooding to the town when there's no employment.
And then it's a difference between some industries have seasonal layoffs, like I grew up in the East Coast of Canada. The fishing industry is fairly stable, but there are seasonal layoffs. You can have certain layoffs that happen for retooling of factories in the automotive industry where the employees are gonna be furloughed for a period of two months while they retool part of the factory, but you're coming back, right? You have this vision that you're coming back.
There's a difference between temporary seasonal layoffs and closure, right? There's a difference between you being laid off because the government shut down your business due to a pandemic, but two to three months later, you expect that business to be allowed to operate again and you'll get your job back. That's a short-term layoff. The government throws some money out, yeah, everybody's happy, they're all in the bank, et cetera.
But it's an exogenous shock exposure. It's all about how much risk you are willing to assume by only having a single line of income and that that income could be taken away from you. So you can live like that if that's how you choose. The idea of a preparedness plan for income is just that.
When you get that call, hey, you're fired, or you show up for work, and this has happened to family members of mine, they show up for work with a whole schedule calls, everything ready to go and they walk in the entrance of the building, their office tower that they work in and they're met by member of security. And they say, hey, Mr. So-and-so can follow us. And you're escorted into a room off of the lobby where your boss is there, a member from Human Resources is there and a bankers box with all of your stuff from your desk.
You're being terminated on the spot and you're not gonna be allowed back into the building or access to your accounts. What's your plan when that happens? And that's the idea of you're fired. It's your job to have a plan and there are five parts of this plan.
The first part is what are you going to do when you get fired? So sit back, pour yourself your favorite beverage and ask you that question. It's not, I'm a banker, I'm gonna go get a job at another bank. That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about what job are you gonna do when for whatever exogenous external reason you are no longer able to do the job you do now. What job are you going to do? That's your job to figure out. Now some people look at hobbies, some people look at, for example, I had a friend of mine who was in the army and he was an incredibly skilled tradesperson, just on his own, no qualifications.
He helped people renovate his basements, just brilliantly handy individual. And his preparedness plan was he's going to start a home Renault. He's gonna start doing Renault, it's gonna start charging people for it if he ever got kicked out of the military. Well guess what?
He got kicked out of the military and now he does Renault's. But the point is, is that your first part of your plan is what is it you're gonna do? You have to figure that out. It doesn't cost you any money.
All of the stuff that I'm gonna talk about is free of charge. The second part is what training is required for you to execute that function receive a source of income. Now, training is free and I'm gonna tell you that and people say, oh no, we don't have the money on budget for training. No, you don't.
But if you like Elon Musk or you don't like Elon Musk, he's absolutely right that you can learn how to do anything on the internet. There are stories of individuals not, like the skillset of me, I mean, tools don't go well together. It's hilarious. I have trouble measuring for a stud wall.
But there are people like me who have gone on YouTube and simply built their own house from scratch, including pouring their foundation, doing all their own plumbing, doing all their own electrical, framing, roofing. People have built their entire houses within zero skills, a few basic tools and watching YouTube episodes. You can learn how to code. You can learn how to be a graphic designer.
You can learn how to be a web page developer. You can learn to be a Google search guy or whatever it may be. All of this is available free of charge on YouTube and for a very small amount, you can get a monthly or annual subscription to Skillshare or something like that. The point of all of this is that the ability to learn the skills necessary to execute the what you want to do is completely free of charge and available to you.
So now you know what you wanna do. Now you know the skill level required and you've started to figure out where you're gonna get those skills from. The next, the third part of your preparedness plan for income is time to market. Now time to market means simply how long is it going to take you to pivot from your current job to employing and being in the marketplace and charging money with your next income.
So think about it. And time to market can be two months, it can be three months. Think about, I walk into work on a Monday morning ready to take on the world and I get fired. So I'm probably gonna give myself a 48 hour pity party, feels sad for myself crying.
I'm gonna give you a little bit of a pity pillow and all that other BS. And then eventually I'll have to pick up myself by the bootstrap, stand up, look myself in the mirror, accept responsibility for my outcomes and implement my preparedness income plan. So what's your time from after your pity party there to when you're ready to put a website up and to start asking for money? Remember, you know the websites I have I pay for because it's a professional service, but there are places through WordPress and various other places that you can set up a website that is absolutely free of charge.
One great one that I use right now is buy me a coffee and I'll take a side tangent to tell you about this. Buy me a coffee that's free of charge. It's supported by a company called Stripe, which is an international payment process. So you set up your account with Stripe in the background.
You go on buying me a coffee, you set up your page, you put up your content, your posts, you find other people, you share it on all of your social medias within your buying a coffee, you create things called extras. Like I have one there that for $75, you can have a 45 minute conversation with me about anything related to preparedness. You go in there, you click on it, you pay your 75, you get a link to my calendar, you schedule it, it automatically gives you a zoom in, and boom, all of this costs me nothing. What comes out the other side of it is, is that Stripe takes a small percentage of the money off the top and so does Buy me a coffee for the cost.
There's no cost up front, you just lose a small percentage, and then I donate a percentage of my earnings to the environment as well. So in the end, you probably lose about 10% of what you're charging somebody for the services, but it costs you zero up front, and you can do it for a lot cheaper than that. So there's no money requirement here, so what's your time to market? So if you're an individual who is going to become a web developer and you really like the idea, you're busy now, you haven't learned it.
And so you're looking at how much time, so you figure, okay, I need about two months of solid work on YouTube and practicing to get this skill to a point where I think I could actually charge people money for it. I gotta build the website, I gotta do all this stuff. I have a time to market to two months, why does that matter? Because this is your Dave Ramsey lesson, right?
This tells you exactly how much of a financial savings emergency fund income you need, right? This is where your multiple lines of income come in. So think about your three lines of income, you have your main income, and you have your two other small side hustles or whatever it may be that you get sources of income from, you lose that primary one with the support of the other two for a period of two months. How much money are you gonna need to meet your basic life requirements and not get behind on your bills before you start getting that income replaced by your new business?
That tells you the size of your emergency fund. It's when we do preparedness planning, your plan is gonna look different from everybody else. I know they say you have six months of savings. You can pull six months out of your urs and put it up in the sky, it doesn't matter.
What matters is if you go through and develop a plan here that says your time to market is two months for your skill. Because of your risk, tolerance level as a human being, your self-efficacy, et cetera, you want to have another month of cushion while you're your first month of operation. So you decide that three months of preparedness funding, emergency funding, sitting in your bank account is the right thing. So now you've got a target to build that up over a period of time.
Your emergency savings is a well-defined amount of money, specifically to meet a plan you've developed. And that's the key. That's why preparedness planning is utterly successful because it's a plan that you created for you by you and not some ridiculous PDF list that you get off some website. The last part of your, your fired preparedness plan is practice the skill in your off time.
You do have some downtime. I know people say they're tired and I'm tired a lot too. Sure, fair enough, but you do have downtime in your life, all right? You do.
We can add out the hours of the day, your sleep hours, time with your family, time with your kids. Somewhere in there, you're on social media. Somewhere in there, you're on Netflix. There's always an opportunity to practice, you have to find your skill.
You know what you're going to pivot to. So practice it, right? What if you're a hobby, you know, get a bunch of scrap wood and practice building stuff if you're going to be a handy person or if you're going to be a web developer, pull up a 20 minute YouTube video. You're going to be on Netflix, anyhow's, a YouTube video and take some notes down and figure out basically it's an investment in you.
The last part is always about making that investment in you because what you're trying to do is facilitate in the unlikely event, but possibly definitely in disruptive time event, you get fired, you've dabbled your toe in the area you want to be, you've got a plan and you execute. So listen, hopefully what we've talked about today, was some use to you, think about the fact that you're going to get fired. I don't care who you are, I don't care what you do for a living. I don't care if you own your own business.
At some point, that source of income is going to disappear and it's probably going to disappear quite abruptly. We have enough lessons for that in today's world. And so the government pivoting checks in your bank account is not a preparedness plan, right? It'll give you a little bit here, there, whatever.
The point being is is you can't be successful in the preparedness world if your default is that the government is going to give you checks to pay your bills or it's somebody else's job to pay your bills for you when you can no longer do it. The idea of self-reliance is that you accepted that responsibility. So you follow what we talked about today, you understand you're going to get fired at some time or you may just want to tell your boss off, which is another way of getting fired and you've got an ultimate strategy and you believe in yourself, you have the self-confidence and your ability to succeed. And here you are, you've got an awesome emergency preparedness plan for finances, you know how to deal with when you're fired and I hope you found this useful.
So thanks again for listening us at Inside My Canoe Head. Go drop over to our website, www.triplewinsidemycanoehead.ca, follow us for our daily preparedness tips on Instagram, buy me a coffee or over on Twitter. We're coming up on some pretty neat stuff that's going to be coming out in the June timeframe. I've joked about this before, but I'm going on TikTok starting in June as well as doing Instagram reels and ramping up the YouTube shorts.
So we're really trying to bring this preparedness message to people and empower people that you don't need to buy two years of food. You don't need to follow these ridiculous lists that you see on YouTube, 15 things to stock up now and I'll let other BS. So take care, have yourselves a wonderful weekend, summers here, grab the golf clubs, go for a forest bath, whatever it is, take care of yourself and we'll see you next week.