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Monday miscellany: Sleazy scammer edition.

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Lost your job due to the pandemic or looking for a side hustle through a work-at-home job? Be careful where you click. The increase in work-at-home jobs is a perfect fit for an Internet scammer, reports Kathy Kristof on the SideHusl blog.

“Crooks hide in the crowd, making their offers appear so similar to real ones that it’s hard to tell the difference,” says Kristof.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, job scams have cost U.S. residents at least $150 million in the first nine months of 2020. I say “at least” because who knows how many people who were victimized bothered to file an FTC complaint, or who didn’t know they could?

Here’s what the thieves want:

  • Personal information, such as a Social Security number
  • Passwords to accounts
  • Access to your computer (for example, the crook might send you a link to fill out an application – but it’s a spoofed site that will infect your computer with malware)
  • For you to cash a personal check or write them a personal check

To be clear: There are loads of legitimate work-at-home jobs out there. But you need to be cautious about any offer, even if you think it’s legit. Kristof’s article can help.

In addition, the Internal Revenue Service reports a new text scam: Messages saying, “You have received a direct deposit of $1,200 from COVID-19 TREAS FUND. Further action is required to accept this payment into your account. Continue here to accept this payment …” 

 

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Monday miscellany: Holiday hiring edition.

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“Get a side hustle” is a common personal finance suggestion, whether it’s for paying off debt or building wealth. A whole bunch of those side-gig options went away when COVID-19 struck, according to veteran PF writer Kathy Kristof.

But “several industries are now picking up steam,” Kristof writes on her SideHusl website.

“Some are back from the dead, while others are simply ramping up to new highs for the holidays.”

Among them: warehouse work, delivery, pet-sitting, mystery shopping and, of course, holiday retail. In her article, “Jobs that are revving up and reviving,” Kristof doesn’t just make the observations – she also gives links to the sites where you can apply for these gigs.

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“I can’t afford to retire.”

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One day last week I was trotting around a big-box store, using the Shopkick* app. I hadn’t planned to buy anything; I was there simply to rack up hundreds of points by scanning universal product codes with my phone.

Out of habit, I checked the clearance rack and saw a slightly dented can of tomato soup for 55 cents. Since winter is coming and I loves me a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup, I grabbed it.

The last Shopkick scans were right outside the store’s beauty section, which has its own cash register. Rather than go to the front of the store and stand in line, I asked if I could pay there.

The cashier wore one of those clear face shields to protect against the virus. She looked tired, pale and a bit stooped. As she scanned my order she said, “It’s my 73rd birthday today.”

I wished her a happy birthday and she smiled just a bit. Then I remarked that I was on my way over to visit a retired friend in her 70s, and would now tell her to get off her lazy behind and get a job.

The woman smiled again, a touch wistfully. “I can’t afford to retire.”

Boy, did I feel like a horse’s patoot. Here she was, obviously fatigued and having to stand for her entire shift, and there I was, making a clumsy joke about working in one’s 70s.

I took a closer look and she seemed older than 73. DF’s mom is 20 years older than that, but doesn’t seem“old.” Sure, she has a lot of wrinkles and is increasingly frail – 93 years will do that to a person – but she still takes both a daily walk and a lively interest in the world. Heck, she gives her great-granddaughter art lessons every week.

The cashier, on the other hand, seemed beaten-down by life. Perhaps she’d had bad luck: illness, job loss, a divorce that didn’t come out in her favor. Possibly she’d earned very little during her lifetime due to social pressures to stay home with a family and/or social mores that didn’t encourage women to seek highly skilled (or highly paid) employment. Could be she’d made bad money decisions due to a lack of financial education.

Whatever happened has left her where she is: weary, and working because she has no choice. Which is why I wanted to share her story with you. The moral of that story is simple:

 

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Sheltering in place. Just not MY place.

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Well, another 17 days have gone by without a post. This time I’m gonna play the C card.

A couple weeks ago I took the calculated risk of flying to Phoenix because isolation was not playing well with my daughter’s bipolar II and depression. Initially she rejected my offer to fly down if things got really tough. Her response was “thanks, but I’m okay” due to her fear that I might become infected.

To be honest, I was a little worried about that myself. After all, I’m in my early 60s and have asthma. But when you hear phrases like “suicidal ideation,” you get on the damn plane.

Was it ideal? No. Was it necessary? Yes. And it turns out that social distancing was a snap with fewer than two dozen passengers.

The decision was snap, too: When she called and said, “Yeah, I really do need you to come down,” I checked the Alaska Airlines website and discovered I could get a nonstop-to-Phoenix flight at 11:55 p.m. that very night. The hardest part was telling DF that I had to leave, and leave soon.

 

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Average salaries haven’t gone up (much) in 40 years.

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Having trouble making ends meet? A beer income rather than champagne tastes could be the reason.

That’s because real average salaries – wages adjusted for inflation – today aren’t much bigger than they were in 1978, according to the Pew Research Center.

Lately we hear a lot of rah-rah about low unemployment (3.9 percent), and the fact that the private sector has been creating jobs consistently (101 straight months as of July). However, the Pew study indicates that not only has wage growth dawdled, most salary gains have gone to higher-paid workers.

Workers in the private sector averaged $22.65 per hour, a gain of about 2.7 percent from last year. That’s the new normal, according to the study; in the past five years workers have seen salary gains of 2 to 3 percent.

However, average hourly earnings tended to go up by 4 percent in the time period before the Great Recession. In the 1970s through the early 1980s, it wasn’t unusual to get wage increases of 7 to 9 percent. Those were high-inflation times, however, so the money was desperately needed.

Here’s where it gets depressing, though: Our inflation-adjusted salaries haven’t gone up by much. In January 1973, average hourly wage was $4.03. Today, that would be $23.68 – and as noted above, private-sector wages currently average $22.65 an hour.

 

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Enchilada sauce and the domino effect.

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On Sunday I finally cooked the red enchilada sauce I’d been planning to make for ages. Generally I do a double batch and freeze half, because the recipe calls for three ounces of tomato paste and the cans are all six ounces.

Make ahead and save, right? Especially when you see how much you save: The red enchilada sauce at the store cost $2.79 to $4.49. By comparison, this recipe cost me maybe 50 cents (and probably not even that much) for more than four cups of the stuff. In part that’s because I used clearance-rack tomato paste (29 cents a can) and cumin and chili powder from Costco-sized jars.

Better still: I can control how much sodium goes in, and I can tinker the recipe a bit. For example, I added a little unsweetened cocoa powder for richness and replaced the water with broth made with chicken bouillon. But since both these additions had also been found on the clearance rack, they didn’t boost the total cost by much.

Naturally the flavor of the homemade stuff is so much better than the canned variety. No preservatives, less salt and it’s amazingly easy to make. We’re taking 10 minutes, start to finish. The recipe is from a delightful cookbook called “Budget Bytes: Over 100 Easy, Delicious Recipes to Slash Your Grocery Bill in Half.” (You can also access it at the BB website.)

Bonus: Finally making time to do the enchilada sauce led to all sorts of shenanigans. In a good way.

 

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College is optional. Education is not.

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(FinCon and the Center for Financial Services Innovation are sponsoring the #FinHealthMatters writing/podcasting contest. Here’s my entry.)

A recent Facebook post about college featured a couple of 20-somethings. One was a slacker dude lamenting, “I spent $60,000 on a worthless degree and no one will hire me.”

The other was a clean-cut young man happily announcing, “I spent $6,000 at a trade school and make $85,000 a year.”

Obviously things aren’t that simple. Some high-cost degrees immediately lead to high-paying jobs, and not every skilled tradesperson automatically rakes in the bucks.

But its core message is one I’ve been espousing for years:

There is more than one road to postsecondary education.

If you’re unsure what you want to do with your life, college might not be a good fit. And even if higher education is in your future, it might not look the way you imagined.

 

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Giveaway: “You Can Retire Early!”

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Early retirement has spawned a subset of personal finance blogging. Those who write on the topic call it the FIRE movement, i.e., “Financial Independence/Retire Early.”

Their readers tend to be younger, but it’s also possible to construe “early” as earlier than you thought, as in “maybe you won’t have to work until you drop dead.”

Understand: Not everyone wants to retire early. Some of us like what we do so much that we can’t quite imagine ourselves not doing it. That said, some people who love what they do would like the option of changing the way they do it.

Members of both groups should be interested in “You Can Retire Early!: Everything You Need to Achieve Financial Independence When You Want It.” And one of you will get this book for free, because I’m giving away a copy.

 

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Labor Day musings.

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A press release received today had this clickbaity line in the message field: “If you are not doing what you love…You are wasting your time!”

Huh.

I understand the likely intent: Be all that you can be! Reach for the stars! Follow your bliss! Yet my own inference is a little darker: If you aren’t a super self-made success in the high-profile career of your choosing, you’re kind of a loser.

Dark, I know. But I do wish that the people who define success would realize that we can’t all be startup successes or crowdfunded darlings. I wish that “success” could be redefined.

Specifically, I wish that fame and fortune weren’t the things we all apparently should want. Not only is this untrue, it’s a notion that tells a whole bunch of working-class people that they aren’t measuring up.

 

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Giveaway: “Leap,” by Tess Vigeland.

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The subtitle to this book by personal finance journalist Tess Vigeland is a bold proposition indeed: “Leaving a job with no Plan B to find the career and life you really want.”

Let me say that I do not necessarily recommend leaving a job with no Plan B. However, I’ve done it myself and survived – and I sure wish I’d had “Leap” to help me along the way.

It would have made things a lot clearer and helped with the anxiety and doubt. Part autobiography and part self-help book, it helps readers deal with the fear and uncertainty but also gets them to think clearly about their working selves: “Who am I without my job?”

The answer may enlighten in terms of what new work to seek – or, indeed, whether to seek a new definition of labor.

 

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