The “economic impact” being the focus leaves a bad taste in my mouth; it’s the economic impact itself thats making it worse, if not outright causing it.
I once worked in an industry once that wound up forcing long periods of excessive overtime. Think 60+ hour weeks for months on end. And for peanuts (16 to 22 an hour.)
The combined stress resulted in the following issues among the team:
- Employee #1 committed suicide the weekend after valentines day, (work stress led to alcoholism relapse, then everything else fell apart)
- Employee #2 wound up completely throwing out his back (i.e. could not move and had to crawl into his house) because of the bad chair ergonomics.
- Employee #4 had multiple nervous breakdowns, ruining their marriage and setting back their life years.
- Employee #5 relapsed on some bad habits involving opioids.
Of the above 4, 2 were tobacco users and their intake increased substantially during these time periods. This was true of others on the team that didn't fall into these more extreme examples.
But even in those other cases, I saw ruined marriages, slow spirals into bad habits (gambling, drinking, adult clubs, etc.) and overall years taken off peoples life from stress.
So yeah, long hours are no joke.
Edit: I skipped #3 on the list because the way they responded to stress wasn't easy to delineate. (They were however also a smoker and would increase intake under stress)
On the other hand... it's worth noting that #3, when under high workload stress, would become very judgemental, easily offended and prone to rants that would, depending on day, either belong on breitbart or buzzfeed.
It's kinda caused me to break down a bit, I quit a couple weeks ago and moved. I've been working a job lately with less hours, but different demands that haven't really made things much better.
My generation forgot what meant to live in moderation. All the drinking, poor diet from restaurant outings several nights out of the week is not good for health or the wallet which affects the former thing.
Everybody is just like: "save some money, don't go to restaurants". Ace advice, all financial problems solved!
I'm 39 and I've almost literally broke my back working. Never had much time or motivation to look at the sides. So here's me, at 39, who still has no clue what does "invest your money" mean. Will you give me a few examples?
Same for diet, by the way. A lot of genetic advice is floating around but when you try to find a concrete set of rules, they are not there. My generation was never educated on diet. As far as I can see, the next ones aren't either.
You can buy it at Vanguard.com. You’ll need to sign up for an account, and then it’s a process similar to setting up online bill pay.
If you can put a consistent amount into an index fund, even if it’s $50/month, religiously, that’s a huge step.
There are certainly online brokerages available in your country that offer index funds (either mutual funds or ETFs) like Interactive Brokers or Revolut.
How I learned was through trial and error. I opened a brokerage account. Which now in my country is the easiest it’s ever been since there’s are 0$ fees for transactions. And just bought stocks at like 100$ or whatever I was comfortable to lose until I understood the basics of why something affected the price one way over another.
It’s not a science it’s more of an art and it’s own of those things that you need to put the effort in and someone can’t really explain to you until you do it.
• Make a will.
• Pay off your credit card balance.
• Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.
• Fund your company 401K to the maximum.
• Fund your IRA to the maximum.
• Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.
• Put six months’ expenses in a money market account.
• Take whatever is left over and invest it 70 percent in a stock index fund and 30 percent in a bond fund through any discount brokerage company and never touch it until retirement
• If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issue), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges you a percentage of your portfolio.
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/scott-adams-financial-advice/