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<p>I don’t see anyone working my son harder than himself. He puts an inordinate amount of time into his course projects. I usually tell him that working in the real world will be less work than he did in college.</p>
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<p>My income last year was mid-six-figures. My expenses were five figures. I think that he could get by.</p>
<p>Backup plan? I haven’t had to worry about one but he could always move to Singapore where the unemployment rate is 2.2% and they need a ton of immigrants to keep the economy running.</p>
<p>My dad started working on his business while he was a salaried employee, and eventually quit because he thought he could make more from the side job if he put all his time into that-- he’d been doing it for ten years and making good profit. Now he works from 7am to 2am every day and we don’t have health insurance. He does make good money but with all the additional expenses and stress it’s not worth it. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think I would ever want the pressure of owing my own company. I’m a hard worker but I want to be able to go home at the end of the day and not worry about it until morning.</p>
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<p>Sorry emaheevul07, that doesn’t apply to a lot of salaried jobs either! LOL!</p>
<p>I know. :(</p>
<p>I’m in denial. :P</p>
<p>I agree with both Emavee and ellenemope on the above two posts:</p>
<p>I think owning your own business, which one poster is saying is liberating, can also be a lot of pressure. Especially if you have a payroll to meet, clients to satisfy etc.</p>
<p>OTOH, salaries positions are not usually ones where you can “go home at the end of the day” and forget about it. There are pressures and responsibilities - to the team, to the employer, to the clients - there as well.</p>
<p>I’ve always thought that you could walk away at 5pm with no job thoughts to stress you if you were a checker in the grocery store or any other low hourly pay job. But then you have a different set of financial stresses and, in some cases, the stress of being underemployed and the toll that takes psychologically.</p>
<p>When I left a salaried position to go into business for myself, I said I just traded one set of headaches for another set of headaches…</p>
<p>I think that running your own business is a blast when you are young and don’t have commitments and can spend huge amounts of time on the business. When you have a family to raise, it’s nicer to have a lot of things taken care for you and it’s nice to have the group buying power for things like insurance. Maybe running a business is interesting when the kids are gone too.</p>
<p>The failure rate for businesses is very high and lots of money is lost in startups that turn into failures.</p>
<p>I actually found the opposite. I was able to set my own hours and come and go as I needed to. After all, who is going to tell me I can’t? Granted, I have a spouse whose employment provides the health insurance, etc. And while certainly its not been without hassles, being self-employed for almost 20 years is working out ok. I never thought I would be self employed, and have had office colleagues so its not isolating. But it works for me</p>
<p>When I was young and owned a business, I was interested in making money and the more effort put in, the more income. So there’s the greed factor and the hunger factor. If you have someone else providing the necessities of life, then you might not feel the hunger factor. It can become more of a hobby that just happens to provide income (I’ve done that too).</p>
<p>well, I’ve been self-employed since 1986. I tried working for others a few years ago. I had to cancel dental appointments 3x, as there was some crisis or another. Minor surgery was postponed 6 months, and they were still upset I took 4 days off. So, I’m on-call 7/24, but I set my own hours, work with people I want to, and prefer this life-style. Only down-side is the high cost of health care.</p>
<p>Most ideal–my first professional position at a teaching hospital. I had all the benefits and could still set my own schedule. When I got sick, the head of hospital called me at home to say he had set up my surgery, the surgeon, etc. He had never spoken to me in person, but reached out to a staff member. Some jobs and people are wonderful.</p>
<p>That may be part of it in our case-- my mom only works as a transcriptionist, which basically only pays for /some/ of our incidentals. My dad needs to support a family of four almost entirely on the income from his business. Which I think he could do, I don’t think the problem is the business. Going on vacation four times a year takes precedence over health insurance. If we were a little more… realistic…we could probably meet all our basic living expenses plus extra.</p>
<p>A co-worker and I had jobs where we literally could walk away at 4:30 pm and not think about our jobs. (We were med techs in a hospital lab and someone from the next shift came and took our places.)</p>
<p>Years later, we met again when I was a lawyer working late at night and stopping for a bite to eat (before returning to work) at a restaurant that turned out to be owned by that same co-worker. We both laughed at how much we did not appreciated our 8-4:30 pm jobs when we had them.</p>
<p>go work in china lol</p>
<p>Emaheevul07, your dad is a what Michael Gerber, author of the E-Myth Revisited calls a technician. He only knows how to wear the technician hat. All small businesses have 3 hats to wear. Technician, manager, and entrepreneur.</p>
<p>Most businesses fail or become a burden because nobody is ever taught how to wear the manager hat or the entrepreneur hat. Our education system does not teach this. It teaches us to be good employees, to be good technicians, good foot soldiers. Sometimes the best technicians think they can run their own business but are ultimately overwhelmed.</p>
<p>They have been told what to do their whole life, they have no experience thinking for themselves.</p>
<p>Ever wonder why the most successful people in the world in any era rarely ever completed high school, let alone college?</p>
<p>Ben Franklin - dropped out of school at 10.
Thomas Jefferson was managing his plantation with over 250 employees at the same age we were sitting behind a desk getting yelled at.
Danica Patrick dropped out of high school at 16.
Diablo Cody changed her name when she was a teenager, started a pornographic blog, was a stripper and ended up winning an Oscar.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, Mark Zuckerberg - no college degrees.</p>
<p>What does this tell you? It tells me you do not need college to be successful. Its a fool’s game. I am guilty of being a fool, so guilty I even have an MBA. And we all have to play this game. Unless you are in the engineering field or a natural science, the goal should be to play it with the least investment in time and money as possible.</p>
<p>“I never let my schooling interfere with my education.” - Mark Twain (who dropped out of school at 13)</p>
<p>Wow, that’s rather offensive to insult Emaheevul’s father.</p>
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<p>Parents; innate talent?</p>
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<p>We didn’t have mandatory attendance laws back then; there were lots of
kids that didn’t go to school. Are they all most successful?</p>
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<p>So the average person in his time period could do the same thing?</p>
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<p>Looks like she moved across the pond. Do they finish compulsory
attendance early. If we look at all of the other people in her
field, did they attend high school or not?</p>
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<p>Do you have any daughters?</p>
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<p>I would suggest that you go to the career sites of these leaders of
companies and look at the job requirements for their postings. I think
that you will frequently run into BS required, MS preferred or
something similar. Now most of these (or maybe all of them) so they
felt that there was some value to the college degree at one point in
their lives.</p>
<p>At the end of Steve Jobs presentation on the iPad 2, he brought up a
picture of two road signs intersecting and he talked about the value
of the liberal arts and technology. What do you suppose he was
referring to?</p>
<p>Steve Jobs has publically advocated the use of LSD too. Do you think
that’s a good idea?</p>
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<p>Have you taken statistics?</p>
<p>Are you familiar with the term: anecdotal evidence?</p>
<p>What percentage of CEOs of the Fortune 500 have college degrees?</p>
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<p>It isn’t for millions and millions and millions of people.</p>
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<p>“I have sinned against You, my Lord, and I would ask that Your
precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the
seas of God’s forgiveness.”</p>
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<p>One of the guys that I work with is a brilliant computer science guy
with multiple patents over a very long career. He has a Phd in
English. A friend of mine has a Phd in Fine Arts - his career has
been spectacular doing work for many big-name production studios,
theme parks and in producing records of his compositions.</p>
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<p>“You say, ‘But Brother Al, I don’t have a hundred dollars.’ Well
that’s OK, friends. You just sit down and write that check, and then
get on your knees and pray, and by the time the check clears my bank
and gets back to yours, God will have that money in your account.”</p>
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<p>Source, please.</p>
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<p>Clearly our schools have produced great scientists, leaders, warriors,
artists, and writers. And those in many other professions, careers and
jobs. We do have our problems with education but many in our country
would get little to no exposure to science, art, music, literature,
history and culture without schools.</p>
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I never said I didn’t work my butt off and didn’t say I wasn’t interested in earning money. When I went to work for myself our kids were 2 and 6. When my DH’s job started requiring him to travel for extended periods of time I realized I needed to adjust my work schedule. I still worked a lot and my business has been successful. But over the years, as I needed to, I was able to cut back to 4 days/week and work shorter hours. My decision. My business. Now, with the kids grown, I may work longer hours (often stay til 7 to do paperwork) but after all these yesra, I can be selective in what I do. There are negative aspects of having the responsibility of a business, staff, rent, managing the office, etc, but there are great benefits as well.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, that was not my intention. I was using him as an example to what happens to thousands of small businesses. Its tragic.</p>
<p>BCEagle91, thanks for taking the time to read my post, our views clearly differ. We can go back and forth for days refuting each other. Neither of us will get anywhere and nothing good can come of it.</p>
<p>I agree with that.</p>
<p>I was commenting more on the experience of being single without family responsibilities and young with boundless energy and what a great time it was to run a business.</p>