Yes people have to figure out how to have financial security so they are able to know they’ll be OK as they age and when they retire, even if they end up divorced or single, if they are currently in a relationship.
Re-entering the workforce can be challenging and one has to keep skills and networking current to be marketable and find a good job when one has stopped working or cut back substantially due to other obligations.
I am fortunate that H and I consider all assets acquired during our marriage as joint and I will get 55% of his pension and all of his growing roth ira if he predeceases me. My personal retirement assets are very meager (due to scaling back my career for the family), and would not allow me to live comfortably in HI, even with my minimal SS and Medicare.
It was very important to me and my husband that our daughter have a job that she could fully support herself with.
I have been underemployed, my parents felt that it was important for me to pursue a career that I could be able to raise children with. And be a support to my husband. It worked out for me but I know plenty that were left without much after a divorce.
Daughter supported herself on her own for many years. Lived by herself, bought a car, saved for retirement. I’m quite proud.
Well, I know I have officially turned into my father now, because my initial thoughts on the article were "does she have health insurance and retirement savings?’
My daughter, age 24, has a job that fits that ‘lazy girl’ definition. It’s not necessarily that she was seeking out a job that fit that theme, it just worked out that way (but it is more than three hours a day). It is a full time, remote job, with benefits. She has an enviable work-life balance and a lot of flexibility. She’s doing satisfying work in the industry of her choice (the theater industry, at that!) She’s very happy and it seems just about perfect. And, she has health insurance and is saving for retirement plus saving a lot more. The fact that it is a remote job with a NYC company that she can do remotely from her house in rural midwest (that she purchased with her fiance and is fixing up) puts her in an unusually good financial situation for her age. Housing costs are a huge issue for her generation, and her situation is unusual in that regard.
As for her friends/peers, she’s the only one that I know of in this situation. Many of them are in more traditional jobs (nurses, teachers, typical office jobs), and many of them are kind of drifting in part time jobs and getting by. I don’t really think influencer jobs that pay the bills in 3 hours a day at the salary the article states are truly that easy to come by. I do think remote jobs that pay the bills but don’t fill up 8 hours a day are attainable.
Yes though living in Belleville chances are she doesn’t have a family doctor. They have a huge shortage and no real walk-in clinics. The hospital though is very good and there is transfer to Kingston or Toronto for more complicated cases. With her low income she will not pay much in income taxes either and probably qualifies for quite a few government tax credits.
Lots of people in the US make too little to owe taxes. I guess they shouldn’t use the public schools, libraries, roads, fire and police departments, ERs, etc.
Quiet Quitting, Lazy Girl Jobs…my daughter is just entering college so I can’t tell you about her friends work experience but I do work in NYC at a large company and can say I really feel for the young people starting out now. When I started, in the 90’s, I did work my butt off, I did put in long hours…and I was well-rewarded for that with big bonuses and trips and promotions. Now, it seems like everyone has absorbed two other jobs, so your “lazy girl” job is probably what most of us 50-plus people think of as what a job should be. Now the reward for working 60 hour weeks and being a producer is…more work! The rewards just seem few and far between and in much smaller dollar amounts. I took a “step back” last year for something that maybe you could describe as a lazy girl job for me. I have had several people comment that they are sure I can do this job with my hands tied behind my back…but I can’t because there is just so much of it, and the technology that is supposed to make it go faster/easier brings it’s own issues of troubleshooting and deciphering!
So I would not side eye any person saying they choose life work balance. For years work gave back to me in lots of wonderful ways but since the pandemic…not so much. There’s been a shift, for sure.
Are you calling $60,000-$80,000 low income, and/or is this a low tax bracket in Canada? (Seriously asking, wondering if I am super out of touch with what qualifies as low incomre or if this is a US vs Canada thing).
I think that was her salary before she transitioned to her “lazy girl” job, not what she earns now. If she earned that much living in Belleville she wouldn’t need to split expenses with her boyfriend.
I deleted my response last night b/c I just realized I thought I was responding to a conversation about young women who only work a few hours a day working social media type jobs, like bloggers, etc. Was there another thread about that recently?
My original response was aimed at that, not the “lazy jobs” in the context of the article above.
H and I retired early (59 & 57) after working our entire careers for the same company. I regularly worked 50-80 hour weeks for most of that. H had his busy years as well, and we did a lot of switching off to allow career focus for each of us. I have to say that I regret a lot of it.
The pros - we had vacation and SL, 401k, pensions, retiree medical, ok pay. The cons - too much time away from the family, a lot of stress on my part (the tears shed at my desk at midnight, the misogyny), inability for me to take time off in the summer.
One of my colleagues hired in not long after me & went with what you could call the “lazy boy” route. He wanted a good work-life balance (before we knew what such a thing was) and structured his career to meet that goal. His wife was also a colleague and she did the same. Sure they made trade offs, but they made it work.
Our daughters won’t live the way we did. For starters, they have a career and a job that they want. Portable. Will change employers over time. They saw me retire before the job killed me (yay!) and know that there are better ways…
So, the lazy-girl job in their minds is not lazy, but a reflection and a repudiation of what they saw mom suffer through. Work hard 8 hours a day and then go home and forget about it. Enjoy the other 16 hours. I’m behind them 100%
This is the “lazy girl” career I have had for the past 20 years. I have a job I enjoy, but for the most part, I forget about it entirely the second I pull out of the parking lot at the end of the day.
I spent the first 5 years of my professional life climbing a corporate ladder, living and breathing the ethos that personal sacrifice was necessary for the “greater good” (hello, Y2K-era tech start-up culture) - just long enough to realize that as much as I enjoyed the nature of the work, it was, still, only one part of my life. Once I moved into my current situation, I never looked back.
After many long years on the road the senior delivery guys at our company have what could be considered a lazy-boy job. They check in at 6 a.m., pick the best load, drive 15-30 minutes to a single account and park the tractor-trailer at the loading dock. In 20-30 minutes forklifts remove every pallet of beer. They get back in the truck and drive it back to the office. Several times a week they pull into our parking lot as I’m arriving at 7:45 a.m. For their 2 hours of work they earn 8 hours pay plus incentives. They get into their BMWs or Escalades and head home with the entire rest of their day ahead.
It really depends how one defines standard of living and quality of life. Having 6 weeks universal vacation and the ability to travel all over Europe for long weekends is important for my daughter. So is not having to spend hours in a car commuting to/from work, having excellent public transportation that facilitates socializing with her friends and working fewer hours in general than her counterparts in the US (her company is global). She is 23 yo - her priorities are different.
Also, the data hold for the US as a whole. Housing in the Bay area is comparable in price to London (and the supply seems smaller if one does not want to commute and needs to be close to work), the property taxes even after Prop 13 are much higher, etc. We will cross that bridge … So far, she is genuinely happy with her choices.
So many houses in the US are unnecessarily big. I’d trade smaller for better hours and lifestyle in general. Wait–I did! We make much less money than we could, brought our kids up in a 5 1/2 room house. Life quality so much more important than bigger houses.
Except in the UK you get a tiny flat and still pay as much as the US. The average UK renter has less space than the legal minimum studio size in DC (375 sq ft). As this says, if prices were lower then British people could choose between living in larger houses and spending more on other things.
