What do you want?  Or, how can you get to where you want to go when you don't know where that is?

Hello.  My name is Larry Roth, and I’m happy to be a part of this new venture called Mind Like Water.  Until recently I was the editor of Living Cheap News, and I’ve written some books on frugality and voluntary simplicity.  Some of these are Beating the System, which I published in 1995; The Best of Living Cheap News, which Contemporary Books published in 1996; and The Simple Life, which is an anthology containing articles by 22 people in the frugality/simplicity movements that I edited and the Berkley Publishing Group brought out last year.  You can find any or all of these in your library.

Having said that, what I would like to talk about with you now is how to decide what you want out of life.  Strangely, many of us seem to be on automatic pilot.  We live our lives without much thought or direction.  We get  up, go to work, come home, have dinner, watch TV, go to bed, and then we start all over again.  We buy a new car every few years.  If we’re lucky, we retire and get the gold watch, and then . . . we sleepwalk through the rest of our lives.

On Labor Day, a friend I used to work with called from his home in Northern California.  We used to work together at Company L, one of the world’s largest defense contractors.  The stress of working at Company L has taken a terrible toll on my friend.  He has diabetes, which has been made worse by job-related stress.  His kidneys have failed so he’s on dialysis, and he’s been on temporary disability leave since this past April.  The reason for his call was that he had just learned before the holiday that his job would probably be eliminated soon.  

I thought I would cheer my friend up by telling him that if that happened, Company L would probably allow him to go on long-term or permanent disability, since he was obviously ill.  His worry was he would never again be able to do the job that was literally killing him.  In five months my friend had developed no new interests.  He is not even taking brief walks in the wonderful California climate we used to complain we didn’t have the time to enjoy.  My friend was awakened while he was sleepwalking through his life, and he’d very much like to go back to sleep.

I was awakened from my sleepwalk in 1982.  That’s when I got laid off in the great Reagan Revolution.  I was living here in Kansas City, Missouri, working for the Office of Surface Mining - a Department of Interior agency that, while it still exists (although not in Kansas City), is not much more than a shadow of what it used to be.  I took a job in Burbank, California, working for a government plant representative office at Company L.  If that wasn’t the all-time worst job I'd ever had, it was certainly close.  I was told I would have a staff of two and would be directing the staff’s work.  Any resemblance between what I was promised and what I got was purely coincidental.  What I got was a job that had been, because of Reagan-era hiring freezes, vacant a year.  There was no staff.  And, of course, there was a year’s worth of backlog.  My desk was in a filthy office in a building that had been considered temporary when it was built during World War II.  The building faced the runway at the Burbank airport.  (Eventually I became accustomed to conversations suspended in mid-sentence while planes roared overhead.)  Well, my furniture was on its way to California and I couldn’t afford to move it back.  I was trapped.  Being trapped was a feeling I didn’t like.  I dug into my work.

In a few months my backlog was gone.  I expected some measure of appreciation for my efforts.  Boy, was I barking up the wrong tree.  All I heard from my boss was how wonderful the woman was who'd had my job before me.  My performance reviews were tepid.  The experience was dreadful.  

Now, you might think I’m bitter about my time in Burbank.  Actually, I’m grateful for it.  I learned how truly awful my life could be if I had to depend on someone else for the money I’d need to buy my next meal.  That job gave me the incentive I needed to start saving serious money.  That job gave me the incentive to become frugal before frugal was cool.  I started putting every dollar I could save into bonds.  I wanted an income I could depend on if I ever found myself out of work again.  I knew it would take awhile, but every time I saved $10,000, I had another $800 a year in income.  If I could live on $800 a month, that was one-twelfth of what I needed.

Things did take a turn for the better for awhile.  My superiors didn’t appreciate me, but the folks at Company L saw that I was a hard worker.  They offered me a job (with a healthy increase in pay) to move to their new plant in Austin, Texas.  That was in 1984.  By then, frugality had become my second nature.  Times were good, and I used those good times to sock away even more.

In 1988 the program I worked on was canceled, and I ended up making another move - this time to Company L’s plant in Silicon Valley.  (Have you figured out who Company L is, yet?)  My frugality was now paying off big time.  My salary was getting up there at the same time my interest income was getting healthy.  I was in Silicon Valley for seven years.  At the end of that time my salary was over $70,000, and I was saving $30,000 per year in addition to my 401(k) plan.  I was financially independent.

In 1993 Company L began merger talks with another industry giant.  There were massive layoffs.  I asked to be laid off (those of us who remained were, after all, being given the work - but not the pay - of our former co-workers).  I wanted to receive my three lousy weeks of severance pay and unemployment insurance.  However, things got so bad at Company L that I decided I'd rather be fired than hang on to a job I hated for the approximate amount of $9,600.  Which, after taxes, would be about $5,000.  I decided the money just wasn’t worth it.

In February 1995, at the age of 46, I laid Company L off.  I finally had what I'd decided back in 1982 that I wanted - enough of an income that I didn't have to depend on the kindness of strangers.

Times are good now.  Jobs are plentiful.  Pay is competitive.  This may last forever, but I doubt it.  Take time now to decide what you want.  And use these great times to make it come true.

For information on Larry Roth’s Living Cheap Press, visit his web site at www.livingcheap.com.  Larry will also be convening a class on frugality for Communiversity (in Kansas City, Missouri) on October 28, 1999.  For more information, see the Communiversity catalog or call (816) 235-1448.