Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Chemists need an emergency fund

From a recent excellent post by The Polymerist about everyone's favorite topic, layoffs in the chemical industry, this worthwhile advice: 
Having two years of expenses in cash is a good cushion when you are older and if you lose your job and your severance and unemployment benefits get you through one year, guess what? You still likely have two years of expenses covered provided that inflation is not rampant. There is also a strong likelihood that you get laid off during a recession so having a strong cash cushion is nice for not having to sell investments during a downcycle. If you are in your late fifties or early sixties a few years of cash could mean the difference between when you can draw on retirement accounts and actually being retired.

But what if you are in the middle of your career, like your mid forties? One to two years of expenses could help tide you over to look for your next gig because unlike other professions there just aren’t really a lot of job opportunities out there for chemists and by out there I mean in the world.

I think of myself as reasonably "with it" in terms of personal finances, but I've never actually thought about what "expenses" look like. I liked this Vanguard post in terms of "what counts" in terms of "emergency expenses": 

  • Housing
  • Food
  • Health care (including insurance)
  • Utilities
  • Transportation
  • Personal expenses
  • Debt
That's a tall order for most mid-career folks like myself - guessing that you have a fairly fine grained sense as to how much this actually runs for yourself and/or your family. That's not an easy thing to think about or to start to save for, but it's definitely a wise thing to prepare for. Rainy days do come...

18 comments:

  1. Good to see that I'm not alone! I've always been a firm believer in having a 2-year emergency fund (in CASH), and I have had my fair share of people ridiculing me saying that 2 years is excessive and 6 months is enough. Those people haven't experienced the employment difficulties chemists face...

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is something I think about often. I have a good bit saved up, though I don't know how many years that translates into, off the top of my head.

    Some advice I've read for business owners seems apt: know what it costs to keep things going every week (or month), which costs can be cut quickly when needed, and which might be negotiated. I need to do this.

    My bigger concern is that I really like where I live in many ways and I have roots now (I moved more in the preceding decade or so). I really do not want to move again, so I'd probably have to change careers if/when something happens to my job. Sometimes I wonder if I should consider a trade, as those seem about as recession-proof as possible. But there's the physical toll and quite substantial pay cut to contend with.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I addressed preparedness from a small business and personal perspective in multiple LinkedIn articles:

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/prepared-how-one-independent-consultant-getting-harry/

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/improvise-adapt-overcome-how-one-small-business-some-harry/

    Harry

    ReplyDelete
  4. I find it useful to know my COBRA costs every year, and also see what an acceptable ACA plan would cost when the annual premiums are published every year. There are a lot of moving parts there, and ways to adjust your apparent income up or down to get the maximum ACA subsidy you are eligible for during times of long term unemployment.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is one of the reasons I tell kids not to study chemistry. My less educated friends make more money and have less stress and better quality of life. No I had to be a scientist...

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'm happy to have pivoted away from the lab/chemistry and into process engineering as there seems to be A LOT more job prospects out there, especially a lot of jobs at actually good companies that pay reasonably well. Those types of jobs seem to be few and far between for true bench chemistry work unfortunately.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Can I ask, how did you make the pivot?

      Delete
    2. I am the anon from above. Maybe my story is pure luck... I was working as a chemist in a very large company and HATED my job, site, and boss. So I actually looked internally to other jobs that sounded interesting but not exactly bench work. I made sure to contact the hiring manager "unofficially" through email because our recruiters were known to be poor at their jobs. I got a response within maybe five minutes. I made sure to highlight in this email my experiences that most closely related the responsibilities in the listing.

      I ended up getting that process engineer job but that site was run even worse than my previous site, so I stuck with it for as long as I could tolerate and tried applying to large pharma jobs after about 1.5 years experience. I was not expecting to get any bites from my applications because of my relative inexperience in process engineering but I probably had a 50% response rate from all my applications (this was at the height of COVID btw and some coworkers told me that there were A LOT of open jobs out there). I ultimately had two offers come through at approximately the same time. As a chemist, I never had that great of a response rate to applications I've placed so that was a remarkable tidbit.

      Delete
    3. Ah very good thanks for your detailed response. Congratulations on the job shift, I'd say you made your own luck. Determination often creates unforeseen opportunities.

      Delete
    4. Any thoughts on this reddit post:

      https://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/nqjzid/low_paying_jobs/h0ay205/

      Delete
    5. At least Johns Hopkins pay better than the University of East Tennessee, Kingsport, or Boise State University. Both are paying 32 kUSD for a full-time instructor. They'll probably get away with it!

      Delete
    6. That's a real joke. Why do chemists accept these low paying jobs? I agree that these institutions will get away with it. The amount of time and effort that one puts into a chemistry degree the ROI isn't the best. If I had to do it over again I would of probably went into some kind of trade or business. The reason being the abundance of those kinds of jobs in every small, medium and large city. If someone gets fired from there chemistry job there is a good chance they will have to relocate. If I was a plumber, mechanic, electrician, truck driver, or accountant there is a good chance my starting wage will be significantly more then what a chemist makes as well as there being a whole lot more opportunities. I am just curious how students can be so naïve to major in such a subject when the job prospects are pretty dismal. How does ACS even allow such low paying jobs. I remember seeing once on C&EN news about a bachelor degree chemistry position in the suburbs of Chicago for $15/hour. This job was posted just last year. If that is all companies aspire to pay chemists why even go into the field. Please don't say for the love of science, you still have to live and that means paying bills, saving up for retirement, child and medical expenses. Some ways I plan ACS leadership. In my opinion if you are going to be a leader in a non-profit organization you should at least have a bachelors degree in chemistry, otherwise there is a discourse of what is in the best interest of the organization see Manual Guzmans profile. For all those professors out there you know the job prospects are abysmal why do you keep on promoting the degree? I once spoke with a director at a fortune 500 company about this situation and this person told me the same thing. The person also stated that chemistry professors don't want to hear the truth regarding the job prospects. Also why are chemistry professors on the low end of the academia pay scale? Just some questions I have.

      Delete
    7. Edit, Some ways I "blame" ACS leadership.

      Delete
  7. A big part of the calculation has to be family status (married / single, kids / no kids) and the correlation between the spouses' employment prospects -- worst case scenario (spouses have similar job roles at the same company, therefore likely to both lose their jobs in a large job action) vs. best case scenario (spouses have totally different jobs in different industries, hopefully one being recession-proof)

    ReplyDelete
  8. After 3 periods of long-term unemployment in my 17-year career, plus a miserable experience in grad school, I really regret choosing chemistry as a career. I find chemistry interesting, and I like my current job, but I feel I've put much more into this field than I've gotten out of it, and I would have been better off getting some kind of office job.

    During my most recent job hunt, I kept getting rejected for technical sales jobs because I don't have sales experience. So how the heck do new salespeople happen? It seems most companies today would rather hire a non-technical back-slapper salesman than one with technical expertise. I've done plenty of tech service and direct customer interaction; you would think that would be close enough.

    People willing to move at the drop of a hat will always have a job in this field, but that's not an option for many as Anon 8:05 and Jordan pointed out. I know a few people who relocated to my area for jobs, and were laid off within a few months of moving and uprooting their lives. With today's short job tenures, I wouldn't recommend moving for a job unless you're a young single apartment-dweller who could easily move with a U-Haul. If it involves changing your kids' schools, disrupting your spouse's career, seeing your parents once a year at Christmas, picking a house you're not enthused about because you only had one weekend to look, etc, don't do it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi - I currently work in technical sales and didn't have prior sales experience. I'm seeing a LOT of companies hiring for tech sales jobs and have had a ton of interviews myself lately. Look up companies like Waters, Thermo Fisher, and others - they hire salespeople by the dozen. Entry-level sales does have a high turnover so you should be able to get your foot in the door somewhere. Plus thanks to COVID there are plenty of remote jobs available now.

      Delete
    2. KT, perhaps you could look at application scientist roles at suppliers like Thermo and Sartorius for example. I know quite a few application scientists where you are customer-facing but you're more like "advanced tech support" if that makes sense. I was a chemist but I actually really started hating chemistry and I also found a lot of rejection in sales interviews. The bulk of the responses were "we don't doubt your technical expertise but we're looking for someone with experience" and I would always think "Then why did you even interview me?" Anyway, certain companies have different types of application scientist responsibilities where you could still be more lab based and less customer-facing (I know Thermo has a mass spec application scientist group that 1/3 of them work in lab only and the other 2/3's have more customer-facing responsibilities). Anyway, I feel like an app scientist role is an easier pivot than sales in terms of requirements by employers.

      Delete
    3. That's basically what I was doing before, applications scientist / tech service work. I think the trap I got myself into is that I'm now overqualified for the kinds of entry level sales jobs where they're really looking for a recent grad, but not having sales experience barred me from the more advanced sales jobs in my subfield that I thought I'd be a great fit for. The refusal of employers to consider tech service experience "close enough" really grated on me. I suspect this may change as the economy picks up and employers are forced to stop chasing after a purple unicorn and just hire the best applicant they can get in the current market.

      I ended up in a position that's a great fit for me, and a better fit for me than a sales job, but I'm likely to be laid off and long-term unemployed every five years or so if I don't move over to the commercial side. My current job will give me managerial experience and a lot of exposure to customers and new market development, so I'm hoping it'll make me more marketable when the next layoff happens.

      Delete

looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20