Social Security- not what you are thinking

How to pass, fit in, eventually set an example, and ultimately lead the way.
Saltation
Posts: 39
Joined: Mon Jun 19, 2017 6:20 am

Re: Social Security- not what you are thinking

Post by Saltation »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Thu Aug 03, 2017 6:48 pm
1) Your business partner starts gambling on penny stocks with company funds.
2) Your teenage daughter becomes addicted to pain-killers and starts pawning your belongings.
3) Your spouse runs away to Tahiti to paint naked teenage girls and leaves you to cover the mortgage.
4) Your Aunt who is a member of your Sprint Framily is lapsing into senility and keeps changing the password to the account and then forgetting it.
5) Your boyfriend does not take his medication for bi-polar disease and shakes you awake at 3 in the morning and asks for your car keys.
Besides all of these questions stemming from lake of foresight or bad decision making I will take a stab at them.

1. My business partner (DW) is more conservative financially than I am. I am more likely to gamble with penny stocks than she.
2. The other night DW and I were sitting around the house looking at all of our belongings trying to find out what we paid for. To our surprise not much except a couple beds, the couch and one chair and two computers. The point is my material possessions mean little to me.....unless my daughter was selling my investment account which would be my own fault. Obviously passwords were not strong enough.
3. In 29 more months she can run to Tahiti and paint naked girls. The mortgage will be paid off then. I don't see here in Tahiti, though. I suspect she will be somewhere she can garden, have a craft brew, relax in peace and have hardwood floors.
4.I piggyback off my FIL's cellphone account to save money on the total bill. I don't have this risk.
5. He can take the 20 year old truck. That has already been in an incident.

People going rogue generally involves a certain level of damage control in the short term that involves highly dynamic circumstances with emotional people. As a rule, I very rarely involve myself with other people that have a history of instability. I have not spoken with my male biological parent in more than six years because of one voicemail. Why? His inherent instability was a liability to my standard of living. If you count my DW and two entries for my parents in my cellphone I have 17 contacts. I keep my social circle small. If need be I prune the vine. Besides my nuclear family I am ready to disconnect at anytime from anyone for any reason I find detrimental to my well-being.

IlliniDave
Posts: 3845
Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2014 7:46 pm

Re: Social Security- not what you are thinking

Post by IlliniDave »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Tue Aug 08, 2017 4:51 pm

... So, what I am trying to figure out is how to best plan for failure rather than suffer the losses associated with planning to avoid it?
There I don't think I can be much help. When you view an interaction as an investment you get back to the inextricable risk/reward connection. And that goes back to what I think I said above which is to avoid taking risks you cannot afford to endure should they become reality. As far as specific situations, the devil is in the details. There are usually prudent steps one can take to eliminate/minimize unnecessary risk, but there will still be an analog to market risk that you are stuck with. Part of that is asking "what's the worst thing that can happen?" and "what would happen when it does?" Then avoid the ones where the answers to those questions are worse than your tolerance for bad. Beyond that I would speculate that it's largely a matter of intuition.

Scriptbunny (and 7Wannabe5), I think you two are making fun of me, but I'm too dense to figure out how. I'm a good sport though, so carry on! :)

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9372
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: Social Security- not what you are thinking

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@20sharkall03:

The more I read the responses you guys are offering to the examples I gave, the more I realize that I likely was still coming from a bit of a spot of self-pity because the examples I offered are reflective of only the downside of various social relationships. Rational analysis requires rigorous examination of totality of self-interest, or perceived self-interest in the moment of decision-making.

Second attempt:

1) Your business depends on a good deal of schmoozing up to clients for success and profit. Your partner is much better at that sort of thing than you, but also tends towards taking risks amounting to gambling on the margin with company funds.
2) Your baby girl who has been the love of your life ever since you first looked into her big blue eyes and she grasped your thumb in her tiny hand, started demonstrating a good deal of anti-social behavior after you divorced her mother for some reasons you recognize to be pretty damn selfish. Last time she visited, you noticed $50 short from your wallet, and a pill you didn't recognize at the bottom of her backpack.
3) You start painting naked teenage girls in your basement studio. Your wife reacts by moving out and leaving you to cover the mortgage.
4) You save $20/month on cell service by being part of your Aunt's Framily Circle, but she keeps forgetting to pay the bill and changing the password, so every month you have to go over to her house and help her fix the problem.
5) Your boyfriend is a devoted sweetheart who bakes bread and keeps bees and cuddles with you in the back of his jeep on camping trips when he is on his medication, but he chose to stop taking his medication because "he was so happy now that he was with you" and the medication had some sexual side-effects he didn't like. You decide to at least make some effort to get him to see his psychiatrist because you are worried that he will come to harm in his highly manic state, but then he shakes you awake at 3 in the morning and asks for your car keys.
IlliniDave wrote:Part of that is asking "what's the worst thing that can happen?" and "what would happen when it does?" Then avoid the ones where the answers to those questions are worse than your tolerance for bad.
Right. But sometimes you can fail at your estimation of the worst that can happen, and sometimes either choice is pretty terrible. For instance, when my DS28 was going through a highly erratic phase during late adolescence, my choice was either over-protect/over-coddle and deal with the future ramification of that choice OR allow him to experience greater burden of the natural consequences of his behavior. The situation was such that I had good reason to believe that he might die if I didn't take preventative action, but I chose to let him flail. I really don't know if I could have recovered from the worst possible outcome of that choice, but I believe it's worse to stunt a person by babying them than to let them harm themselves.

Anyways, I figured out what I did wrong in the recent situation with my sister. I knew there was a possibility, which I hoped to be slim, that she might have another acting-out psychiatric incident, but I chose to continue living with her, and I made a plan for what I would do if that happened again. BUT, I didn't ask her what she would prefer for me to do if it happened again. So, I was not prepared for her very bad reaction to my response. It is entirely possible that I would not have agreed to behave in alignment with her preference, but I was treating her like a baby, or engaging in covert contract, by not even asking. I mean, you have no choice about treating a mentally ill person like a baby when they are actively severely mentally ill, but you should treat them like any other adult when they are stable.

IlliniDave
Posts: 3845
Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2014 7:46 pm

Re: Social Security- not what you are thinking

Post by IlliniDave »

7Wannabe5,
Sounds like with your son the worst-case outcome was the same irrespective of your choice, and the real choice was his not yours anyway. But you are correct, short of omniscience, we can't always anticipate all outcomes or accurately gauge all risks. I have no advice for gaining omniscience, that one has alluded me.

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9372
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: Social Security- not what you are thinking

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Well, with my son it was more a question of when is a kid no longer a kid? I mean, you don't allow a 5 year old to suffer from the natural consequences of impulsively running after a ball into traffic, but you can't grab up and save a 17 year old who comes home with gravel embedded in his knees from jumping out the back of his friend's van while drunk, and that was a relatively minor incident. I was pretty much err on the opposite side of Tiger Mom, so I would sometimes fret that I should be doing more. End game for me was hand-wringing while communicating "I wish you would act like you cared more about how sad I will be if something terrible happens to you."

Riggerjack
Posts: 3182
Joined: Thu Jul 14, 2011 3:09 am

Re: Social Security- not what you are thinking

Post by Riggerjack »

7w5, you certainly choose odd ways to eventually ask a question. I'd given up on this thread before you got around to asking:
Maybe I'm not explaining very well, but there are a lot of contracts we enter into that involve other people that are more likely than not to fail in some manner eventually, but it is still the case that the sum of these entered into, worked upon, and then failed contracts over time is better than doing everything in a more self-reliant manner. So, what I am trying to figure out is how to best plan for failure rather than suffer the losses associated with planning to avoid it?
And suddenly this started to make sense. The best way is to plan the failure, and sometimes help it along. To explain will take a long story, those not REALLY interested in what a manipulative bastard I can be should move along. This will be long, and not particularly interesting.

I'm cleaning up a rental for sale. I hired labor off of Craigslist. The problem with a humming economy is it is hard to get someone to operate a shovel for $20/hr, and I had just injured my knee. I had burnt through a few unlucky volunteers and this is where S enters the scene.

S is strong, 23, clearly not the sharpest tool in the drawer, with a history of working manual labor jobs. I have him work basic landscaping for a while, then show him how to lay pavers, and then strip paint, prepping to repaint the exterior. He did great work when I worked with him, and I arranged for him to come strip paint the next day, while I did something else, and since the house was empty, gave him a key.

The following day, we come back, and S has used the pressure washer to strip paint, damaging the siding, exactly how I had told him not to do it. And he turned out about an hour and a half's work and claimed 6. (No problem, I knew this was a possibility before I set this up. Now I know S can't work on his own. Cheap lesson, $90.)

But at the end of the day, my DW notices my nail gun is gone. Look all over, it's gone. S never saw it. Uh huh. well, I didn't need it to finish the job, and it was $99 new on sale. S wasn't the only one with a key, but I knew the other guy, for 15 years. He didn't grab my cheap knockoff gun. DW is pissed. S leaves with his girlfriend, I round up the tools not needed, and take em home, generally clean up a site that shouldn't have gotten so messy anyway, and choose a few tools to leave out.

Go home, come back with my lock box, and change the locks on all the doors. S is working outside. I make sure to keep an eye on him, I'm looking for odd behaviour. Then I spot it. He's carrying his jacket from the side of the house he is working on, to the side he's not. We're close to end of day, so I yell to my wife, asking where the hose nozzle is, then go on that side of the house, moving stuff around, and moving his jacket at the same time. My nice metric gear wrench set falls out with a clatter, and S comes around the corner, looking guilty and a bit stupid.

At this point, he has lied, cheated, and stolen from me, but, I'm injured, need the work done, and even with these costs adding up, S is a known evil, and the previous laborers were weak enough to make him valuable, still. So I look him in the eye, and ask if he has seen the hose nozzle, then wander off looking for it. I went around back where DW is cleaning up, ask her to look on that side of the house for tools, and mention the wrenches specifically. She grabs them, unaware, and continues the clean up.

Soon S comes up, looking sheepish, and apologies, he should have just asked to borrow the wrenches, blah blah. I tell him fine, and loan him the wrenches, pointing out that they are my favorites, and Costco doesn't sell them anymore, so please return them in the morning. He's surprised that I want him back.

Now, I know there's a 50/50 chance I never see S or the wrenches again. But, even with the problems, he does good work, and now he has some guilt to work off if he comes back, and no hard feelings if he doesn't. It's always good practice to let the really stupid and flawed ones feel like they had a victory.

He came back, worked like a fiend for a few days, then back to normal, then stopped showing up.

I replaced him with 4 ex cons, but that is a different story.

So, let's review. I took a risk hiring strangers off Craigslist. I took another leaving him alone with a key.
I took another after he lied and cheated, and another after I knew he stole, and another to catch him, and another to bring him back after I caught him.

But in each case, I had a limited downside, and as each problem developed, I reduced my risks, and accepted the losses as part of the cost of doing business. Even with all the losses, I feel like I came out even, when you factor in the value of the story, which I've told a few times now.

Some folks think I'm gullible, others, too forgiving. I am neither. I was never wronged, I was just wrong. I took risks, knowing that things could go as they did, and really, they could have been much worse. I gave S every chance to succeed, knowing I would profit if he did, and that my losses would be minimal if he didn't.

So, I would encourage you to take risks, but only after checking to ensure failure does minimal damage, and sometimes it helps to encourage the failure, so you can control the fallout. As I did when I chose which tools to leave out.

I hope that helps. Good luck.

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9372
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: Social Security- not what you are thinking

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Riggerjack:

Gotcha-lol.

I think the risk in my recent lifestyle portfolio has mainly resulted from spreading my eggs into so many baskets, it's less like one sturdy parachute, and more like a fistful of brightly colored helium balloons. So, even though I am clearly able to float along happily with a certain size clutch of balloons, I don't know exactly how many can pop, yet leave me with enough left to keep me from landing on my butt. Luckily, it seems like I am still doing okay ;)

EdithKeeler
Posts: 1099
Joined: Sun Sep 01, 2013 7:55 pm

Re: Social Security- not what you are thinking

Post by EdithKeeler »

I'm late coming into this discussion, but to me the answer to this question is risk management (which is also my profession). In any endeavor or relationship, it essentially comes down to three questions:

1) if I enter into this arrangement or relationship, what are the possible positive and negative outcomes?

2) what can I do to either prevent or mitigate the negative outcomes?

3) even if negative outcomes happen, is it still worth it to me (however you choose to define worth here) to engage in this relationship or endeavor?

So, anticipate that it's possible that your business partner might do something that affects you--address it in advance in the partnership agreement. Your teen daughter starts a drug habit and starts pawning your stuff: rehab numbers and safe deposit box. Your aunt could change the password: decide it's not worth the hassle and have a private plan for a few extra bucks.

Into every life a little shit must fall, but if you're smart about relationships and planning for possibilities, it doesn't have to be a catastrophe.

And I personally don't believe the MBTI has much to do with it (or anything, frankly). It doesn't predict for mental illness , it doesn't anticipate the actions of others around your partner or whoever, so I don't see much point in relying on that.

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