Be financially independent!

[chipotle]

I've just come back from a sales pitch at a financial company called Primerica. They called it an "open house" for potential employees--but they were trying to sell us on positions, like you'd expect from a multilevel marketing company.

Now, you may ask, "Why were you there?" I was there because somebody from Citibank, the company that owns Primerica, called me last week and said they were looking for people with my background. She didn't say it was for Primerica, and she didn't say it was for a sales or "ownership" position.

So now you might ask, "Why were they looking for people with your background?" I have no idea, cause this sure wasn't no IT position, pardner. Honestly, I had a suspicion about this before I went--but hey, being a nice guy, I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

In return, they gave me about an hour-long presentation by a group of people who came across liked used car salesmen. The pitch was all about money. "Financially independent" to these guys means you have a net worth of a million or more. Their tone was condescending at best to the other 95% of us. I've never been subject to a pitch whose message was so clearly "and isn't money all that matters?" You make all your money at the place on commissions paid on other Citibank services you sell to people who are getting "free" financial needs analyses from you ("what other companies would charge at least $1000 for," they say).

And they had the gall to say, "the beauty of this is that we're not salesmen." This while they made a point of using everyone's first name in the middle of their canned routine. ("Now on this slide, ____, you see that...")

But at least their examples were chauvinistic, and for all the talk about the amazing money they're making, it struck me that the "slides" were transparencies on an overhead projector. Their regional vice president or whatever the hell his title was isn't equipped with a generic laptop and PowerPoint?

So why did they target me? My cynical suspicion is that they figure that people looking for work in the IT field right now are particularly desperate. I wrote down snarky notes on my Visor while I was listening (such as "like Amway for financial planners"). One of the first things I wrote was, "makes me want to be bohemian."

And it's true. Sure, the Primerica droids were right in some ways--I do want to be "financially independent." But this is kind of like politicians taking a stand against crime. You start with something obvious and then wend your way off to la-la land, whether it's the blind acceptance of stupid drugs laws as a solution (to what, exactly), or the blind acceptance of the "only 1% will be wealthy when they retire and only 5% will be 'financially independent'" as the just, good and indeed inevitable consequence of the American way. They talked about helping people become debt-free as being Primerica's business, but the clear message was "you want to be in that 5%"--not "you want to expand that 5% to 10%," let alone something radical like "you want to change the underlying assumption that if 54% of a society's members end up dead broke after a life of work, it's their own damn fault." (Again, that figure came from their own presentation--as did the assertion that it was their own damn fault, although they put it slightly less baldly. Only slightly.)

This is the sort of thing that makes me more inclined to sell everything I own but the PowerBook and the car and volunteer for Habitat for Humanity--or try to get a job as a park ranger in some very obscure, rarely-visited national forest somewhere.

Comments

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

They're good practice for saying no to cults.

Oh, wait a minute... it sounds like they are a cult.

I've been through a similar ritual. Except that these people wanted money from you for their special training. That's when I loudly said, "This is where I get out," and left.

[joshuwain.livejournal.com]

I appreciate your "Amway" comment; a previous roommate of mine was a cultist with them for a time, and it was a bit disturbing. In fact, your assessment of the kind of vacantly-cheerful, "money is everything" attitude espoused by those people was more succinctly put than any description I've ever come up with.

Y'know, we should all follow Postvixen's suggestion of creating a commune-like arrangmenet to lift each other up and help out with finding work/arrangements. It might be for the best, since many of us who know each other, here, are on similar wavelengths in regards to our beliefs and skills...

Anyway, I'm glad you resisted the temptation of Evil™ and could stay the hand of wickedness for at least a little while longer... :)

Take care,
Sylvan (Dave)
n

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Some of the folks in the local group here have half-joked about forming a company to do--well, something technical. Part of the problem is that we don't really have an accountant type. From past experience I consider myself to have the business sense of a boll weevil.

That concern aside, it's definitely not a bad idea.

[chastmastr.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. You may have a point there. Helping make the world a better place as the main focus, whether in a park or otherwise?

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

"Helping make the world a better place" is awfully idealistic, but it's something I'd like to feel like I was doing in some way, yes. I don't think it's impossible to get that feeling in a for-profit company--at the very least you might feel you're providing a useful product or service that people need or want. I had that feeling, at least most of the time, at Intermedia and GTE TSI before that. (Of course, another lesson from Intermedia is that such a feeling isn't necessarily enough; ultimately I wanted to get out of my position there because the job had settled into unchanging drudge work, and there were no obvious paths for advancement or a change in duties.)

Unfortunately, I don't have the training or education to make a complete career change without starting at an entry-level position... and I can't afford to take the corresponding pay cut, at least not without some ugly consequences.

[tacit.livejournal.com]

Premise: You want more money.
Conclusion: You will have more money if you give ME money..

Very clever. Do people actually fall for that pitch?

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Sure. It's how multilevel marketing works, and Primerica is sufficiently "real" to bring people in, I'm sure--after all, you actually are selling stuff on commission, rather than just depending on recruiting other agents, so on the surface it's not as cockeyed as truly illegal pyramid schemes are. But naturally, if you do recruit people, you start getting a cut from their commissions.

Of course, after poking around a bit for information on the company, I found reference to how their agents have to pay for all expenses out of pocket (perhaps explaining why they didn't have laptops with PowerPoint for the dog and pony show), why their "personal financial analysts" aren't called certified financial planners the way their competitors would be (to wit, they're not certified), and so on. Someone did an analysis of numbers in Citibank's annual report and Primerica's reports on how many agents they have at what levels, and figured out that their lowest-level PFAs--the vast majority of their employees--made an average of something like $750 a year.

I'd like to think people in the IT field would be too smart to fall for this, but I know better. Evidently the last few months they've been targeting IT people the same way they did me--find a résumé, set up an "open house interview" invoking the name Citibank rather than Primerica. Since there's a big Citibank processing center close to here, I was hoping my initial bad feeling was wrong.

If nothing else, it makes me more likely to cross Citibank off my list of potential new employers, just because they own these yoyos.