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Employees across industries are feeling increasingly insecure about their jobs. One in three American workers say they have layoff anxiety and one in four say they feel insecure in their job, according to a recent study. In recent weeks, tens of thousands of U.S. government workers have been fired, and federal agencies are expected to lay off thousands more. For now, its unclear whether federal job cuts will have a ripple effect on the private sector, particularly on firms that rely on government contracts. U.S. tariffs can also have an impact on the job market. Workers who are worried about losing their jobs may want to take steps to shore up their finances. Recent surveys find that many Americans dont have much saved for a rainy day. Nearly half (43%) of Americans say they would need to borrow money to pay for an unexpected expense, such as $1,000 bill for an emergency room visit or car repair, according to Bankrates Emergency Savings Report. In addition, 13% of Americans have no savings, according to the Clarify Capital study. If youre concerned about losing your job, make a list of every nonnegotiable monthly expense, suggests Bobbi Rebell, personal finance expert at BadCredit.org. For example, list how much you pay for housing, your phone bill, electricity, and food. Add those up and then compare that amount to whats in your emergency fund and figure out how much runway you have to live on with only that money, she says. If youre coming up short, here are five financial moves to make now to prepare for a layoff. While youre still working, live as if you lost your job Commit to only spending money on essentials, even though you are still getting a paycheck, and put the extra money into your emergency fund. There are a lot of things that we don’t consider discretionary that very much are discretionary, Rebell says, listing expenses like buying new clothes, going out to dinner, or happy hour with friends. Rather than treating yourself to a new dress, treat yourself to more money in your emergency fund, Rebell says. Practice politely declining invitations, Rebell says. For instance, if youre invited to a fancy birthday dinner and you dont want to chip in for drinks, dinner, and a gift, just tell the host that you cant make it, you dont need to give an excuse, Rebell says. Cut back on retirement savings There is no question that saving for retirement is important, however financial experts caution that if youre looking at potentially being unemployed for six months, nine months, or even a year, the funds youre putting into your employer-sponsored retirement fund might be more useful in your bank account. If youre worried about losing your job, you might want to prioritize current cash flow over retirement plan savings and temporarily scale back on your 401k contributions so you have more available income, says Tracey Spivey, partner and private enterprise lead at KPMG, a global professional services firm that specializes in audit, tax, and advisory services. Rebell agrees that if youre facing a potential layoff, you might not want to have all your savings in a retirement fund. However, she says, make sure you are still putting enough money into your 401(k) to get the employer match. Keep in mind if youre 55 or older and you are fired or laid off, the IRS does allow you to access your 401(k) without paying the 10% penalty. However, Rebell says, you will need to pay taxes on any 401(k) money you access, and any funds used now obviously wont be available when you retire. Audit subscription services One of the easiest ways to find extra money is by auditing subscription services, says Said Israilov, a financial planner and wealth manager at Israilov Financial in San Francisco. We frequently uncover $80$100 in monthly subscription costs that provide no to minimal value, he says. Categories to look at include: Trial subscriptions that have been converted to paid plans. This can include mobile games and streaming services. Redundant music and video streaming services. Typically, its more expensive for family members to have individual accounts rather than subscribing to one account and paying for multiple users. Annual subscriptions that auto-renew. This could include mediation or diet apps as well as software subscriptions. Expensive gym and fitness memberships. Consider replacing the cost of high-end gym membership with a low-cost membership to a community recreation center. Consider replacing all your entertainment subscription services with a free library card, at least temporarily, says Erika Kullberg, an attorney and personal finance expert and host of the podcast Erika Taught Me. Most libraries offer newsletters, magazines, audiobooks, and even games and movies. Remember, these cuts are temporary, so see what you can do to save money now, so you have some extra cushion in the event a job loss does transpire, she says. Negotiate a better rate Lower your bills by calling your insurance, internet, and utility providers and asking whether you can save money by changing the plan youre currently on. Insurance bills often present opportunities for savings, Israilov says. Ask about bundling discounts and usage-based insurance programs for low-mileage drivers, if you drive less than 625 miles a month, he says. If you do lose your job and you owe money on a mortgage, car loan, or credit card, call the financial institution that holds that debt and ask about forbearance, says Derik Farrar, head of personal deposits at U.S. Bank. Your lender may offer a reduction or pause in payment during a temporary hardship like being laid off, he said. In addition, ask about ways to lower your interest rate, he says. Consider selling high-value items We all have items we no longer use. Take inventory of your possessions to determine if you still use them and whether others might value them. Rebell recommends selling gold jewelry that doesnt have sentimental value, designer handbags, and designer clothes you no longer use. However, if you plan to sell these items through ThredUp or The RealReal be aware that some websites take a percentage of the sale, which could eat into your profits. Consider selling your items at a local consignment shop to avoid fees, she says. Some of these lifestyle changes will hurt more than others. While you can go back to your normal spending and saving habits when you are employed again, some degree of frugality is usually a good idea.
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Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Companys work-life advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: I think my manager is burned out. What can I do?A: Its tough out there for managers, especially middle mangers who are often caught in thewellmiddle and may find themselves enforcing unpopular policies that they didnt create. Its not explicitly your job to fix your bosss problems (and you dont have the power or authority to do so if you arent in a leadership role). But, a manager sets the tone for their team and if they are burned out, their entire team will likely follow suit. It may feel unfair, but giving a bit of thought to this question will make your (and your coworkers’) lives much better. This is a super-charged opportunity to practice your managing up (aka managing your manager) skills.Fast Company contributor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic outlined several signs that your manager might be experiencing burnout and how to address them. Here are a few. They don’t seem to care how everyone else is doing Chamorro-Premuzic says that a burned-out boss might start to be less open to feedback, be suddenly uninterested in team morale, or no longer receptive to concerns. If your boss is acting like this, you can normalize small breaks and occasional team check-ins, where theres more opportunity for casual interactions. Chamorro-Premuzic also says you can be supportive in subtle ways, like offering to help with tasks or expressing appreciation for their work. Being a manager can feel thankless. If your manager feels like no one cares about them or notices their work, they’re less likely to offer you and your coworkers the same appreciation. If you show them you care about them, hopefully that care will trickle down. Their energy is all over the place Scientific studies on burnout show that energy and motivation can wax and wane when someone is facing chronic stress. What this might look like in your manager is that you are being micromanaged on some days when they are overly worried about how your work reflects on them, and then completely ignored on other days, as they feel overwhelmed by their own workload. If your boss is acting like this, Chamorro-Premuzic advises that you can help them by providing structure and consistency in your work so they know what to expect. Institute routines like regular project updates or weekly recaps, and suggest ways they can delegate so their workload is more distributed. (Bonus: Taking on work above your level might set you up for a future promotion.) Longer hours and blurred boundaries If your manager is emailing late at night, working weekends, not taking time off, those are all pretty clear signs that they are habitually overextending themselves, and on the fast track to burn out. If your boss is acting like this, it probably feels tricky to push back but its another place that you can lead by example by setting clear boundaries. You can also gently remind them that you and your colleagues can take on their tasks when they arent there. (In other words: The world wont fall apart if they take a vacation and it might help them reset.)Yes, your managers job satisfaction isnt explicitly your job, but if we truly want to work in a more humane workplace it means we should care about everyones well-being, no matter where they are on the org chart.Want more advice on helping burned out managers? Here you go: Managers are not okay. Why were headed to a manager crash in 2025 Its time to check on your middle managers 5 red flags of your bosss behavior you should not ignore
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In our current political and media environment the loudest voices are the ones that are farthest from the center. Tech hasnt been spared, with some Silicon Valley leaders drifting rightnot only out of ideology, but also pragmatism. Box CEO Aaron Levie sits somewhere in the middle: not a MAGA-touting accelerationist like Marc Andreessen, nor a traditional progressive like Reid Hoffman. But he is clear-eyed about one thing: Donald Trump will likely preside over some of the most pivotal years in AI and innovation. And Levie sees reason for optimism. Fast Company spoke to him about AI policy, AI and crypto czar David Sacks, Elon Musks DOGE, and AI safety concerns. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. I know you came out in support of Harris before the election, but now I’d like to find out what your assessment of Trump is so far, where technology is concerned. During the Harris campaign, I felt like there was an opportunity, and there really needed to be a very strong kind of pro-technology, progress-type of push in the Democratic party. So I was trying to ensure that they saw key policy issues around AI and deregulation and how to drive more growth. And so that was my interest in the topic during the campaign cycle. But I just want America to succeed, and I want our tech position to be as strong as possible. And I think there’s a number of topics that kind of relate to that. There’s high-skill immigration, there’s AI policy, there are regulatory issues and topics that face the tech industry, especially more of the harder tech, more manufacturing-leaning parts of tech. And I think we have an opportunity as a country to ensure that we are building for not just the next couple of years, but the next couple of decades, and there’s a lot of key things that are going to happen right now around AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles, advanced manufacturing, new forms of energy; all of these things will intersect with either federal or state and local policy, and it’s critical to make sure that we’re heading in the right direction on those topics. As it relates to Trump, I think there have been a number of things that have been signaled that I think are actually extremely positive to those topics. I think we’re really early in seeing how they will manifest. Some of them were on the campaign trail, some of them are kind of being in office, that have been signaled, and to some extent, a little bit in a wait-and-see mode on how they all manifest and evolve. And you know, my views on them are extremely clear, and I’m hoping we lean in the right direction on a large number of those topics. Lets talk about AI first. I think you saw JD Vance give his Paris speech, and he did talk a bit about striking a balance between regulation and innovation, but he also seemed to scold Europe for what it has done with the AI Act. He accuses them of going too far. Do you agree with him on that? My rhetoric would probably be different, but I am worried that when it comes to policy conversations, in the U.S. and even globally, we have tilted more toward the precautionary views of AI as opposed to the productive and pro-progress-oriented views of AI. I thought that it was compelling that the vice president talked about how AI is going to actually createI’m going to now probably change some of the wordsbut create more of an abundance environment where we can actually use it to help jobs and create jobs, and we can use it to improve healthcare, and we can use it to drive manufacturing. And if you just take a word content in the speech and compare it to maybe a speech that would have come from a U.S. politician a year or two ago, it leaned 80% more positive than negative, with the appropriate levels of calling out that there are things that we do need to pay attention to. Do you have thoughts about David Sacks and his appointment to “AI and Crypto Tsar”? I am much closer to the AI side and the AI Tsar. I don’t think about crypto that much. David’s a strong choice for that. David knows his way around Silicon Valley. He knows all the people doing all the important work at the leadership levels of AI labs and big tech. And so to have a conduit that can help marry what’s happening in Silicon Valley with the policy decisions happening in the government, I think he’s in a great position. I’m also very happy about Michael Katzios on OSTP (Trump nominated Kratsios as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy). I think he’s a very strong pick for that job. And so I think the administration has brought in sophisticated, thoughtful technologists or business leaders into the administration to help drive policy in the right direction. You were also upbeat about Elon Musk and what he’s doing with DOGE, at least around the time of the election. Do you have any thoughts about that now? At a philosophical level, I think that the thing I get more excited about in the DOGE remit is how do we modernize the approach that many of these agencies are taking to regulation? How do we ensure that we’re driving more efficiency so we can have just better productivity in the government? I think that’s a very good thing. I think there’s an ability to modernize a lot of the technology as well in the government to get more efficiency and be able to drive just overall better results. When you have better data feeds coming in, when you have better ways of collaborating, when you get better insights, we can make better policy decisions, we can run the government better. As a big-name tech CEO, do you feel an obligation to express your views and let people know where you stand on these things? For me, it’s a natural thing. But I do think we’re in an era right now where there’s almost no industry, and especially in tech, there’s no subindustry in tech that will not be impacted by policy decisions from the federal government. And so I do think we’re in an environment where you have to lean in to some extent on the policy conversation if you want any chance that it ends up going in a productive direction. I have some things that to me personally, from a business perspective, rise to higher or lower levelslike one of my biggest areas is high-skill immigration. And so thats an area that I unequivocally and emphatically view as mission-critical to get right because it will lead to the next generation of companies for us to go build in the futurethe next Apple, the next Google, the next OpenAI. You want the odds to be that that’s going to get created in America, and high-skill immigration is one of your ways of increasing those odds. AI policy raises very high because getting AI policy right or wrong could mean that either the U.S. is the home of AI or China is the home of AI. And as a U.S. company, I think it would be a disaster if we miss the window where we could have complete AI leadership. On the high-skilled labor part of this, are there specific changes to that that you are in favor of or that you think might have a chance of happening in the next four years? We do need a fster way for people to get into the country that is more of a merit-oriented approach. On the campaign trail, Trump very clearly stated that he wants to stamp a green card to every diploma for individuals that are coming from outside the country to study here. And so I think there’s been some acknowledgment that we have an inefficient system. It’s a little bit too random at times, and it’s probably not serving us in the best way possible of getting just clearly getting the best talent in the world to always come here, and that’s what we need. I will keep fighting and shouting from the rooftops that that’s a critical policy, whether it’s in the Trump administration or whatever administration comes next. I know that your business depends on AI, and you’re probably looking down the road and thinking about how Boxs product can evolve as AI progresses. Do you have concerns about the safety risks of future AI models? The labs need to operate responsibly. They need to test these models and ensure the safety and protection of how these models operate and ensure that we are in a situation where AI can’t go rogue and complete actions on their own without the right kind of guardrails being built into these systems. So, I’m in favor of everything that the market is currently doing. The part that I’m less in favor of is a situation where there would be just an incredibly extreme liability for the model providers to be able to release new AI model updates without major government involvement. Because what that will do is dramatically slow down the pace of the industry, and the pace of the industry will move at the rate at which the government can evaluate and understand how AI works. And we see in any industry where that is happening, we see less competition, we see higher prices, we see less innovation. Maybe there’s a time and a place for that to happen in AI, but we’re not there yet. AI right now is really early. And so, what we need is an environment where the AI innovation is accelerating, where the models are getting better, where they’re getting cheaper, where they’re getting more capable. And what we need is a shared industry-oriented way of establishing that we do need safe AI. These teams should be testing their models. We should have more best practices, more research, more red teaming of these technologies. But to me, I have not been compelled yet that we need the government to overwhelm the system with those reviews and those procedures. And I may get to that point where I do believe that, and I’m actually glad that there are lots of people that say we need that. I think it should be a really healthy debate and dialogue.
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