Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua, I am your host and today we talk about making sure

that you are not behaving stupidly with your money so that you will never be in a

position of a slave who lives in fear of losing a single paycheck.

We begin with a short excerpt from this morning's program of Morning Edition on National Public Radio.

Air travelers are used to flight delays and cancellations because of the weather,

or maybe mechanical problems. Well, it soon might be the partial government

shutdown that is disrupting travel.

New planes are not being certified to fly.

Security screeners and air traffic controllers are working unpaid. Here's more from

MPR's David Schaefer in Chicago. I'm here at Chicago's O'Hare Airport

standing next to one of the large CT 80 scanners. It's essentially a CT scanner for your checked luggage. And the TSA officers who operate

this machine, they're here at work lifting the heavy and sometimes odd-shaped and over-stuffed bags onto the conveyor belt to go through the machine.

Even though come this Friday, if the shutdown continues, they won't get paid.

And that presents a severe financial hardship for many of these officers.

I've been here 16 years plus I am a single mom.

Christine Vitell is a security screener at O'Hare with a son in college.

She's trying to figure out how she'll pay his tuition and...

I just bought a house.

I'm not going to be able to pay my mortgage.

A lot of the offices, they live paycheck to paycheck. Janice Casey is president of the union local representing TSA employees in Chicago and she

notes that they are among the lowest paid federal employee. Some average 36 to 4343,000 a year, but start only in the mid-20s.

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