There aren’t many industries in which you can make a pile of cash without formal qualifications. Mining is one.

A six-figure salary often overcomes hesitation at being away for extended periods, sometimes for several weeks at a time.

Yet people STILL have financial problems when working fly-in-fly-out (FIFO - pronounced fye-foh, not fee-foh). Just ask them! There’s not a crib room I’ve visited that didn’t contain someone complaining about their financial situation.

If you’re a FIFO worker, how can you avoid the typical financial pitfalls we find in this workgroup?

Here are four ideas to help:

1. Have a rainy-day plan

Mining has always been and will always be cyclic.

There are the glorious peaks, where the coffers overflow. There simply aren’t enough people in Australia to fill the demand for skilled workers. You can double or treble your salary in a few years in this environment if you’re strategic.

Some of us fall into the trap of thinking that’s normal.

Well, it’s not normal.

Commodities are an excellent proof that what goes up, must go down. When the bottom approaches, companies will shed employees and contractors like it’s going out of fashion.

Layoffs are part of the deal if you work in mining. Expect to see redundancies at many points in your career. What would you do if your role gets the chop in a downturn?

The time to work out what to do is not when the DCM (Don’t Come Monday) arrives. It’s now, before anything happens.

Here’s what I’ve seen work well:

1a. Make your (awesome) plan

Everyone needs a rainy day plan. This is a set of actions you would take if you lost your job. It might include things you would do to downsize your spending, e.g.:

• Sell some toys (boat, jet ski, motorbike etc),

• Find a place with lower rent to live in, and/or

• Do your own cleaning for a while instead of paying a cleaner.

...but it shouldn’t only be about spending less.

The best rainy day plans I’ve heard are AWESOME. In fact, they’re so good some people have a hard time not quitting work so they can start enacting those plans!

Here’s a few people have mentioned to me:

• Doing a twelve-month house swap with a family in Spain so your kids can learn the language and travel through Europe.

• Backpacking around South America for several months, seeing the highlights (e.g. Machu Picchu and Patagonia).

• Completing an MBA at a world-standard university. Doing it the full-time way to take advantage of the amazing case study discussions they offer (which you often miss out when you do it remotely).

• Living near a beach with great surf for six months, with nothing to do but master the art of longboards.

• Be the stay-at-home parent for a while – including some long lunches while the kids are at school.

Make this plan so good that if the opportunity to do it ever arrives, you will leap at the chance.

1b. Set aside the cash you need

Some redundancies lead to a big payout to fund your awesome plan.

…but not all of them. If you’ve got cash set aside, you’ll stress less about what the final payout might be.

First, you need to work out how much cash you need to make your plan happen.

You will be surprised at how little such plans actually cost. Especially if you relocate to a cheaper place to live for an extended period, for example if you negotiate a long-term rental or house swap instead of living in hotels. The mini-retirements I've taken have been the lowest cost-per-week periods of my adult life.

Now that you’ve worked out the cost, add another whack as a buffer. Just in case you decide to stick with that plan for longer, or something unforeseen pops up.

And now for the hardest part of that whole plan:

Set aside that amount in cash so you can access it when you need to. 

The cash doesn’t have to be in a transaction account. It could be in a term deposit, or your mortgage offset account, or even in your mortgage redraw facility. As long as you can have that cash within two days of deciding you want it.

If you have an awesome rainy-day plan and the cash to make it happen, you will be the crazy person grinning in the meeting when they announce the job cuts. What a way to turn a stressful event into something amazing!

With that cash set aside, you will also feel under less pressure to take the first job you’re offered. You can take your time to pick the right job for you, or choose not to work for a period.

Even if you do end up with another job inside three months and you don’t get to live in Spain for a year, you’ve ensured you had enough cash to make it through that period of unemployment.

What goes down will also come up again. The industry will recover and there will be more jobs available again at some point.

2. Outsource

While you awork FIFO, you’re away from home between 40 and 75 per cent of the time.

On site, you work hard and don’t get much time for play outside the 12+ hour days. You likely don’t want to come home to a list of chores on your Rest & Relaxation – that’s why it’s called R&R, not C&S (Chores & Slavery).

This is where having the extra disposable cash that comes with most FIFO roles is a big advantage. You can afford to outsource menial and mundane tasks for a fraction of your hourly rate, thus reducing stress. The return on investment is immeasurable when you’re feeling pressed from time on your breaks.

Here are a list of things I have outsourced in the past:

2a. Cleaning

$160 each fortnight gets me three hours, which does the floors and bathrooms plus some dusting. More than enough for my standards of cleanliness.

2b. Washing and ironing

There are places that will collect your washing for you, or you can arrange to drop it off.

2c. Food

A fortnightly organic fruit-and-veg box delivery is always a treat. The big grocery stores will also deliver to your home, or you can drive up to collect your shopping via Click and Collect. Or, you could get prepared meals delivered when you want them, or a meal box from Dinner Twist or similar.

2d. Booking travel and appointments

Hiring a virtual assistant on retainer or ad-hoc can be fabulous.

Last time I hired one on retainer was a dream. She lived in Perth (the same city as me) and I'd just email or call her with any job I don’t want to do myself.

It was a wonderful help when I was living overseas in a different time zone. I had my snail mail redirected to her house while I was away. Once a week she sent me an email with all the mail attached as scan. That part costs about $5 a week in 2011.

2e. Help with the kids

A nanny costs around $35 an hour. Give yourself a break one day a week by having a nanny get the kids to and from school.

2f. Following up customer service fails

I had a virtual assistant call up an airline once to lodge a complaint for me. I asked him not to get off the phone till he got something. He was on hold for an hour, spent 30 minutes reading out my complaint and arguing with customer service, and produced a $150 voucher for me.

It turned a horrid event into something entertaining – worth the $69 a month I paid for the service!

For those with partners minding the home and/or kids while you're on site:

Don’t just outsource your tasks. Do it for your partner as well.

How much happier would the at-home partner be if they didn’t have to clean while you were away? Or do the grocery shopping? Or pick up the kids from school every day?

Anything you can do to ease the burden on the person keeping life going while you’re away is money well spent. It may even save your marriage.

3. Rent

Owning something comes with risk.

Whatever you own, you have to look after. You have to pay all the bills associated with it. You have to clean it. All these things chew time and money. So, consider what you can rent instead of own:

3a. Home

In general, it’s cheaper to rent your lifestyle than to own it on a year-by-year basis.

You might not be able to paint the walls pink or install a deck. But you also don’t have to pay building insurance, rates, land tax or any maintenance costs if you rent your home.

Further, you’re not burdened with a mortgage if you lose your job. The lender doesn’t care if you lose your job - they still want their repayments.

One FIFO friend didn’t even rent a home. He lived in hotels on his R&R so he could change location whenever he wanted and he didn’t have to pay rent for a home he wasn’t using when he travelled. It worked for him for over a year (note: he was single and child-free).

3b. Boats and jet skis

If it floats or flies, it’s cheaper to rent than own.

Why not rent a flash boat twice a year and revel in it, instead of having to buy, maintain, fuel, store and clean your dinghy for the same price? Especially if you only take the dinghy out twice a year anyway because you can’t be bothered with the maintenance and cleaning…

3c. Car

Even a car might be more sensible to rent if you’re FIFO.

Pick up and drop off at the airport so you don’t have to catch a cab or pay for parking. You don’t pay registration or insurance, and you don’t have to get it serviced.

4. Practise delayed gratification

This is a tough one.

You’ve been in the bush for days or weeks, earning this dosh. Why not splurge when you return? After all, you’ve quite literally earned it.

Well, partly because it becomes a habit.

And partly because you’re missing out on one of the best bits of buying things: anticipation.

If you get in the habit of buying everything you want as soon as you want it, you get used to experiencing instant gratification. Sure, you can afford it now. But what if that downturn happens tomorrow? Breaking that habit is more than you want to be thinking about if you’re dealing with a job loss.

Also think about the example you’re making for your family.

Do you want your kids to learn that they can have whatever they want, whenever they want it? It’s hard, but your actions need to be consistent with your words. ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ is for morons.

You are also missing out on the satisfaction you can get when you buy what you really want:

The build-up of excitement as you wait.

Savour that time before buying. It’s this thrill, this anticipation, that makes waiting so rewarding. When you finally get that item you’ve been waiting for, you are much more likely to appreciate it.

You also avoid impulse buys, which often lead to buyer's regret.

Some splurging is fine, but don’t make it a habit.

Author’s note: this article was originally published on the Money School blog in September 2014 and has been refreshed in August 2024.

We’re slowly migrating the blog across to Beehiiv, which means we’re losing the comments on the original Wordpress blog.

Sorry to those who asked questions or made comments, you’re welcome to re-add them here.

About Money School

If you’re new here, welcome! Delighted to have you 😁

This is the blog for Money School, an Australian financial education company.

The main site is at https://www.moneyschool.org.au, but I keep our articles over here on beehiiv.

Everything on the main site and this blog is for educational purposes only. I’m not a financial adviser, nor do I play one on Netflix. I aim to help you learn about money so you can ‘choose your own adventure’.

Money School was co-founded in 2010 by me (Lacey Filipich) and my mother, Fran White. Money School offers workshops, online courses and has an international award-winning book, published with Penguin Life in 2020.

I’m also a regular media commentator on all things personal finance. If you’ve got 16 minutes to spare, you might like to check out my TEDx talk (over 1m views!) on financial independence and mini-retirements.