People that have commission-based income can develop a standard of living without anticipating changes and / or downturns to their income.
They can ignore changes or attribute them as being temporary.
It is not until SOMETHING forces them to face the reality that monthly expenses are higher than income, over a period of time, that something needs to change.
The change could be to supplement your income (even get a non-commission, regular paycheck job), and / or reduce your income.
WT strenuously fought the internet (rightly so). Their consultants gave them a plan to embrace the internet (I know that this is contradictory - but also, rightly so).(What bloody entity does not have a decent website ??? ).
The problem was, and is, that WT and their consultants are like contestants on Shark Tank - we have a concept with a website - please invest with us.
The "due diligence" should have included the fact that the dot-com-bubble burst back in 2000.
Someone coming into the game 15 years later, having adherents go door-to-door or standing on street corners doing nothing more than saying: "Hey, OUR CHURCH has a website" is akin to a person on a dating website boasting that "I have a penis" or "I have a vagina," so, marry me.
IMO, WT either paid major bucks to an agency, and received good advice for a 1990's model, or they have done it in-house copying the Mormons,
No matter how, WT's growth came during times of great adversity, such as the Great Depression, the Great War, WW II, the Cold War and the Arms Race.
Although there are a handful of areas of conflict, they are only newsworthy because of the lack of anything else to report as bad news. There has not been any global adversity for a very long time.
Rutherford was a marketing genius, but his target market has changed from gung-ho middle-class to impoverished third-world citizens.
I am hardly opposed to helping the current target market, but as to WT's true goal of financially exploiting them - ummmm, time for a new consulting agency.
