I left my job about two months ago, and I applied for unemployment immediately. I got a new job today, but I STILL haven’t gotten my unemployment decision. Additionally, my food stamp application was delayed due to personal circumstances. In short, had I not had money saved for an emergency, I would have been mega-screwed.
I know some people are not in a position where they have the luxury of storing away significant amounts of cash but, if you are, I beg of you to do so if you aren’t already. I can’t imagine what position I’d be in right now if not for my budgeting.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
PS. I posted this here instead of in c/finance because the sidebar there specifies that it’s supposed to be for finance-related news.
LOL yea sure I can’t even fucking pay for food right now but I’ll just casually save up thousands of dollars.
I know you said “if you can” but bro most people literally fucking can’t.
Same here, my friend. I have a feeling that anyone who can is already doing so, or at least have a second car or something they can sell if times get hard. Most of us don’t have shit to fall back on.
I would love to. But when you’re stuck in perpetual minimum wage and your rent alone is costing you at least half of that… yeah. I am not arguing by the way, you’re absolutely right, it’s just that, for a lot of people, myself included, dare I say, the vast majority of people people, this is not something that is possible.
Buddy, in this economy, most people’s only feasible financial-emergency strategy is to jump off a bridge.
Yea let me just go to the fuckin money tree and harvest 6 months of income to put in savings… Where the fuck is that supposed to come from? Wtf is this wall street journal privledged ass fucking advice?
Would you like me to lecture you on not eating avocado toast?
You guys are getting toast? In this economy?
If only we actually lived in the Animal Crossing universe.
(For those unfamiliar, in the game Animal Crossing you can actually “create” money trees that you can harvest from every so often, and how much you get is dependent on how much you initially “invest”)
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I’ve been unemployed for 6 months now. Resigned from my old job because I was fed up with how I was getting treated. In hindsight, it was probably a rash decision, but I never expected that getting a new job, with all my skills and experience, would be this difficult. I completely chew thru all my savings, sold half of my stuff, and even ended up borrowing money from my folks to survive. I’m glad my parents were able to help me out, but I feel pretty bad asking them for money when they’ve been retired for years, and it should be me supporting them instead. It really sucks, it feels like I failed my parents and failed at life, especially when I keep hearing stories of how well off my cousins are, how they’re married, own a house, own a car, have kids etc and meanwhile I’m still single, flatting, and don’t have any assets worth mentioning. Sigh.
Politicians: “Look how great the economy is doing!”
Job market: doesn’t exist
Housing: doesn’t exist
Homeless people: everywhereWhy there aren’t massive riots, I can’t fathom. Civilization is coming apart at the seams and everyone is just…okay with that.
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Protests don’t work.
Yeah, that’s why I didn’t say “protests”. Our forefathers didn’t get a 40-hour work week by asking politely.
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Even that doesn’t really explain it. The streets are crawling with people who were evicted from their homes because their jobs didn’t pay enough to cover rent. These people have nothing to lose, and yet they still stay quiet.
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most people hate the poor, and especially hate the unhoused and just want them to disappear.
Yeah, that’s true. Everyone seems to hate the homeless. And they’ll probably continue to hate the homeless even as millions of working middle-class people lose their homes as a result of the housing and job crisis. Hell, the newly homeless will probably hate themselves, too.
But I don’t understand why. These homeless people didn’t choose to jack up their rent and slash their wages; their landlords and employers did. They’re victims, not perpetrators. Why would people hate them? Is everybody’s brain malfunctioning from microplastic poisoning or something?
the recently unhoused quickly learn to follow suit if they want to stay alive and have any hope of improving their lives
So, they remain docile because they cling to a false hope? As far as I can tell, once you’re homeless, you’re going to stay that way for the rest of your life, no matter what you do, precisely because everyone hates you for being homeless.
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Keep your head up! Its definitely stressful being between jobs. I just experienced that this year, however mine was forced on me when the company let a bunch of people go to save costs/restructure. I guess the good part there was it included severance. It took me about 3mo to find a new job, but holy hell those months were super stressful. I cut out all extra spending, switch to minimum payment on my loan, dropped services we didn’t need and of course stopped buying stupid shit.
No idea what you do, but my line of work can be remote/on-site and I thought finding a remote position from anywhere would be easier, but ultimately started looking at local companies with some on-site. This turned out good for me because of everyone’s push to be full time remote.
Thanks, I appreciate your kind words. I’m in IT (sysadmin) and would prefer to work remote, but tbh I don’t really care at this point. At first I was a bit choosy because of my overconfidence, but now I’m open for anything - even part time, short term etc - across the whole country even. Applied for several dozens of jobs so far, only had one interview call and I blew it - my mind went blank on a simple python question, although I nailed the rest of the interview, I guess they weren’t impressed when I said I knew python (which I did, but… oh well). I do have another interview coming up, but my confidence has taken a big hit. I used to think I knew this shit inside out and companies would be lining up to hire me, but boy was I wrong. It’s come to the point where I’m willing to take a 40% paycut and go back to tier 1 roles… not like I haven’t applied for tier 1 stuff but I friking didn’t even get an interview call, or let alone a rejection mail, so yea, I’m seriously doubting myself at this point.
I did not have much serious interest either and considered my resume really strong. I quickly started wondering where the disconnect was.
Since I was laid off, one benefit I was given was access to a placement company. They helped with my resume formatting and I had a human coach who I met with a handful of times who initially helped calm me down but also gave me pointers on my online presence (LinkedIn profile). The companies website had videos that went over resume building, interviewing, negotiating etc, but I honestly didn’t find them as useful.
If you want to message me I’d be glad to help. I can look at your resume (not an expert) but am in IT (solution architect) and can at least compare it’s layout style to what I ended up with. I can try to remember/write up the things my coach had me change on my Li profile.
I don’t know if I have much info/help to give but I can share what I did.
That’s pretty similar to my experience, although I’m maybe slightly less seasoned than you in terms of experience. I wasn’t exactly expecting to get a new position immediately, but given all the talk in the media of a needy job market, I had a pretty damn hard time getting so much as a call back from most places.
Yeah the job market is so fucked up, being told everywhere needs people, except for every company you just applied for lol.
On one end you have HR sitting on their ass for months, advertising for jobs already filled (only finding out weeks later), go through 2/3 interviews to not be picked or put on hold even following up for a couple months, random filters that screen out proper candidates while keeping ones who bloated it with keywords… long lines to even speak to someone at career events. Been through it all. I picked up every single god-damn call and still it took 10 months. The whole process is so denigrating and it makes it easy to fault yourself for it. (Lesson learned: don’t do that!). Other thing I learned is many companies for some fucked up reason like to hire around the same time so often it was 3 interviews 1 month, 0 interviews for the next two.
On the other hand, from recruiting side you have an avalanche of applications to sift through, many of them AI garbage nowadays, and if you interview someone that can’t say much about a project they put on their resume, what can you do?
With inflation at the level it is, and salary offers not keeping up either, even if you can land something it’s not quite a golden ticket on its own.
If you run into a financial ditch and don’t have emergency funds, contact the electric, water, medical, phone, credit card, etc. billing departments right away. Don’t wait until after you’ve already missed a payment or two! Jump right to it and set up payment plans. I helped a friend through a financial crash and was impressed how much leeway billing departments will give you if you reach out before you miss a payment.
They want to get paid and it’s much easier to get paid from someone willing to work out a deal.
1–3 months is enough for other developed countries other than the US, due to unemployment benefits, social security and most importantly: at least 3 months prior to termination a required termination notification.
Anyways: due to the current high interest rates it might be worth it to put more money into your savings account, since the opportunity costs compared to company shares are low.
You can also do short term investment like T-Bills or CDs too. Just make sure they’re maturing regularly. For example you could split your emergency fund into 8 chunks, and buy an 8 week T-Bill every week for 8 weeks. If you ever need the money stop reinvesting them and you’ll get 1/8th back per week for 8 weeks.
T-Bills are a bit over 5% now.
Is it nearly as much a nightmare to start getting unemployment in other places? I’m stunned that it’s taken as long as it has in my case.
My experience in the netherlands is that there is usually some delay, but not more than a month usually. I used to go in and out of unemployment a lot when I had just dropped out of college. Lot’s of temp jobs. It was very annoying. But the unemployment money started accumulating right after you got fired. Only thing was that it could take a few weeks before they payed out.
Here in New Zealand it took me about three weeks.
But, I know we get far less money than in many other places. It wasn’t even enough to cover rent so I had to use savings.
Now I’m on disability and it’s less than half what people get on minimum wage. I know from my support group that disability is harder to get in the US but it’s also pays a lot more money.
it can’t happen. greedy landlord keeps raising rents.
The other benefit of having a proper emergency fund is being able to say no to your boss without any fear. It took me 10 years but I have enough accessible funds to go a year easily without any new income. The freedom at work is so nice. I’ve noticed that my confidence at not needing the job makes them take me way more seriously and offer all kinds of benefits they don’t afford everyone.
While you’re at it, just pay all of your bills immediately. Just don’t be in debt, its that simple.
Thanks, Dave.
People used to reddit really need that /s there buddy
For credit card this actually isn’t the best idea if you’re trying to build credit. You want to build your debt and then pay it off at the end of the month.
Yeah, I live in a real country, so that isn’t necessary.
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wow very humble, contributing a lot to the conversation
I just switched jobs, I’m gonna have like $15 in my account when my car insurance gets taken out today lmao, it’s rough till you get that first paycheck
And if you cant try for say $20 per check. It will help, maybe not be everything you need, but will help.
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Thanks. I’m mostly having fun. ;)
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For quite a while I’d always told myself, “I’ll just forego the usual advice, since I could just draw from unemployment if I ever found myself without a job.” I’d had the usual advice drilled into me but, until recently, had completely ignored it. I’m pretty damn glad I pivoted when I did, because holy hell it’s a nightmare to actually start getting benefits, even in my state.
As to why I posted this: if my experience can convince even one other person who was as naive as I was to save a little more, then I’d consider that worth any ass kicking that I get from others. More than anything, I wanted this to be a, “it could happen to you” style of post.
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i’ve been around on !personalfinance@lemmy.ml :)
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One tip I heard when I first got a job is if you go shopping and pay with a debit card, don’t be afraid to get $10-20 cash back just to throw in a rainy day fund. Granted the person that told me this used it to hide money from her husband but the point still stands.
Always keep emergency/rainy day money because you never know when you’ll need it
