What Would You Do If You Lost Your Job?
I bookmarked this post by Nina a long time ago. She wrote about some service jobs she’s had when money was tight.
I just lost my post because I forgot to intermittent save, so I’ll do my best to recreate what I wrote.
What would you do if you lost your job tomorrow?
In 2005, I worked at a yarn shop and waited on tables while waiting for a job offer from my current employer. That was pretty hairy. I also worked full time retail for my first job out of college. I also thought about working as a stripper, but fortunately never had to do it. I have found out that several of my friends have done it though. Yes, I did know someone who paid for college this way.
One of my hipster friends told me something fascinating. You have to picture this, she’s one of those crazy cool NYC hipsters. She’s impossibly cool. You want to be her because she’s so cool. Not because she’s some drop-dead gorgeous model, but because she is absolutely amazingly creative, funny and interesting. She told me that she took a night job cleaning offices to make extra money so she could go travel in India for two months. I don’t think I’d ever do that, but that is a testament to motivation. She wanted to go to India and taking the second job was what she had to do to go.
Makes me wonder what the heck is wrong with me that I’m not killing myself to get out of credit card debt.
AllFinancialMatters » Blog Archive » JLP’s Weekly Roundup wrote:
[…] Mapgirl asks: What would you do if you lost your job? Bookmark to: [link] […]
Posted on 09-Apr-07 at 12:27 pm | Permalink
Jeremy wrote:
If I lost my job tomorrow my decision would be pretty simple. Collect unemployment while searching for a decent job. The amount received from unemployment would probably be more than a part time, or even many full time jobs.
I would need to find someplace that could pay $12 an hour or more with a guaranteed 40 hour week to make it more beneficial to work instead of collect unemployment just from a raw dollar point of view.
Since even a lot of service type jobs of that type aren’t always readily available I’d take the money from unemployment and use my time/resources to find replacement income.
Posted on 09-Apr-07 at 1:20 pm | Permalink
Sick of Debt wrote:
I had that experience last year (with employer fighting unemployment) and ended up doing a bunch of interesting things: Greeting at Toys’R'Us for $15/hr (Christmas season), installing video cables at Radio Shack stores ($50/job), working at Taco Bell, doing on-call computer support, tutoring ($12/hr).
These days if I lost my main job, I would just increase my second job of tutoring, make some calls to other random jobs I’ve got references for (eg: picking up people from their homes for Dr. appointments, waiting for them to finish and taking them home). I’d also do some mystery shopping with my wife.
Posted on 10-Apr-07 at 1:14 pm | Permalink
Zachary wrote:
I may be getting a service job while I’m out of teaching work for the summer.
Posted on 10-Apr-07 at 4:19 pm | Permalink
tiredofbeingbroke wrote:
If I lost my full-time job then I will increase the amount of hours at my part-time gig. I already did the math. I would be able to pay the rent and pay the minimum on all my bills until I got a new gig.
Posted on 10-Apr-07 at 9:46 pm | Permalink
karla (threadbndr) wrote:
The longest I’ve been out of work was five days. And that was because I was fired without cause at the start of a three day weekend.
Temp agency. I’d be back at work tomorrow, maybe even this afternoon. I’d take anything - call center, data entry - anything to keep the bucks coming in.
Posted on 17-May-07 at 10:10 am | Permalink