Claiming Unemployment? Read The Unemployment Survival Guide!

December 23rd, 2009 |

Claiming unemployment seems like a crushing blow. The modern mindset is that a job is a vital necessity, because you must have money to pay for everything in your life. Those of use who have been unemployed for years due to the global recession have slowly come to learn a painful, but very valuable lesson.

Time is money.

I used to easily spend $10,000 in a month, and I thought that I was living fairly conservatively. I have reduced my expenses to nearly 10% of that amount, and I find that I enjoy my life today more than I did a few years ago. It took a lot of trial-and-error, though — trial-and-error that I’d like to spare you, by sharing with you four steps to turning your time into money without a job. Claiming unemployment is just the beginning of the “benefits” unemployment can offer someone with the right attitude.

1) Honest Expenses
When I first lost my job, I thought to myself “Oh, crap. How will I pay for…?” about every twenty seconds for about a week. Then, I panicked some more. Finally, a few months later, I realized that I was doing better than I expected — because my expenses weren’t really as high as I had thought.

I stopped paying for things that I didn’t absolutely need, obviously. My lattes went away, but more importantly, I started really carefully looking at what I could make for myself, and thus save expenses on. I switched from paper tissues to handkerchiefs, and from a laundry service to a bathtub and an old-school washboard which I used to clean those handkerchiefs. By looking carefully at every single thing you consume, and switching to renewable variants, you can save yourself a ton of pennies.

I got about enough to pay my rent just by claiming unemployment checks, the rest I did away with — or at least, converted into less-painful forms.

2) Learning to Make Stuff

It’s absolutely amazing how many products each of us buys every week that we know absolutely nothing about. You have time now — use it to learn about them!

I learned online how to turn some beeswax, lanolin, coconut oil, and a few other ingredients into chap sticks, shampoo, conditioner, and more — and then, I got those things cheaply or even free.

Super-ninja unemployed-person trick: learn how to make something out of industrial ingredients like the above, and then go to www.thomasnet.com, look up the companies that produce those basic things, and send them an E-mails that say you’re trying to start a company, and you’re looking to settle on a producer for the ingredients for your final product. About one in four of them will happily mail you “samples” — which are easily large enough for you to use in your personal lives for months if not years!

3) Volunteer

I cannot begin to overstate the value of using your time to benefit the other people around you. By volunteering, you not only start to heal the wounds that losing your job has dealt to your feelings of self-worth, you also prevent the ennui of listlessness from setting in.

More importantly, you meet new people. Did you know that 90% of jobs are acquired through ‘networking’ — which basically means, ‘knowing the right person’? So volunteer to do something that you already understand — even if you have to walk up to the HR department of a business and tell them that you want to work for free for ten or twelve or twenty hours every week. That way, you’ll meet relevant people, and you will instinctively begin to build relationships with them.

To quote someone wiser than me: ‘love is giving, and giving is love’. If you give a group your time and effort, you will start to love them. Love is your brain’s way of excusing the otherwise-illogical action of volunteering to work for no benefit — so your brain literally must love the place you volunteer for. And once you know people there, and you love it there, the likelihood that a job will follow is a thousand times greater than if you gave an already-overloaded HR lady another paper to skim on the way to the circular file.

4) Make money

“What?” you ask. “How can I make money while I’m unemployed? The problem is that I can’t make money!”.

Wrong.

The problem is that you have no job. But if you can claim unemployment checks, you can make money. It might be the opposite of everything you wanted to do, but there are “heavy lifting” options for every type of person. If you’re hands-on, be a day laborer. If you’re sedentary, go to www.odesk.com and sign up to spend a few hours a day creating forum posts for some marketing company or writing articles about smile-whiteners for some affiliate marketer.

The pay won’t be what you’re used to getting — but if you’ve lowered your expenses, and you’re creating your own stuff, you can easily spend 10 hours every week massacring Monster.com and all of it’s competitors, 10 hours per week volunteering for the people you REALLY want to work for, and still have a good 20 hours to spend making $8~$10/hour on Odesk, Elance, Getafreelancer, Rentacoder, or any of the many other freelance-work sites on the Internet.

I don’t see how anyone who actually applied this advice could fail to not only survive, but thrive right through claiming unemployment and get out the other side.

Articles on this site have been acquired from a variety of sources. No content on this site should be considered financial or legal advice.