Debt Consolidation Blog

Posts Tagged ‘unemployment’

Losing your job can feel like your whole world is falling apart.  A job can be so much more than just a J-O-B, it can define you as a person.  When it is pulled out from underneath you with no warning, then your mind set can really be affected. Depression can rear its ugly head during times of high stress and pressure when your personal finances are falling apart.

If you are the main bread winner and you have the responsibility to support your family, loosing a job can soon turn to depression out of feelings of despair and disappointment. Credit card debt, mortgages, and personal loans are all commitments that need to be paid.  What happens when you simply don’t have the cash flow?  

Keeping a positive mindset is paramount in times of unemployment.  You need to look at this as a temporary situation and your new job is to look for a new one.  Don’t sit on the couch and dwell on the situation, this doesn’t help anyone.  If you just lost your job, and you worked 40 hours per week, then you need to be actively looking for your new opportunity with this time. This is not an opportunity to catch up on reading or cleaning.  If you have a family to support or bills that need to be paid, then you must do all you can to get back into work asap!

Getting back into work tips-

Ensure your resume is up to date

Rewrite your resume and cover letter and make sure that it contains all your current achievements.

Ensure you have an interview outfit which is clean, ironed and ready to wear.  Be ready for an interview at short notice.

Have printed copies of your resume and cover letter with you at all times.  Carry a resume folder in your car and bag so that you can drop it off as you find opportune places.

Keeping positive in times of stress and little income

Money does not make you the person you are- don’t let it define you.  We all need money to pay bills but don’t focus on the lack- keep your mind on taking action and applying for jobs.

Be Proactive in looking for new work

Get creative when looking for a new job.  Look online and in local newspapers for companies that you would want to work with and make contact with them about future work.  Temporary or part time jobs can help you get a foot in the door.  Be open to the possibilities of accepting jobs that are outside of your normal industry.  You can look for more permanent work in your chosen field  while you are working in a less familiar area.  By keeping employment gaps on your resume to a minimum,  you demonstrate your tenacity and work ethic.  By accepting a position that is less than ideal, you may be setting-up your next, better job offer.  Remember that employers prefer to hire someone already employed.

Dealing with debt

When the debt collectors are calling you for money,  and you have little, stress levels can skyrocket.  Do not put your head in the sand and ignore this situation.  Either answer the phone and discuss your situation with them, or get professional help.  Your debt will not go away on its own.  You have options to explore including credit counseling, and bankruptcy as a last resort.

Times of change always present opportunities that may have not have been available before.  Be proactive, positive, and keep the lines of communication open. You will get back to work.  You will get debt under control.  You will regain your life again.

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

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.

If you’re one of the ten-percent-or-more of the developed world that is unemployed due to the worldwide recession, you may not have realized that there are notable unemployment benefits far beyond claiming checks.

Don’t get me wrong. Having an empty bank account kills your security. Having potential employers tell you that you are not worth hiring kills your self-confidence. Sitting around wondering what you could be doing with your life kills your spirit.

What you might not realize is that it’s not only possible to survive unemployment — it’s possible to thrive. In fact, it’s possible to be without a job, but not be unemployed.

You see, ‘unemployment’ is more than just a check-mark next to the box on the form at the local welfare office. It’s an attitude. If your spirit, security, and self-confidence have been stomped on by your lack of productive activity, lack of usefulness, and lack of income, it’s time to change those elements in your life by creating your own personal supply of unemployment benefits.

Productivity
Everyone has the potential to be productive. Productivity is commonly measured by corporate standards these days — your effect on some huge conglomerate’s bottom line — but that’s a trap. Productivity simply means this: did you do something today that brought value to someone else’s life?

If you sit on your butt and watch reruns and read forums and complain about your life, you’re not productive, and you know it. Find someone that you can help, and help them. It doesn’t matter if you’re helping your neighbor dig fence holes, or helping someone ignorant in a subject to better understand it by posting in a valuable manner on a forum online.

When you bring value to other people, they tend to want to reciprocate. More importantly, your spirit — by which I mean, your inner assessment of your own value — improves. Unemployment benefits like checks and job training can’t do that for you.

Usefulness
This is different than productivity in a key way. It’s possible to be useful, but not productive, by knowing valuable things and not sharing or using that knowledge. It’s possible to be productive but not useful by doing ‘busy work’, burger flipping, or creating things that no one will ever see.

In order to be useful, you have to apply understanding. Many people feel useful in discussions they have online, because they are applying their understanding of something to a discussion. It’s rarely productive, but it’s useful.

You can’t see the unemployment benefits like the improvement your own feelings of usefulness by helping a neighbor dig post holes — unless you have a deep understanding of that particular art that will actually make the job more efficient or otherwise better.

Income
Of utter importance in the struggle against unemployment is to understand that income does not mean a job. It doesn’t even necessarily mean recurring, predictable income. In today’s environment, that’s becoming a luxury rather than a rule.

In order to create income, you COULD do any number of short-term things like sell items on Ebay or Craigslist, or contact temp agencies and pray that something stuck.

But by far the best route to take is to combine productivity and usefulness with your income creation. Find someone that has a problem, to which your personal understanding has a direct and useful application. Offer them your productivity in assistance with that problem, in exchange for money. Seeing offers like this come through is something you just can’t get from a job — it’s strictly one of the best unemployment benefits there is.

If you happen to be a liberal arts major, for example, you can often find work writing, creating graphics, or generating other forms of technical or creative art at places like Odesk.com, Elance.com, or Craigslist.com. The work will be piecemeal, at first, but places like Odesk give you the opportunity to get a reputation for your work, which will lead to more work.

If you’re skilled with a specific form of labor, like welding or automotive maintenance, you can start with Craigslist — post a “work wanted” ad, and search the “help wanted” ads. Again, you probably won’t get a long-term job — but everything you do that combines productivity, usefulness, and income will break you of the stigma of unemployment.

Once you’re free of that looming aura of fear, doubt, and helplessness, your attitude will change. Ironically, it will become easier to find a job with your new outlook — perhaps the most startling unemployment benefits of all!

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