That is where we are right now. I will be decimating what’s left of my Retirement Savings starting in January. Just turning 59 and a half so I can access my funds without Penalty.
My Wife has been out of work for seven months. Her Unemployment ends December 31st. My hours have been reduced because the Company I work for as a 1099 Contract Employee is barely making it.
Looks like we’ll be selling the House. With two incomes we were doing OK. You live to what you make and now that equation is changing. We have a $1350 COBRA payment due every month because my Wife had Health Insurance through her old Job. If she found a new job with Benefits even with a lower Salary than before, we could pull it off.
I always planned ahead, but I never planned on having a Communist in the White House for eight years in a row.
I had hoped Lord Obama would be dethroned and things would get better, but 64 Million Useful Idiots thought otherwise.
2013 be an interesting year, no doubt about it.
Oh, man, I truly can sympathize! I’m a little younger, and in my case I voluntarily took a pay decrease that with other factors (changes in my employer’s health care plan, for example) nearly halved my take home pay. This was to help the company survive, but eventually we all got laid off anyway. So, double whammy, since the Unemployment Benefits are calculated off of recent income. Worse, if I took a temporary job at, say, something like the level of the Unemployment Benefits, then if I got laid off again, the benefits would go down even further. Since I had some retirement / rainy day savings in a money market account, benefits such as food stamps were unavailable. Worse yet, from an employment standpoint, especially in this “employers market”, the few employers who do have good job openings available take a pretty dim view of applicants whose most recent employment is at MacDonald’s or Wal-Mart, regardless of past history. “There must be something wrong with this guy / gal ...”
Yes, I know, 8 FReepers who are employers will jump up and say they’d respect more the person who would take any work, rather than someone who stayed on the dole. But that’s NOT the general reality out there. Shoot, most employers probably like better the “smart person” who maximizes what they can get out of the system. “They’re smart!”
*The bitter part is that the savings we had came from many sacrifices. I’ve never made a lot of money - being happy with what I did was always more important to me than $$. But at least I had and still have that love of my work. I eventually ended up much as you, doing 1099 work. Not too much security there, and no Unemployment Insurance or other benefits, either, if that work tanks... Fortunately our savings are recovering slowly, though we’ve got to replace a vehicle soon. I’d like to think we can survive a further downturn in the economy, but we might not have much left.
Anyway, I hope your situation somehow turns around. Good Luck, and God Bless!