A friend of mine lost his job a few months ago. He has a family to support and money is tight (they're barely making it). He's franctically trying to find work? Have you ever been there?

I have not, but lots of friends have. They often went through giving up everything nonessential – which varies by person. Some see doing without manicures or a cell phone as a hardship (at least at first), and a couple of my friends decided to live outside or in the homeless shelter.

For most friends, they had some kind of reserve of savings, and unemployment to draw upon, but others didn’t and had to couch surf for months. The thing is, often people don’t manage to “take care of everything.” The parts of ‘everything’ that you decide not to take care of often determine how long and how well you will be able to manage the rest.

Some people don’t make it. Your friend sounds lucky if he is still (barely) making it. I wish the best for your friend.

In the early 80’s, my husband who I now realize was bipolar couldn’t hold down a job. The answer is, you do what you need to do to survive. If that means calling Catholic Charities, so be it. If it means living in a flea bag pay by the week hotel, so be it. If it means flipping burgers or digging ditches or wiping asses in a nursing home. you just do what you need to do to get by.

I’m unemployed ever since march 2008. Thankfully I still live with my folks although Im 30 they still love me and are willing to help me out. I receive benefits from unemployment , but I still make effort to go find any job(although confidence is low), I made effort to get into a CDL driving school meanwhile too.

I have done the following things over the years:
Move to a smaller apartment, or live in the car (or a tent on the beach for several weeks).
Move in with friends
Work for food at a co-op restaurant
Sell all my belongings
Work as a maintenance
Work as Security Guard
Do volunteer work for an employment agency – and get job that way

I am in that situation now. My husband was laid off in mid-April of 2009. He has had good luck finding contract work, but not full-time work. It has been hard financially. Savings are depleted. Bills are piling up.

I wish your friend good luck.

It was really hard when my kids were little and I had just fought with the water company to get the water turned back on and the mother of a kid I was baby sitting (while she went shopping) said, “I spend most of my day at the pool. I just can’t afford the electric bill to turn on the air conditioner.” She didn’t have a clue what, “Can’t afford” means.
Now that I am doing very well, I make sure never to use the excuse. “I can’t afford it.”
The answer now is, that’s just not high on my priority list. I think that struggling time made me a better person and forced me to be more genuine and honest.

Be creative. One acquaintance of mine started selling used items out of his garage, and now owns a store he calls Recession Busters. He gets items free off the Freecycle.org and by going around the yard sales and leaving his business card “haul left over items free”. He also bids on storage units that have been abandoned. He usually gets an entire unit for under $100 and some are full of perfectly good furniture and such.

When he started, he cleaned up the stuff himself, and with a little polish, paint, varnish and oil, most stuff cleans up real good. He now makes enough to hire a handyman, part-time to do actual repairs on broken stuff.

I’m without a full time job right now actually. I just graduated college in June, and after hectically searching to get a job before my student loan money ran out, I finally had 3 options, and ended up picking one. Well low and behold 6 weeks later they fired me for no apparent reason, and the other two positions had been filled. So I’m back in the same boat, frantically looking for work. I have a part time job, and were it not for it I’d be completely sunk at this point. Even so, without my parents help, I’m not sure how I’ll pay rent for October.

Not to mention I feel like a total loser at the moment, having lost my job. I was through a contractor, and the only thing they said for a reason was that there were complaints with my analysis (I’m a chemist) and that I was having poor accuracy/results with a basic task. But it’s BS because while I was there I received no such feedback, and right up til I got the call that I was fired I thought I was doing a great job and had a long future there.

Just keep your head up, and get a part time job in the mean time if at all possible. It may only make 8.50 an hour, but it’s better than absolutely nothing. Just make sure you alot time to still find jobs.

I think we’ve all been there. Luckily, when things were really bad for me, I had no family to support yet. When I was in a similar situation but with a daughter and lots of debts, I just kept borrowing (I still do). I’ll probably have to work for the rest of my life to pay it off, but I’m generally good with money, so I can handle it. There are things more important than money in this life, and as long as you keep that in perspective, you’ll be fine.

I was homeless and dependant upon the kindness of my friends and acquaintances. I then got a job in a bar and rented a room from an old man for $160.00 a week. You do what you have to do.

I was laid off from a job that filed bankruptcy and laid off most of it’s employees a few years back and have since taken jobs where I make less than half of my old money, poor benefits (if any). Since last Nov., I’ve been working “on-call” status between two jobs where I sometimes clock near f/t hours and other times I’m working 7 days a week and 10–12hr shifts for weeks at a time. Like @tinyfaery says, you do what you have to do since it won’t be forever and coming through is what counts in the end.

I was laid off about 4 months after 9/11, and it took me 7 months to find work.

@YARNLADY: a brother-in-law of mine, his parents did this as their retirement hobby which turned into a very solid business, enough to share around for us youngers to pad our incomes too. They eventually bought a warehouse for refinishing, a huge sports-car hauling trailer to fill with furniture they take to the Galt and Roseville auctions monthly. Every now and then I get tempted to give them a call and ask to be adopted back into the family :D

In the 1970’s I was a newly divorced mother earning $2.05/hr (min wage was $1.90). My ex was supposed to pay $75/mo that was never on time. I netted lt $70/wk and paid $20/wk for after school child care and $130/mo rent. We literally lived from week to week from my job at a K’Mart style store.

In the mid 70’s there was an oil related recession that was comparable to this last year except for ‘stagflation’ where both unemployment and inflation were high. In November this national retail company went into bankruptcy and Dec 11 was my last day on the job. I had enough money to pay the Dec utility bills and January 1 rent. but that left me with $25 and expectation of $75 sometime in the 3 weeks and a $55 biweekly UI check. It was obvious that I wasn’t going to make Feb rent

In order to get a $30 monthly bus pass to the City to look for work. I just about had to give up eating. I had some supplies in the cupboard including a box of oatmeal and 10 lbs of rice. I managed to feed my daughter on small meat patties, canned veggies, rice. oatmeal and dried milk but for 3 weeks I had only a bowl of rice a day. By the 3rd week in January I got a job an hour away from home that paid $2.63/hr. I was able to get on track in about a month and the estra $20/wk seemed like a god-send.

We were able to take a step back from the precipice with small promotions but after 3 years I reached a point where I could go no higher on a hs diploma. At that point I took my $1300 in savings and went back to school. With grants and scholarships, a 25/hr wk min wage job and a class schedule of 20–22 units I was able to graduate in 36 mos. Abject poverty is scary every time.

Well, I’ve been laid off from the last 5 jobs I’ve had since 2003. Due to a combination of these layoffs, inopportune but expensive and necessary home repairs, and going from a 2 person, 2 income household to a 3 person one income household in 2001, we managed to accrue a lot of debt. Because I have excellent credit (I assume it’s still pretty good anyway), I have always been able to get low interest credit card offers. I refinanced my house once, but only to the level of 65% of the appraised value to pay off a lot of credit card debt, but where I have rates like 2 to 4 percent until the balance is paid off, I’m not in any hurry, even when I had money, I paid the minimums…carrying some debt is actually good for my credit rating. As it turned out, I had literally 10s of thousands of dollars in available credit when I was laid off this past February, and I was counting on it, because that’s what had gotten me through the many rough patches I’ve had. I had one 8 month layoff and one 5 month layoff punctuated by a 15 month job that paid $11k less than I had been making at my previous job. So basically for over 2 years I was making a lot less than I needed to and borrowed when I had to. We also racked up student loan debt for 5 years while my wife was in grad school (she took one class per semester).

So this past February, the company I worked for ran out of money. I’m still out of work. My wife works ½ time, but that didn’t start till last November, so what we were left with was a few credit cards that were maxed out (but which had low interest rates), a couple cards I use and have always paid off in full every month, and what I thought was a fair amount of home equity and tens of thousands in available credit.

Well, I had this AMEX card I used only for Costco, and when I’d signed up for it, they gave me a $33,000 credit line…I would have been fine with $200. I thought, well, at least I can either borrow against this or charge against it for a while if worse comes to worst and I can’t find a job. And I thought, hey, I’ll cash out some of my home equity, I’ll be doing fine. Well, my first call to cash out on home equity ended in me finding out that even though I wasn’t upside down, enough of my equity had evaporated in this financial collapse that I really couldn’t borrow anything. Then I got a letter from my AMEX card saying that due to changing market conditions, they were taking away 90% of that $33k credit line. Once they did that, one by one, every card I had started writing to me saying that now my utilized credit was as a percentage of my available credit too high, so they TOO would be reducing my credit lines or closing my card altogether. Suddenly, what I thought was probably 60 grand in easy to access credit was just gone. So, obviously even though I tightened my belt, my monthly commitments are more than my wife and I pull in between her job and my unemployment. So, I’ve had to just pay the minimums on the couple cards I have left and tap into those credit lines at higher interest than I wanted to pay. But it was still reasonable, but then even though I’ve never missed or been a day late on a payment of any kind, all my cards jacked up my rates by about 8%, so now I’m paying interest through the ass, and I’m running out of available credit.

I have taken some contract work where I could get it, I’ve done taste tests, secret shopping, market research, etc. to pull in some extra cash…I don’t really eat out anymore, I don’t buy things anymore, I try to sell stuff on Craig’s List. I know that if I run into too bad of troubles, I can borrow from my parents, but that comes with let’s say “other” costs. They’re helping us out here and there, like my son needs some orthodontic work and they’re going to pay for it. We get movies from the library, clip coupons, watch for sales, changed to a cheaper cat food, buy more store brands, etc. Essentially we cut out most of the fun things and stick to the necessities. I still can’t keep up, I still need to borrow. And this job market SUCKS. It’s the worst I’ve seen. I haven’t had an interview in months. I’m hoping things are about to turn around, I have more opportunities to apply to than at any point in this search so far, but I’m still drawing unemployment (thankfully there is an extension available these days). I looked into borrowing from my 401(k) and I guess that you can’t borrow unless you’re employed, because the IRS requires the payments be taken out by payroll deduction. So, I may have to take a distribution, which I don’t WANT to do, but I figure worse comes to worst, what I’ll do is take some out of my 401(k) now, when I have a very low gross income, so probably all I’ll be taxed is the 10% penalty anyway, and then when I get a job again I’ll max out my 401(k) contribution for a couple years or whatever it takes to pay that back, and maybe put any unused funds in an IRA when I get back to work as well.

Bottom line, you just have to be creative…I’ve had to adjust my expectations. In the past, I’ve refrained from borrowing unless absolutely necessary because I don’t want to have any more debt than I have to, but now, I’m looking for any borrowing that’s available, because it’s available today, but it might not be tomorrow. If I’d foreseen what was coming, I probably would have taken every offer I could get my hands on a year ago and I’d be flush indefinitely. Before I never would have paid more than 5% interest on anything, now I some times pay 20% and it’s better than starving or losing my house. Essentially, I do things one step at a time. When I run out of money on one card, I start not paying off another. When I’m out of cards I take a 401(k) distribution. If I run out of money, I borrow from my parents. When that’s all said and done I see if the real estate market has come back enough for me to borrow. If I have to I sell my car and take buses to interviews. I may put myself out there for contract work. I’ll go to a temp agency. I’ll work retail. My definition of necessities may no longer include high speed internet or cell phone or TV service. The almost never going out to eat or to a movie will become never. I’ll sell blood. I’ll do every $1 paid survey I can get my hands on and enter every contest I can find and sell any prizes I win. If I have to, my wife and I will get divorced and I will go on welfare. Whatever it takes man, scratchin’ and survivin’....good times. I’ll be dead soon enough, if I die in debt, so be it, I’ll do what I have to do to get to the end game.