Today, Dear Reader, I share another experience that shaped my approach to money and saving. I’ve previously covered a period of my childhood, when I was relatively poor. And another — sort of — when I was in law school, and the period following it.
Today, I’ll bore regale you with the tale of the time I was out of work for several months. It was back in aught aught. I think that’s the proper way to refer to 2000. I think.
Web cast
The job I had was the highest-paying job I’d had to that point, and it was in the tech industry at a heady time. We’re talkin’ Y2K. Pets.com, and start-ups bleeding money but making investors’ hearts swoon. Come to think of it, I wonder how much has changed since then.
I had never been in the tech industry, but the company I worked for had a lot of legal industry clients. What with me being a lawyer and all, and having worked for several years in the legal industry, I wasn’t a total interloper. An impostor, maybe. But an interloper, no.
But as for the job itself, I was not an ideal fit and I didn’t like the job. The work wasn’t something I had a lot of experience or skill in, and I my ability to do my work was dependent upon other coworkers doing their work and doing it well. May of those coworkers failed me on one or both of those scores regularly. That others are not as committed to getting a job done and doing it well drove me nuts. In short, there were signs that this wasn’t going to end well.
I also had little in common with most of my coworkers, who, in large part, were a bunch of kids just out of college who wanted nothing more than to be liberated from all the money they had (and often more than they had) as fast as humanly possible. Many of them succeeded wildly on this score. They probably wanted to do well to make up for not doing their job (well). Probably.
And the culture? Let’s just say manufactured wild enthusiasm is not my bag. I’m happy when an organization I work for does well, and am proud to be a part of it. But regularly having rah-rah pep rally-type events? That makes me nauseous.
Notwithstanding my distaste for the job, as this not only was pre-discovery-of-FIRE days, and I was headlong in the law-school-loan-repayment phase of my life (which I look on rather less fondly than the post-law-school-loan-repayment phase of my life), that job was pretty important for our finances. While by that point I was married to The Missus, who also had a full-time job, we needed both of our salaries to make all of our payments, which included said law school loan repayments.
Then one day I got called in for a meeting with HR. Long story short, I was an early member of a group of people laid off over the next several months. I was granted a few months some severance, but the gig was up.
Yerrrr out!
Having never been laid off or without a job when I needed one, this was a new experience for me. I was a bit shell-shocked. But, knowing no better, I was optimistic that I’d land something relatively quickly. And hopefully before my severance ran out, which would have enabled me to actually make a profit out of the experience.
So I began job searching. It . . . did not go well. My optimism started flagging after the severance ran out. It flagged more when I soon thereafter decided to claim unemployment insurance.
In the meantime, I remembered my good experiences with temp work. And so I looked for a temp job, which would at least provide some income and might lead to a full-time gig. After all, that game plan had worked out for me before.
The first temp job I secured was low-end. Really low-end. But, believing that a new permanent gig was just around the corner, I didn’t dwell on that.
Then time dragged on. And on. The forecast was bleak, and my confidence started to nose-dive. I had a B.A. from a great university and a J.D. from a moderately reputable law school, and here I was in a job that a high-school dropout probably could have gotten. That’s not to demean the work or the people who’d take such a job. Not at all. Just to point out that I’d spent a lot of money on education that theoretically should have opened a lot more (higher-paying) jobs for me. Then again, I think my law school was more interested in taking students’ money than preparing them for the job market. So there’s that.
And I worried. A lot. I eventually found a higher-paying temp job, but my permanent job prospects still were dim.
Our finances also became increasingly grim over time. While we had been able to make ends meet with the help of moderate dips into our emergency fund once the severance ran out, eventually that fund was depleted, too. So we started, for the first time in our lives, only paying part of our credit card balances.
Because the combined amount of money we brought in was not too much lower than our expenses, we carried over only somewhat moderate balances. But this was a huge blow to my self-esteem. I guess it’s good that I consider that to be a disappointment and embarrassment, but I hated it. And it cost us more and more money over the course of what, mercifully, was only about a two- or three month period before I finally secured a full-time gig, after about eight months out of work.
Lesson unplanned
This experience with credit cards made me empathetic for people who feel that they “have to” carry a balance on one or more. But for the people who don’t have to carry a balance and still do? That to me is just insanity. I struggle to find a worse way to squander money.
Another thing I learned while out of regular/permanent work was that I did not like the fact that I was financially beholden to having a job. I didn’t then know how to address that feeling of relative powerlessness, but it had a profound impact on me. Fast forwarding to my discovery of FIRE, I was, in part, as immediately receptive to the philosophy because of that feeling of powerlessness. I don’t EVER want to be in that situation again.
I also gained a much greater appreciation for how difficult it can be to stop keeping up appearances. For the first few months of my unemployment, we moderated our spending (which, because of our expenses, was not that lavish to begin with) a bit. This mainly meant not proactively planning outings.
But as things started to bite, we had harder choices to make. Two experiences caused me particular angst.
First was whether to host a dinner for a group of about 10 friends of ours. We’d been getting together for monthly dinners with this group for a while, with the hosting responsibilities rotating among each couple. We ultimately went ahead with the dinner. Spending time with our friends was important. But truth be told, we also didn’t want to give off any impression that we were struggling. While we kept the dinner expenses low, hosting the dinner was probably stupid on our part, as we didn’t know when my unemployment would end.
Second was whether to take a trip to Santa Fe with our closest friends, who had suggested the get-together. I’d never been to Santa Fe, but had wanted to go for years. To go with these friends would have been a blast. But while we were willing to spend $50-100 on hosting our group of friends for dinner, a long weekend trip that we could not afford was almost immediately dismissed.
That hurt. By not going, we were demonstrating that we were struggling, even if just a little. Sure, our friends completely understood. They may even have said that we shouldn’t go on the trip. But that didn’t make the pill any easier for me to swallow. It’s stuck in my craw to this day.
ThanksGiving
This all said, in a lot of ways, we were super lucky at the time this all happened. For one thing, our “ship” never sank. It took on water, but it didn’t sink. And we were able to get everything right in relatively short order after I got my full-time job.
We also were DINKs at the time. Had Thing One, the Elder been in the picture at the time, things would have been much harder. Had Thing Two, the Younger also been in the picture, we’d have needed significant help from others.
Which brings me to another thing I’m exceedingly grateful for: the ability to call upon the assistance of family, which we did to a minor degree once or twice. That luxury — and it’s just that, a luxury — is one we were and are in the incredibly fortunate position to be in.
Although this period of my life was almost 20 years ago, it remains seared in my brain as if it were yesterday. The lasting effect was to make me even more cautious about spending money than I already was. For better or, probably, worse, that means sometimes being too frugal. I wish it also made me equally focused on income-generating efforts, but that’s still a work in progress.
And while this experience taught me a lot and helped make me who I am today — and The Missus and I are immensely less dependent on a job for security now that we’re headlong on our FIRE path — it’s also at or near the top of experiences I’d just as soon not have had to go through.
Being unemployed when you have no full financial security or game plan sucks.
