End of Your Rope? Phases 2 and 3 |
3 Comments |
Yesterday I wrote about some emergency measures you should consider if you find yourself without an income. With any luck you won’t have to live without a steady income for a long time. I really hope that you don’t have to go two years like I had to.
If you took my advice and ended up getting two minimum wage jobs, chances are you are going to burn out before too long. It’s almost like treading water, you just want to prevent yourself from sinking. Once you’ve stopped the bleeding, it’s time to be begin the recovery phase. The recovery phase is where you will need to spend any spare time looking for one job that used to pay like the one you previously had. That means making a huge effort to apply for new jobs in your industry. You may find that you need to learn new skills or require additional education. It will be hard to do this while you are working two jobs, but it’s necessary to complete this recovery process.
If you’ve been able to secure a salary near what you had before the job loss, you are ready to enter the third phase. The main idea with this phase is prevention. You want to prevent this situation from happening again. One way is to start up an emergency fund that can you get you by if this were to happen again. Another way that I’m preventing a total loss of income is by looking for and building alternative income streams. That way if I lose one, the others can keep me afloat.
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Previous: End of Your Rope? Tie a Knot and Hang on Tight.Next: Net Worth Update - May 2007
May 17th, 2007 at 9:39 am
It always takes a scare/layoff/downsizing to make you think about how you’d survive without a job. Many people never think about this until its too late. This was a great series. I’ve been through many layoffs in my time.
May 18th, 2007 at 8:31 am
This is good advice. Cutting the recovery process into two distinct steps makes sense. In medical terms, it’s like you have to stop the bleeding (cut expenses, live a bare-bones life) before bandaging up the wound and rehabilitating the injured body part to get it back to normal (find a new job which at the very least matches your old income, or provides you with more job satisfaction)
I’ll be sure to bookmark this page for when I’ll ultimately need it. In my industry (the media) the bad times are never too far away
May 22nd, 2007 at 12:32 pm
And it’s REALLY hard to get the training or education when you have no money and cannot borrow.