FrugalFannie
NES Member
So it's happened again. My husband has lost his job. He is an engineer by education and has been climbing the ladder into the management realm. Unfortunately, he is "middle management" which is the first to get whacked when companies downsize.
Probably 10 or 11 years ago he was working for Raytheon when they went through massive layoffs and after 5 years with them, he was gone in that wave. This was back when "the economy was booming." He spent a year looking for a job before he finally took a $10/hr gig working for a cell phone company in one of their retail stores so we could continue to have health insurance (more on that later). That lasted 6 months before he got back into an engineering position.
Then he spent 5 years with Lockheed Martin and they had huge layoffs and IIRC he was unemployed for 6 months. Not as bad as layoff number 1 for sure but financially very damaging though not as devastating as the first one.
Then he got a temporary gig of about a year that ended when the contract ended. I think he was out for about 8 weeks. This one was scary to say the least. Given what we had been through with the previous 2 layoffs and we had only 1 year since the previous period of unemployment, well….
Then he got a job with a company that was being bought by another company. Within a month of him being hired the company got acquired. Then it got acquired yet again within a year. During the 2 1/2 years he was there we saw them 'consolidating departments' and laying off people, mostly administrative positions that were duplicated when the 3 companies merged, until last spring when they had a 20% layoff of engineers and managers. Yep. He got the ax.
He was out of work from just before memorial day until just before labor day last year when he got a job that for the first time in a long was actually paying more than the previous position. Yep. The last couple of jobs he took, he took a pay cut compared to his previous employment. Definitely not a good thing since as we know, prices on everything kept RISING.
So last fall he starts with a new company and now he has lost that job. Not going to get into details but when your boss tells you that you are lying and completely ignores all facts, it's possibly not a good place to be /sarcasm/ and from our experience, doesn't end well.
And thus here we are with a major loss of income. Again.
In some ways we are in a better position than we were in previous layoffs. In others, we are definitely worse off.
Over the next few weeks (hopefully it won't last longer than that) I will attempt to share with all of you the steps we took in case this happened again and how we are surviving it. After having been through this so many times we joke that we are very 'experienced job loss survivors.' I may even break down and share a few of my fears with you guys. Nahhhh. You would just likely call me ball-less. And everyone who knows me now I 'earned' my brass balls.
And maybe, just maybe, this will help me keep my sanity and help others to prepare for a job loss and survive it if/when it happens to them.
Probably 10 or 11 years ago he was working for Raytheon when they went through massive layoffs and after 5 years with them, he was gone in that wave. This was back when "the economy was booming." He spent a year looking for a job before he finally took a $10/hr gig working for a cell phone company in one of their retail stores so we could continue to have health insurance (more on that later). That lasted 6 months before he got back into an engineering position.
Then he spent 5 years with Lockheed Martin and they had huge layoffs and IIRC he was unemployed for 6 months. Not as bad as layoff number 1 for sure but financially very damaging though not as devastating as the first one.
Then he got a temporary gig of about a year that ended when the contract ended. I think he was out for about 8 weeks. This one was scary to say the least. Given what we had been through with the previous 2 layoffs and we had only 1 year since the previous period of unemployment, well….
Then he got a job with a company that was being bought by another company. Within a month of him being hired the company got acquired. Then it got acquired yet again within a year. During the 2 1/2 years he was there we saw them 'consolidating departments' and laying off people, mostly administrative positions that were duplicated when the 3 companies merged, until last spring when they had a 20% layoff of engineers and managers. Yep. He got the ax.
He was out of work from just before memorial day until just before labor day last year when he got a job that for the first time in a long was actually paying more than the previous position. Yep. The last couple of jobs he took, he took a pay cut compared to his previous employment. Definitely not a good thing since as we know, prices on everything kept RISING.
So last fall he starts with a new company and now he has lost that job. Not going to get into details but when your boss tells you that you are lying and completely ignores all facts, it's possibly not a good place to be /sarcasm/ and from our experience, doesn't end well.
And thus here we are with a major loss of income. Again.
In some ways we are in a better position than we were in previous layoffs. In others, we are definitely worse off.
Over the next few weeks (hopefully it won't last longer than that) I will attempt to share with all of you the steps we took in case this happened again and how we are surviving it. After having been through this so many times we joke that we are very 'experienced job loss survivors.' I may even break down and share a few of my fears with you guys. Nahhhh. You would just likely call me ball-less. And everyone who knows me now I 'earned' my brass balls.
And maybe, just maybe, this will help me keep my sanity and help others to prepare for a job loss and survive it if/when it happens to them.
