Like so many people today, I lost my job. A twenty+ year career went down the toilet because of an illness. Even though the quality of my work was fine, my medical problems made me work slower and slower until I was told I just wasn’t doing enough. The organization I worked for constantly repeats the mantra that its employees are ‘like family’. I discovered that some definitions of family include, “Onto the ice floe, Grandma!”
Now, strange to say, this did not upset me as much as you would think. Most of the reason my medical problems were so hard to deal with was stress. My old job and workplace had become extremely toxic. It certainly wasn’t the place I started working at all those years ago. So even now, I can say that being unemployed is less stressful than working there.
But even though leaving that awful place had a massive positive effect on my health and general outlook on life, there was of course the lack of a paycheck. It was especially hard since I am the bill-payer in the family. For years my husband has homeschooled our children, and had an evening job to pay for extras and to give him his own spending money. Now his job was all we had, that and our far too small savings. We’ve managed, through help from family and being extremely careful with our money.
So hopefully I’ll be able to pass along some of the ways my family has made it on the thinnest of shoestrings these last months. Luckily I have always been of a fairly frugal nature, and had kept us from being in too bad a shape financially. I hope that whatever information I put here can help someone through their own crisis.
This was originally posted on my old blog, Middle Class Poor. Since then my intentions have changed. I realized that I couldn’t compete with the heavy hitters in the ‘saving money blog’ genre, so I decided that the one thing I could write about that nobody else could is, well, me. I’ll still be posting tips, but here you’ll find a little bit of everything that Florida life hands out.
So, to the original question- I’m a mom of two grown daughters, wife to a man who has put up with me for over thirty years, and once a scientist and computer geek. But more than that, I’m me. A crazy old Florida broad who loves the magic of Disney World, but at the same time has ‘visit Villisca Iowa axe murder house’ on her bucket list. I hope you enjoy the ride.