After over 20 years (in 2001) working for a governmental agency, our department was downsized and many of the positions were eliminated, including mine, and services were farmed out to private agencies. I had just bought a second house as an investment property and didn’t have much in the way of savings beyond my retirement accounts and stocks. I was offered a job with the same private agency that took over some of my old agency’s services, but I decided to “drop out” and run a small landscaping business, give music lessons, gig as a musician, and work part time (to cover slow periods in the other endeavors) as a mental health, group home counselor. In wearing three of my four hats, I work for myself, and I wouldn’t want to go back to working for “the man” full-time, ever!

I sold the investment home in late 2004 to get my mortgage payments and property taxes down to a reasonable sum and now practice living very frugally (the health care/insurance issue is about the only problem area in the financial management of my “drop out” life). I do have to stay on my toes to keep everything together with a comfortable cash flow and in adding to my “retirement.”

I will probably have to work for the rest of my life in some capacity, and I really focus on wellness, happiness and fulfillment as ways to protect me against gravity taking its toll, as it were.

I have managed to sustain “dropping out” for nine years now.

Brett lists skills (landscaping, musician, a certain ease in dealing with those with mental health issues) as well as an unusual level of resources (an “extra” house, sold at a good point, plus years of experience with both the good and the bad of being in an organization). Skills and resources.
People laid off or otherwise dislodged can (and often must) use the “retirement fund” to launch a career that will extend into a future that is changing so fast. Vision and risk.
The Career world seeks to create Large Employers (Green Economy) and “place” people, with Benefits.
Like Brett, I started my own business, actually did it half time in the 1980s before going full-time in the l990s. There are no more days off, no more evenings off. One gags over too much work when one is not gagging over too little. Old technologies become irreplaceable, and used replacement pieces come along with a bedbug swimming around in the carton. One’s sort of busienss insurance, there being no “give” in time or $$, is duplicate equipment. And someone tries to replace you with Australians; would you quality-check their work. Then someone tries to buy you out.
The business world is geered for either established professions or larger-scale endeavors. Large-scale doesn’t work best in plenty of places where skills and experience count for a lot.
That’s why Obama-nomics aren’t helping a whole lot. This isn’t a problem of 30 million. It is often a problem of one.
I would be doing a startup backyard farm if I were younger and had good land and know-how. I think a lot of lone startups, very sensitive to local needs, take a lot of patience, with years learning the skills, creating the niche, and then you’re like the I-beam in your particular community.
If the Career Counselor could have seen the match of skills and needs, the niche would be taken; it would have become an Industry. The idea is to Make It Big. “Little” endeavors have no advantages of scale, no benefits, no promise.
Anyone with any subsidies (affordable housing, health care subsidized on the kind of sliding scale Congress envisions, Food stamps) can kiss them goodbye. The laws that provide those also punish you monetarily for getting ahead. Oh, you play piano at nursing homes? All of a sudden, you somehow don’t want to do that, once you get the housing of your own outside your daughter’s house. You have secretarial skills? All of a sudden, you are allergic to having to receive any income reports that the IRS might see. You want to learn a new skill? No, maybe not. It might pay. So you get depressed.
That’s for starters. Once you let go of (or are let go) the official job once underpinning the personal venture, you look for the cramped woodshed to live in for a long, long time. No, you don’t want to go back. You mainly don’t want to be “warehoused” by Democratic programs. That is the way you lose in this game. You can live on antidepressants, get neat.
I think everyone knows that actors start their careers by waiting tables, and artists, but right now it seems about 15 percent of us need to be “waiting tables” while we vision the future and try to get there.

I didn’t get laid off, but after a difficult divorce while pregnant, I had to start all over again, but with a baby on the way. Starting a business isn’t easy, but it’s just about all I could do to bring in money while caring for a baby.

The economy that Ronald Reagan inherited from previous administrations was decentralized enough to make a difference in the struggle against Communism.

Since then, Reagan and all the presidents since then have consistently centralized our economy around imported goods and fuel.

In the name of free trade, and getting the US government out of the marketplace, we have invited the Chinese government to control our market.

When I was a small child, most of the toys at Christmas were made in Japan. Then it was Korea. But Japan and Korea are our friends. They allow workers to vote and to have a day off once a week. We moved all of our jobs away from our neighbors at home, and away from our friends overseas, to those who want to deny political and religious freedom.

I don’t personally know anybody who sells things at Wal-mart because we don’t have personal connections with the Communist party. But the Walton family does have those full relationships as the top importer from China. So in the name of capitalism, they are the poster children for communism.

In our era, this makes capitalism AND communism both look really bad.

After being laid off for a full year starting in Oct 08, I finally landed a job in Oct 09 and am thrilled to be back to work at a good company who treat me much better than my old company,has decent benefits & starting pay(but no health ins),and has real growth potential. If not for MA UI, we would not have made it, but I valued the time I spent home with my 2 kids and the lesson of living with less. We actually came out of my lay-off in better financial shape, although I know this is not the case for most. Our situation was better because we did not have excessive debt and don’t try to “keep up with the Jones”. Those who live on credit do not fair as well because of that very reason.

I was second most senior in the company for designers, I have a son with down syndrome who needs heart medication to keep his heart in check, and to well… live.

I was laid off, unceremoniously, and lost all insurance, while junior staff remained.

It was easily the scariest moment of my life.

I was fortunate in that a client offered me a job almost immediately, but the whole situation left me feeling betrayed and sick to my stomach.

This mass unemployment is a systemic failure not an opportunity for individual growth. Most people end up worse off, not as holistic heath coaches and yoga gurus.

I have been starting new companies since 1993 (when it was very unfashionable). During that time I have created over 200 high paying US jobs, laid off many very close friends and been laid off myself. My advice is, have several months of cash in the bank (assuming you will get laid off, because it is becoming the norm, not the exception) and be ready/willing to completely reinvent yourself. I am on my third complete career reinvention in less than 15 years; however, without some cash cushion, you can’t easily reinvent yourself. Don’t get down. Reinventing yourself is tough and scary, but trust me you feel alive everyday. Besides, regardless of what career and/or company you work for now (small or large), it is unlikely you will spend your entire career there until retirement there. Think ahead. Change is good!

Check out Make a Living Have a Life Groups, offered through Lumunos.org. They help people do the inner work of job transition. You can’t go after what you want if you don’t know what you want, and this group is great at helping people know themselves.

I was laid off over a year ago after 16 years with a successful career with the same company. I knew that I felt “stuck” and never could see myself lasting until retirement there. I live in a rural area with few prospects in my field. I did a short stint at underemployment which felt even worse than being unemployed.

I have to sell my house and move on. I made a vow to remake myself, but really don’t know how to get into first gear with it. I know that this change will eventually lead to something good, but can’t see how to get going.

I was a professor when Hurricane Katrina hit. After some slights of hand our department was eliminated and I was unemployed in a ruined house and little money to rebuild. I got a call from a former colleague who offered me a job that was not my expertise. To make a long story short, I got work doing something that I learned in school but never applied before. It was challenging. After a year I went back to school and got another degree at night and over weekends.

So now I have many new skills. It is still not my favorite job, but I have carved out a place where I can be creative with it. And my fellow workers, all who were hit by Katrina, are exceptional. Everyday there is a door that opens with new opportunities. But I think making the task of developing new skills everytime you can is important so you have choices.

It was lemonade getting sacked once and lemonade for a job that was not really my liking but you can make things go your way if you work on it.

I am grateful.

Amen to the the comment about making sure your reinvention has to take into account basic needs – even if you decide to change the needs by unloading expenses.

A lot of people mess up reinvention by taking a wild shot at a new profession without really investigating the new career. Take time to meet people that are doing the work you want to do. Do you like the people, can you imagine doing the day-to-day work?

The good news is that reinvention is possible when it is also a must. No reason to stay stuck in a lifetime profession! And no reason to stay stuck at the same old lame income level – every career change I have done has been motivated by earning more money!

I was laid off twice in 2001&’02 from one of the internet consultancies. We were thankfully debt free, and had some cash saved. I found no work for almost a year, eventually relocating my family to keep money coming in. I don’t believe in the personal reinvention “everything will be ok” myth that people put forwarded at these times – many of our friends lost all of their savings, houses, and their credit was destroyed. We can’t all be successful in non-vocations. selling our books, making our movies, and teaching yoga. We can, however, learn new skills, keep working hard, and get new and better jobs.

As to the callers who were fortunate enough to have wealthy relatives to subsidize or employ them, what about people who are not so fortunate? For them, the cup is not so full.

Growing up the child of a miner and watching the unravelling of the steel industry, I saw frequent layoffs and watched people have to move and reinvent themselves nearly 30 years ago. Not sure why everyone thinks this is new. I think the impact to the steel industry in terms of a populace was far worse yet life went on.

I agree with both Stacked and Peter Nelson’s comment!

Being myself an IT worker, I do see most of the qualified (i.e. eligible people either at the entry level or mid level) NOT from USA, and I’m not quite sure why is it so?

Initially, even I was under the impression that we require more H1B and L1 people because our Technology Sector is GROWING EXPONENTIALLY and our domestic population of ~300 million people ARE NOT ABLE TO MEET the DEMAND (ie, we already exhausted our domestic eligible/qualified people) BUT to my utter dismay, I was wrong (or so do I think).

Now when I sit back and have a look, I guess a majority of US new generation is busy with keeping themselves “happy” (aka being “cool”) not being aware of the reality that ground beneath them is moving, and moving very very fast.

Secondly, there is one more aspect to it, if we are going to get even a BS in Math/Science at the cost of around 100K then, I guess our International competitors are much ahead of us who are dumping Math/Science graduates at the rate of may be a 10 thousand dollars.

I hope I’m wrong, very very wrong.

A reply to Barbara Costa:

We made Lemonade for almost zero dollars. I put a couple of people up in a hotel for a couple of nights, and I had to buy lunch for the crew, but everything else was donated. How? Twitter, my blog (Please Feed The Animals), and Facebook. As soon as I announced on those places that I was making this film, resources found me…Including Picture Park, which was the production company, and VirginAmerica, which sponsored the travel to and from Los Angeles. I’m not saying this is typical, but I am saying that if your idea is good enough and you are passionate enough to pursue it, doors open that you may never have known were there.

Less than 10 years ago, it took about 3 weeks to find a job. Then it was a Resume, and 2 interviews with maybe 2 interviewers, sigh on the dotted line, something on the order of mid 5 figures, full insurance, plus you could expect a few other “perks” and a Christmas Bonus, and matching funds to double matching funds for a 401K. That was AVERAGE. It’s only been 10 years, and you’re telling me we can’t do that anymore? BULL-SH…! Some people call them “Challenges.” They aren’t “challenges.” They are “Pains in the A..!” All I’m saying is that until companies in this nation are AFRAID of not hiring, they won’t.

I’m saying that people have forgotten that the number one reason to keep people working is so they don’t sit around and figure out how worked over their lives really are. WORK is the American Empires version of what the Romans called “Bread & Circuses” or what the Ancient Egyptians invented “Beer” for.

It’s not as if our money really has any value anyway. We have a fiat currency! It’s only worth belief, when you get right down to it. My point being, all of this…this “Economic Crisis” this “Great Recession” this modern “Depression” is either deliberate, or a Confederacy of Dunces. You simply can not break what isn’t REAL!!! Money…is a piece of paper at best, and really a cluster of electrons in a computer in more practical terms. It’s an idea, backed by belief, shooting around in telecommunications lines largely, but most importantly, peoples heads! You want things to be “Good?” Presto! You want things to be “Bad?” Presto! Decide to make people believe it. Convince them to work 65hrs. a week for this illusion. Convince them to sit at home and feel depressed for this illusion. Tell them they’re not being “creative” enough for this illusion. Control them, with this illusion. Laugh at them, for it’s an illusion. The fools! Too easy! Ahahahaha!

@ Stacked:

Sir, you speak like a “monk” who doesn’t need to care about the “worldly” world, as everything is “Maya” an illusion (in your terms, its money).

Well, then I must tell you sir that, the same “illusion” is required to buy clothes, food and a shelter, which ofcourse is not an illusion, atleast for an average person, who thinks he has some real feelings, real needs, not just some illusion based “sadness or happiness”.

I have heard a version of your statement time and time again from lots of “monks” who live near “Himalayas” and other remote places, trying to achieve “Nirvana”.