Category: The View From Your Recession

This reader was a third-year law student about to take the bar exam in Massachusetts. Original post here. He writes:

I graduated this spring with a law degree, and spend the summer in bar preparation.  I sat simultaneously for the New York and Massachusetts bar exams, figuring that I would put my eggs in as many baskets as possible.  Afterwards, I moved to D.C. from Boston in search of work.  From all I had read, D.C. seemed to have a better job market for attorneys than any other locale.

I threw myself into the job hunt with gusto – I was on ten different job email lists, and probably can immediately recite twenty different job posting websites off the top of my head.  I informational interviewed and attended alumni and networking events.  I also applied to thirteen temping agencies, primarily legal.  When I say I applied, I mean I actually went to their offices in suit and tie ready to sell my skill set and impress them – these were not anonymous resume drops.  Each agency’s representative was pleasant and said that opportunities would come in any day now. And then they shooed me out of the office when I tried to press for details.  I call each every Monday and leave a voicemail (always a voicemail).  Since mid August, I have not received one job opportunity from these companies.  Not one.

The first job I got out of law school requires me to wear an apron and hairnet, paying me twenty-five cents an hour less than a high school job I had in 2001.  I’ve also proctored the LSAT, and joined an HIV vaccination study for money – yes, my health is now for sale. 

Happily, my story ends on a happy note. 

I was selected for a fellowship through the Office of Personnel Management this past spring, and with this designation, I was able to get interviews for fellowship-specific management jobs in the federal government.   I received an offer to work for a federal agency just last week, and begin on January 4th.  It’s a non-attorney role, but I hope to use my fellowship (and the completed background check) to continue on in federal service.   It’s the best Christmas present anyone could ever dream of.

I’m very excited about this opportunity, but also very conscious about how dire things were getting. My savings are absolutely depleted, and my credit cards have been filed away lest I overdraw them in a weak moment when I want caffeine.  I qualified for food stamps the same day I learned I’d passed the New York bar exam.  I believe there is no entitlement to a job in this country, but I am very very angry to see so many of my peers struggling though no fault of their own – It's a great hardship to have a newly-minted professional degree right now.  Before the new job came along, my income-based repayment figure for my student loans was $0.00 monthly. I predict that student loans will become less easily available in the coming years as more and more students don't keep up on their payments, or pay very little as I was scheduled to do. 

The hardest part about this experience was when the Massachusetts bar association swore in this summer’s test takers.  I viewed all my law school classmates’ ceremony pictures on Facebook – I could not afford to travel back to Massachusetts and share this great accomplishment in Faniuel Hall at Qunicy Market, where the oldest bar association in the western hemisphere has always held its induction ceremonies.  Instead, I’ll have to be sworn in by affidavit later in January.  I'm a grown man, but I was in tears at viewing those pictures and being struck at how much I wanted to hug my classmates-now-attorneys. 

We live in interesting times, and I know my generation will come out of it with a very different perspective on savings, spending, and investment than did the graduates of the 1990’s and early 2000’s.

This update is from the actor in New York with a young family and variety of sporadic jobs. Original post here. The reader writes:

Earlier this year I was an out of work actor living in New York. Now I'm an out of work actor living in Los Angeles. My wife and I had been planning the move before the recession hit, and I must admit that the financial crisis gave us pause. Others might very sensibly have decided to hunker down and weather the storm, putting off the move to some hypothetical future. But we decided that the move was always going to have an element of risk, and we might as well subject ourselves to that turmoil in a year when turmoil would seek us out anyway. Never waste a crisis, so to speak.

We've received mixed reactions to this decision.

One very nice but alarmed career counselor at the Actors Work Program in LA looked at me white faced and goggle-eyed, saying, "Why would you move to California?" and told us to prepare for nine months of unemployment. (He also nearly passed out from worry when I told him I was getting a scooter to save on gas, so take that into account.) Other friends of ours think we've made a great decision. But then a lot of them are actors themselves, and used to risk. They know us, and they know we'll figure it out one way or another. Here's a short list of how our lives have improved after living here for one month:

1) We are paying less for a better apartment than we had in New York, and we even got a month's rent free. It's a renters market in LA right now.
2) We can wear short sleeves and go bike riding and in December, rather than hiding out from the cold in a cramped apartment with our 2 year old son.
3) We live closer to some very old friends and their kids.
4) There is five times as much paid acting and voiceover work here as there is in NY, and some recent meetings have been very encouraging on that front.
5) Despite the career counselor's worries, we're already finding some part-time work. Not a lot yet, but enough to make our savings last longer.
6) We landed in a fantastic school district. Not to be taken for granted in LA.

I don't know if I'd recommend this move to everyone, but this is the third major city I've come to with no job (my wife's fourth). After a while, you just have to believe in your own ability to find and create opportunities. It helps if your partner shares those beliefs, and mine does. The future looks very sunny for us here.

This update is from the executive recruiter in the construction industry who flirted with the idea of fleeing to the affordability of Ireland or Iceland. Original post here. The reader writes:

Not long after I wrote you last April, it was announced that we were losing our dental insurance, our matching 401(k) contributions, even our parking passes. There was another round of layoffs across the board, from recruiters to admin and IT staff. The company was trimming fat wherever it could. The problem was, they were starting to cut into muscle! I still have great love and respect for the company, and its leadership, but the whole atmosphere was just depressing in a Glengarry Glen Ross kind of way. And that's no fun. So in July I made the leap: unplugged the headset, rented out my house, and left to travel around South America. (I'm single, mid-thirties, no kids).

Five months later, and I'm still here in Peru . . . trekking in the Andes, exploring the Amazon, having all kinds of weird and wonderful experiences. I suppose I'll have to go back and get a real job again eventually. I could go back to headhunting, but last month one of my former associates told me they are considering filing Chapter 11. So for now, I am merely living for the day. I get by without a lot of frills, and I don't even have health insurance . . . but life is an adventure again, and it's pretty freakin' great.

This update is from a reader who was gainfully employed with a new child but whose wife and other family members were struggling to find work. Original post here. The reader writes:

The good news first:  I was home to see our daughter take her first steps.  She is great.  Now the rest:  My employer had several rounds of layoffs this year, and my position was eliminated two months ago.  I cannot tell you how distressing this has been for us.  I have never had a job search experience as exhausting and discouraging as this one.  I have had several very good interviews which did not result in an offer simply due to the number of highly qualified candidates to choose from and the very slow rate of hiring.

My wife has given up on finding a job in her field, and enrolled in a program at a trade school. Her parents have moved in with one of her siblings to share bills and for help with their health problem.  Thank God for Medicare and Social Security which keep body and soul together for them, and for ARRA which allows us to afford COBRA.  No, scratch that – thank the politicians who fought for these programs and damn those who have tried to block or destroy them.

We thought it might be a useful way to check in anecdotally with the impact of the recession if we went back and emailed various readers who sent in their personal "views from the recession" this past year. Here's an update from the ten-year veteran of TV scriptwriting who was considering a jump to law school because of the industry's bleak environment. His friend was laid off in the writers' strike and hadn't been able to find work for over a year, so he was close to offering his friend temporary quarters with him and his girlfriend. The original post is here. The reader writes:

I began searching for work in the legal field in earnest to get away from my demanding job and my abusive boss. After things deteriorated with my boss and he started to insult me on a nearly daily basis I decided to dedicate myself to studying for the LSAT full time. Luckily I was able to arrange being laid off so I was able to collect unemployment. On my last day my boss called me a "fucking moron" for an obviously innocent (and small) mistake. Unable to say anything back and put my unemployment at risk I bit my tongue and pressed on to bigger and hopefully better things. Scared as heck that I was now unemployed in a worsening job market, I pressed on and spent 6 hours a day studying for the LSAT for the next three months, got my results and have now applied to a lot of law schools.

I also proposed to my girlfriend and have begun a lot of big picture planning for our lives together. It's disorienting, even as a 30-something to be making choices that will affect your life for literally decades.

Maybe i'm just a kid at heart but I feel these decisions are so big they can't possibly be mine to make. In the next 8 months we will plan, pay for and execute a wedding, sell our condo, buy two new cars, move, I'll start law school and my fiancee will start a new job. Stress isn't so much an occurrence as it is our environment.

Further complicating matters is the fact that I will be taking on six figures of debt and graduating into an unknowable job market as an older first year lawyer.

 It's no small stress that I may be in a worse position in 4 years than I am currently (and as many a law advisor has told me, the legal job market is "in flux"). My only counter-move to this has been to strongly consider doing a dual degree JD/MBA program in the hopes that the extra year of schooling will help my marketability (at the cost of another year out of the job market as well as adding to the pile of debt). After the holidays if I can scrape enough money together I plan on trying to learn a foreign language (something that's been very difficult with my dyslexia) in the hopes that that too will help my marketability when i enter the job market. We'll see if there is a happy ending here. I plan on being a dedicated husband and a good provider. I just hope that my current all-in bet isn't something that we'll regret for a long long time. Knowing that money is the number one stress for relationships it's hard not to feel that the bet on law school isn't more than just a bet on a career path.

As for my friend, the job market never seemed to turn around for him. He attempted to transition into a career with solar energy companies but the work just wasn't there yet (and he had no experience). Things got progressively worse and he ended up not moving in with me. Instead he sold a lot of his possessions, elected to return to the mid-west and move in with his parents. I know this isn't the end of his story and I hope that he'll be able to get everything together for himself and attack life and the job market again after some time to reflect and collect himself. As someone who's had to move in with his parents after he'd long since considered himself established I know how difficult living with your parents can be on your sense of pride and purpose. I hope that in his private moments he sees the hope and possibility that still exists for him and he doesn't allow his current situation to erode his pride and fervor that he attacks life with.

Sadly he is not the only close friend who is going through a difficult time right now. The best news I've heard any of my friends getting in the past 6 months was a friend of mine with two children under the age of 3, a hefty mortgage and a stay at home wife who was laid off unexpectedly from his law firm 4 months ago who just found work this past week. The news made me so happy I teared up. I haven't been that happy (aside from my engagement) in a long time.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

To the writer who was concerned that the empty UPS store is a sign of a floundering economy, I say that it's a sign of the maturation of online shopping. I have done online Christmas shopping for a few years now.  I know what I can get, what to expect, and what kind of bargains can be obtained.  With the possible exception of one-of-a-kind handmade gifts, there's nothing I can get in a store that I can't get online. Online shopping saves me the hassle of shipping and, in the case of presents for the relatives up north I'll be seeing next week, the hassle of trying to not lose presents to TSA or the airlines.

Another writes:

The USPS has been aggressively marketing its "we'll pick up your shipment" option, and I've long since switched over to just purchasing gifts online and having them shipped directly so I don't have to deal with the crowds at the post office! Measuring the economy by the traffic at the local post office is like measuring the relevance of world events by how many newspapers the corner stand sells.

In fact, online holiday sales are up 3% already. And one imagines that a greater percentage of shopping occurs online in the closing weeks, since last-minute purchases are easiest when done at your computer.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

My neighborhood UPS Store has always been a handy barometer of economic activity.  In years past the place has been mobbed this close to Christmas, with people sending large numbers of packages (presumably gifts) to friends and family out of state.  This week it's a ghost town – no lines at all. The one person ahead of me the other day was sending a few wrapped presents that fit in a very small box.   I live in a gentrified, fairly well off area in New York City, and the contrast to pre-recession days is disturbing.  If people here can't afford to spend much this season, it must be much worse elsewhere.   I'm not advocating a return to mindless consumerism, but it would be heartening to see some signs of economic activity.  A pulse, if you will.  Right now we all seem to be flatlining.

Retail sales nationwide are actually looking up right now. (Though, contrary to conventional wisdom, holiday gift-giving doesn't jolt the economy as much as you would think.)

A reader writes:

I work for a small municipality that serves 40,000 people. As our fiscal year restarted in October we had about 10 jobs open up, ranging from Public Works ($12/hr) to policeman/woman ($42k/yr) to Jailer ($15/hr) to PD Dispatch ($14.50/hr). These aren't high paying jobs, though benefits are included. I am here to tell you that I have never, in my 10 years here, seen so many people come in to apply for a job. We are getting ALL types of people, most of whom I know have a zero chance of getting hired just by the looks of them (I know, a bit judgmental, but believe me, it's that obvious). Every day HR is processing gobs of applications. An HR rep just told me they have gotten about 400 apps for the 10 positions that have been open since October 1. And 80% of them won't even qualify for consideration, based on a municipalities stricter hiring guidelines.

Makes clear to me that at least one demographic is getting hit hard, the working poor.

A reader writes:

Your reader wrote:

I think the question has to be asked now, concerning unemployment:  If our economy is in "recovery," then what is preventing companies from actually hiring people?  I hate saying this, but this is feeling like another "Mission Accomplished" to people, especially me.

While I certainly understand the aggravation, I'm not sure I've seen a single individual suggest that the job market was going to rebound quickly. In fact, basically everyone (from the administration on down) has explicitly argued that the recovery was going to be slow, particularly in the job market. So, it is a bit unfair to reference "Mission Accomplished" along these lines. The economy appears to be recovering, and jobs will eventually come as well, but the latter is not necessarily an indicator that the former is a faulty belief.

A reader writes:

I'm a college grad who has been unemployed for several months now.  I'm scraping by living and doing volunteer work at a hostel while searching for work, and living off a bare-bones unemployment check (which pays for food, that's about it) that is about to expire.  In applying to several entry-level positions in recent months in fields that are strong (social media and video game production), in the area that they are strongest (i.e., the Bay Area), I've noticed a disturbing trend:  In places I applied to, rather than being rejected outright or just not hearing from them, I'm getting responses saying that the job is "on hold," or that the position was "closed" without any hires.  They often note that I was certainly qualified for the position, they just can't afford to hire anyone right now.

I think the question has to be asked now, concerning unemployment:  If our economy is in "recovery," then what is preventing companies from actually hiring people?  I hate saying this, but this is feeling like another "Mission Accomplished" to people, especially me.