Portrait: Phoenix, Arizona

Everyone always says that it will never happen to you; you will never loose your job. And then it does.
Twice.

In seven months.

I can understand loosing one job in a lifetime, but two in less than a year? I still don't quite understand how a young, married, college educated professional, who played by all of the "rules", could loose two jobs in the space of 7 months, through no fault of her own. Some days it sill doesn't seem real. I wish the Universe would play this game of life by some fair rules, instead of cheating and making me suffer the consequences.

In March I was working as an engineer for a national construction company. When I graduated from college less than 3 years before, construction was THE industry to get into in Phoenix. Not to mention, the company was great and I liked working there. Then the call from the HR person came on a Thursday morning and all of a sudden, I'm laid off. No job. No income, only two weeks of pay for severance. Fortunately, my husband and I were in a good spot in our lives and had wisely saved up money, and suddenly very thankful that we had been able to save the small amount we had. We tightened our budget tremendously and figured we had enough savings to get us through this. The unemployment payments helped, although they didn't cover much more than groceries and gasoline. My unemployment was only going to be temporary and short. I would soon find another job and we'd be back to normal in a few months.

My plan of getting a new job entailed a career change. I had been looking into it for a while and this seemed like a sign from God telling me now is the time to do what I wanted to do. It took 3 months of job searching, interviews, submitting resumes online, to get my new perfect job, a job I loved doing. And it came with a salary cut of over $15,000. "That's alright. I'm new in this field. It'll be fine. It meets our budget and that's what matters", I thought, dealing with the initial sting. We kept our tight unemployment budget to make sure we were putting money into savings again. Less than four months into my new career, my perfect new job, the economy imploded and I lost my job. Again.

You start to question everything you did at your job(s). Did coming in to work a few minutes late here and there matter? I stayed later to make up for it every time, didn't I? Surely those times when I stayed late working on projects and didn't bill it to my time card evened that out. Didn't it? Did my bosses just put on a show when they appeared to like me and my work? Was it my work that just sucked? If that's the case, why wouldn't someone say so? You would think that would come up in the periodic employee reviews. It couldn't have been a personality conflict; everyone was super nice to me and genuinely appeared to like me. Or was it all an act that I was completely oblivious to? Especially when I feel like I read people well?

It takes some time to really answer those questions in truth toward yourself. Coming in a few minutes late didn't matter. My work was the best I could do and completely fulfilled the needs and wants of my bosses, even exceeded a lot of the time. And everyone really did like me.

It was the second lay off that really hit me. The first time I had a plan, with steps, that was completely obtainable. I had a goal I was working toward and I knew that it would be attained in a short amount of time. I even knew I was going to be happier with the new career. The second lay off was completely unexpected, out of the blue. You don't think that your brand new dream-job will end in less than four months. It doesn't even enter your thoughts in the tiniest way. Suddenly you're faced with these questions: What do you do when you've exhausted your meager savings with the first period of unemployment? What do you really do when you've found a job you love and now you don't have it anymore? How do you tell your friends, AGAIN, that you've lost your job again? And when they respond, "Seriously?" what do you say to that? Like I would really joke about this.

So, I'm on to searching for another job, after a few months out of the workforce. I just could not make myself look for a job for a long time. I floundered and seriously did not know what I wanted to do. I did not know how to make my dreams become a reality.

In all of this, I am extremely thankful that I have a husband who still has a good job. That I have a husband who supports my employment decisions because he just wants me to be happy. That we were able to keep our house. That we have both been healthy during the time of no insurance. That I have a support network of friends and family that care about me and are willing to help in whatever way possible.

I've come to accept and be happy that I'm now starting my third career in a year (and now a fourth). It's been a long journey of really high highs and extremely low lows in the year since my first lay-off, but I've made it through. While the economy doesn't look stellar even now, I am confident everything will be ok. I have to be optimistic about life. It's just not worth living if you don't think anything good can happen even during the not-so-good times. I firmly believe God is good and that He has a plan and will take care of me.

Anonymous
Phoenix, Arizona

Portrait: Phoenix, Arizona

I am a 27 year old mother and wife. I love my husband and daughter as much as any wife and mother could. They are amazing and make me so happy. They fill my life with love, laughter, friendship and hope. Because I love them so much I am incredibly fearful about our future.

I am the sole provider for our family. My wonderful husband stays home with our daughter, just over a year, and he’s so good with her. He quit his job when she was just 3 weeks old and has been a stay at home Dad ever since. We did fine on my income alone for about a year, but I am in real estate. Enough said, right. My income has decreased by about 60% and although we were very smart with our money when times were good I don’t want to slowly eat though our savings only to end up broke in a year or two. We have cut back our over head as much as possible to try to live within our new income level and although we’re doing just about everything humanly possible, we’re still not quite there.

We got rid of our cable (both computer and TV), our cell phones are at the lowest plan (we don’t have a home phone) and we’re on the savings plan with our electric company - only doing wash and running the dishwasher between 9pm and 9am and on the weekends. We got rid of our Netflix account so all we have is 1 TV channel that comes in and movies to watch, we now buy our dogs the super cheap food (which isn’t all that good for them, but hey we’re all sacrificing) and we get all our baby’s clothes from friends and family hand me downs.

We get our meat and diapers at Costco, we shop with coupons and buy what’s on sale, and we do not eat our at all unless we have a gift card to do so at no cost. We only water our yard and plants once a week, the baby gets a bath every other day, and I shave my legs before I shower in an attempt to save water and lower our water bill. I no longer buy the nice razors for myself but the crappy disposable ones that give my legs a rash half the time (probably because I use them a week or two longer than I should), I only wear mascara on my top lashes (which I have decided I like anyways) and don’t wear make up at all on my days off to make it last longer, and I no longer buy mask for my face but instead go into our backyard and cut off a piece of one of our aloe vera plants, which works amazingly well, and put that on before bed.

I buy the cheapest hair spray I can find, I haven’t had my hair cut in about a year (my husband cuts his own), and I use super cheap shampoo/ conditioner which leaves my hair feeling “oily and gunky,” but it’s 1/3 of the price of the name brand I used to buy. We try not to use the cars more than necessary in order to cut down our gas expense. My husband tries to walk a lot more and find ways to entertain himself and the baby without getting in the car to go joyriding or off-roading (which they used to love to do).

The only debt we have is our house, which is great except that it is over $100,000 upside down. It’s so discouraging as we put 10% when we bought (didn’t do the crazy $0 down, 100% financing) and we own $100,000 more than what our home would sell for today. We own everything else we have outright and we still can’t seem to get our overhead low enough to let my husband stay home with our baby girl. As disappointing as that is, it’s not the end of the world. He’s been looking for a job and I have been looking at day care facilities. We pray that he will find something, anything, soon and that he’ll have weekends off so our daughter only has to be in day care 3 days a week. This would be okay - we would adjust - we’d all be fine.

However, my company is looking to do layoffs again. They just can’t make money selling houses in this market – the costs to build a home (purchase the land, raw material, labor etc) is more than what the market will buy it for so they have to slow their production and get rid of some of us as there is not enough to sell to keep us all employed. It makes sense, financially, for the company to sit on the side lines and let the inventory around the valley get bought up. They’ll get back into the market when they can make money on their homes again. You can’t blame them - no company can consistently lose money month after month and stay afloat, but for me it’s the end of the world. If I get laid off we lose our healthcare. This, more than anything else, scares the crap out of me. I have been looking, any applying, for other jobs that offer less than I make (even making 40% of what I used to) just in case, but I haven’t had much luck. My husband has also been looking and applying to jobs I find him (we don’t have the Internet at home anymore so I have to look for him at work) but that isn’t going well either. There was recently a job fair here in Phoenix and 10,000 people showed up for 400 available jobs. It’s not hard to do the math and realize that there are a lot of other folks who will take whatever they can find too.

The future is bleak and uncertain, but I choose to be hopeful. We are willing to do whatever we need to in order to take care of our family. We have lots of love in our lives and good family and friends. Everyone says money is just money and it’s not what really matters in life. With the way things are going I think a lot of families, just like mine, are going to put that saying to the test. We’ll all find out, very soon, whether we can be happy with love and friendship alone.

Anonymous,
Phoenix, AZ

Portrait: Phoenix, Arizona

My portrait is several years in the making. We are among the lucky ones--at least for now. My husband has a great job--actually two--and we've got income coming in. My husband leaves the house at 4am every day to begin his 14 hour day working for two different employers. Our rent is astronomical (at one point we'd hoped to buy this house at the end of our 2-year lease and part of that rent would have gone to the down payment) and we're moving next month to reduce our living expenses by about 50% total.

In 2006, we lost our entire lives nest-egg when we sold our structurally defective new home back to its builder for around $100k less than its market value. It was that or face foreclosure--and the builder knew it, because the market had begun to sour. After 18 months of trying to hang onto it while we couldn't live in it, we relented and sold.

To add insult to injury, recently the state decided that we owe capital-gains tax on the sale of the home, because we both did not live in it two years (my husband had to work in another state in order to make enough money). They sent us a tax bill for over $25k and will sue us/garnish my husband's wages if we don't somehow resolve this in the next 10 days. I can assure you we won't be able to send them $25k like they've requested!

That same year, my husband's employer went under and we became aware that none of our health insurance claims had been paid during 2006. At the time we were paying $1200/month in health insurance premiums and I had a high-risk pregnancy and a very ill toddler. The company stole our premiums--it was a fortune and we sacrificed to pay for that health insurance that they never funded.

This in turn led to our credit score dropping from about 700 to around 400 because we have tens of thousands in medical debt that we cannot afford to pay. Universal default kicked in and all our creditors raised our rates severely and lowered our limits. We stopped using credit in late-2006 but we are years away from paying them off.

The Dept. of Labor has been investigating the former employer's ERISA violations--for almost three years and we don't have much hope that we'll received any sort of favorable resolution.

Also in 2006, our 20-month old was diagnosed with a serious GI illness and then suffered a stroke in 2007. She needs to have elemental formula (sometimes via a feeding tube, more often orally) in order to stay well and not become malnourished. Our state has no elemental formula insurance protection and our health insurance will not pay for the formula even though the summary plan description indicates that it's covered--and without the formula her other medical expenses would be much greater. I won't even go into detail on her medication co pays, except to say they're in the multiple hundreds per month.

At one point we were paying $1400/mo for her formula. Yes, that's one-thousand, four-hundred dollars per month. I've since been reduced to buying her formula on EBay and from various people I've found online who have extra and sell it off cheap. In my quest to fight for insurance coverage, I've spoken with moms who have to use expired elemental formula because they can't afford anything else!

Our financial issues have also led to my husband and I often neglecting our own medical and dental health, which has led to both of us having some pretty significant health issues and now we're paying the price for that because we don't feel well (me especially) and we're busy paying to treat things we could have prevented. I just have to hope it's not too late and that this doesn't affect us long-term.

The ironic part of all of this is that we are *not* unemployed (praise everything holy). We have what is considered excellent group health (it pays 80% down from 90% in recent years), dental and vision insurance. My husband works for two companies that have promising outlooks even in these hard times.

It is very difficult to work so hard, so many hours per week, and not be able to afford to go out to dinner or even to buy lunch during the work day. My husband brown-bags it daily and our dates as of late consist of getting $1.29 Whopper Jr. sandwiches at Burger King. We have been working our tails off since we got married when we were barely 21 years old. We bought our first home at 22! To have to start over in our mid-thirties is not fun! It feels like by now we'd have some security and we wouldn't have to be trying to dig our way out of a huge debt--it's like we're starting over but not from zero. We're starting over from a big-time negative!

My husband and I have been forced to adopt a kind of a laissez-faire attitude about our finances--we say "it's only money!" and we try to laugh. Because if I'm not laughing, I might be crying. It's not that I no longer care -- I care enough to devote a large portion of my life to carefully budgeting our money and devising a plan to try and get ahead.

We're very blessed in many ways and it really helps to focus on that, because things could be a lot worse. I've been through days where I didn't know if my then-two year old would ever speak or even open her eyes again. Yes, I remind myself daily, it is only money. Some nights I can't sleep because I'm worried (and trying to ignore stress-related heart palpitations) and I just have to think that to myself and shove everything else out of my mind.

Anonymous
Phoenix, AZ

Portrait: Phoenix, Arizona

Everyone here knows someone that foreclosed on a home. It seems as though there are a disproportionate number of houses for sale or foreclosed on here in Phoenix, and it's not simply my imagination… there are. FOR SALE Signs decorate the neighborhoods. We are right up there with Las Vegas for foreclosures. This valley grew and grew, much too quickly. Our valley spans over 1000 square miles; the cities run together, and often you aren't aware that you have left one city and entered another. Eternal suburbia. The growth has all but halted. The new homes are being put up at a crawl instead of the lightning speed they once were. Everyone here came from somewhere else. Well, everyone but me it seems. There are very few natives, so everyone here has a story, a reason for moving here. The story often includes the price of living, or the lack of snow. That's right, the price of living here is extremely low, or it used to be. No PhD, Master's degree, or family money required to live lavishly here. Before the housing "boom" almost anyone could afford to live here, which is good or bad depending on how you look at it.

At 22, my ex and I bought a condo… for $93,500. He had a regular job under $40K a year and I was a college student. That was almost 5 years ago. When we split he kept the house, and in order to keep it, he now has 2 jobs. Like Rebecca I have not personally felt this recession. I have seen people around me in pain from lost jobs, homes, cars… Friends move home with parents after losing jobs after being on their own for years. When I met my husband, I didn't realize that he was in a stable position come recession time. I knew he was not a broke twenty something, but I didn't know that our field of work was a safe one… We are not rich, but we are stable. I am no longer charging groceries, or living paycheck to paycheck. But many here are. The young couples that married right out of high school and started having children are both working, or moving in with parents. They are no longer able to get by, certainly not on one paycheck. Living paycheck to paycheck, it really only takes one or two rough months to hit bottom now.

There are more empty store fronts than I can remember in my short 26 years. Many people that got into real estate here to make money quick, now have to work second jobs. If you bought a home here in the last several years, you are probably upside down in it, and cannot get out of it, so if you lose your job, you can't move… you are stuck. And you aren't alone. Like I said, everyone here knows someone…

Leslie
Phoenix, Arizona