My SO works for the public library system. Recent budget cuts caused the board of trustees to announce that they were closing 12 of the 24 branches and laying off 148 of their 350+ staff members.
After a huge public outcry, they held an emergency meeting today and decided instead to leave all branches open, only lay off 84 staff members, reduce hours/services (down to 8 hrs/5 days per wk). In addition, they are requiring each staff member to take up to 10 furlough days by July 1st.
Just for clarity, a “furlough day” is an unpaid day off. So, basically, over the next 10 weeks - they would work/be paid for only 4 days a week.
Now, I don’t know about you - but I live a pretty tight budget nowadays. And if I suddenly had to sacrifice 20% of my income - I would have to make some pretty deep cuts in my finances.
So what about you? Would you be able to survive? What would you have to give up if you suddenly lost 20% of your paycheck for 3 months?
I’ve already taken 10 furlough days in the last year, and while it wasn’t fun, we made it through. One thing to tell your SO: Take the furloughs in full weeks, if at all possible, and file for unemployment. I don’t know what unemployment pays in North Carolina, but it should be at least a couple hundred dollars.
I wish my company had done this. Instead they permanently closed our division and laid us all off. It’s been almost a year. The job market is terrible. A year living on unemployment with COBRA dwindling away… I would have rather sacrificed 20% of my income and kept my job and participatory health benefits.
I’m self employed, and business is virtually nonexistant right now, so I have cut a lot of things out of my budget over the last 12 months - at least 20%, probably more. To make matters a little more tricky, I took custody of a niece last fall, and my son and his pregnant fiancee moved back in with us. Hubby and I are supporting a family of 7 on less than we’ve ever made since we got married 6 years ago.
I sympathize with you, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
That’s a lot, no doubt. We only have to take 12 furlough days over two years at my job, so yeah, 10 in three months is pushing it.
I guess, at worst, there’s this bright side: some bills can be ignored or postponed for three months if they had to be, as long as you know you’re back to normal in 90 days. So glass half-full…it’s over fast.
If people in (insert some impoverished African/South American/Asian country here) can live on $5 a day, you can survive a 20% pay cut. Sheesh, whiny Americans.
We cut out all non-essential spending. No eating out, no buying CDs or books, no going to the movies, etc. etc. I was a little chagrined to see how much money we were wasting when times were good. I guess we gave up everything but the very basics - groceries, medical expenses, utilities, existing debts.
I could do it. I just got a raise a month ago, and the furlough would be more-or-less equivalent to getting bumped down to my old salary - which I was already living on comfortably. I’d probably enjoy it, actually.
We’re looking at a similar situation - the economy has finally hit my company, and my hours are being reduced from 40/week to 32/week, indefinitely. My co-worker’s are being reduced from 40 to 25/wk, too. We’re hoping that we’ll go back up to full-time in the fall, when we have some events scheduled.
My husband works, too, so this isn’t a 20% reduction in our total income, but I’m the main breadwinner, so it’s still significant. It starts next week, so we’re planning to reduce our childcare some (since I’ll be home more), and go bare-bones on everything we can. I need to call our cell phone company to see if there are any deals we could get, and I need to see if we can consolidate some of our credit card debt. Otherwise, we’ll completely curtail eating out (which we rarely do anyway) and all other non-essential purchases, and try to keep our grocery bill down. Unfortunately, most of our expenses are pretty set, so we don’t have a lot of wiggle room. Our folks might help us out if we need it - I am so thankful that they are in a position to be able to do that!
We’d be fine. My wife just took an unpaid, 12-week maternity leave, and we made it through that. 10 furlough days would cost us less than that, even if both of us had to do it.
It was better when they did a rotating layoff for my last job. That way some people got paid 80% of their wages by unemployment, and the other people received their full wages when they did work. The laid off employees didn’t have to look for work either as they were expected to go back to their job in a month. Losing 20% of your income is tough for some people and a disaster for others. This can be a personal disaster that pushes people over the edge. You have my sympathies on this.
My brothers just received some of their pay for work done last year. They weren’t paid for 3 months while working, and they hadn’t worked for a couple months after that in 2010. They kept on working with the promise of the money is coming, because there were no other jobs and that one might finally pay. They just got 3 days worth of work unrelated to the other job and will have none again. They also don’t qualify for unemployment during this. They’ve used up all money they had reserved over the last 5 months of this ridiculousness. Things sure are going great.
Yes, I took a 40% hit last year and made it through.
Mainly because I had taken the advice of on old friend in the entertainment business. Work there was so intermittent (and sometimes undesirable) that he told me ‘Always have your go ‘frak’ you money.’ in case you don’t have a job or want what is offered. So, I started making sure I had some cash around for emergency living expenses.
I started this by putting raises into savings instead of spending them, it made a big difference. I set them up as automatic deposits so they were not in my checking account to tempt me.
I live paycheck to paycheck, and that would mean I would bring home about $1100 a month for three months. I could pay rent, utilities, gas to get to and from work. I’d lose my phone and home internet access. I’d drop back to eating beans, flea market veggies, that kind of thing. I just don’t have a lot of corners to cut. I already don’t pay for cable. I pay my car insurance once a year out of my tax returns, so that is, thankfully, covered.
Basically, I’d be living mighty close to the bone. I would try to pick up a second job somewhere, maybe midnight shift at a gas station.
I would actually love some more time off. I’ve paid off all debt except the last chunk of grad school loans, and we bought much less house than the traditional numbers said we could afford specifically so we could have some financial wiggle room. 20% of one salary is well within the wiggle room we left ourselves. And the condo was the main reason we were saving up money in a big way (well, that, and the wedding). At least until the car dies.
Frankly, if there were ever talk at my job of furloughs or cutting hours or potential layoffs, I might volunteer for a couple of weeks of unpaid leave. Not gloating, just trying to think back to the last time I had two consecutive weeks off with no obligations, and I think it was sometime before high school. Which was more than 25 years ago.
My first furlough day is Good Friday. We have another scheduled in September and there will be three more some time during the holidays. Rather than cutting back, per se, I’ve made some of the money back selling items and services in my free time.
Plus, I’m single and have a roommate. So it’s not as big a problem for me.
We already had 2 furlough days in 2009, and 10 more over the next two years. The higher-ups would not allow us to take them consecutively and get UC, like rolling layoffs or something like that. So I just took a second job.
I have no debt besides my mortgage. I could live on 20% less, although I might bump the animals down to a less pricey feed. I just bought a new mare, and she’s getting a ton (10 lbs a day) of the priciest grain my feedstore has because she’s thin and I plan to breed her. My other horses eat about 2.5 lbs total for the two of them. The five dogs could live on Wal-mart food, they have before. I don’t spend a lot on food for myself, but I’d cut back on the eating out (two fastfood lunches per week). As long as my paid-off car stayed functional, I’d be okay.
I went back (out of curiousity) a few years to see how the percentages of what I’d spent changed. Interestingly, medical expenses have gone from 5th place (8% of expenses) to first place (13% of expenses) since 2006.
