How is this mess impacting you financially, and what steps are you taking?

The Quarantine Zone
1

Have your finances been impacted by this? Yet? What do you anticipate?

What are you doing, either proactively or reactively?

So far, my wife an I are still employed and not seeing any impact to income. We’re both in pharmaceuticals, but both in Development. Which is always first lamb to slaughter.

Obviously our retirement funds have taken a beating.

I get the weekly commercial updates, and we’re seeing a big drop in parts of the business.

So we’re pulling back on spend, and I have stopped the extra principal payments on the mortgage.

2

In my case there’s been little change. My job hasn’t laid anyone off and apparently don’t plan to shut down, and like Amazon and Wal-Mart they’ve added a couple of bucks an hour. The only real impact has been my decision to let tenants skip the rent for next month.

Like most people, my stock portfolio has taken a big hit, but that’s just temporary. And for now, I’m still making contributions, so I’ll come out ahead long term.

3

I teach at the local community college, so my courses are now online. My wife is an independent bookkeeper, and I help her out with it. She lost three or four clients (out of around 30) because they had to shut down their businesses. Hopefully only temporarily.

So far, I’m not seeing reason to be more conservative with my bill paying.

4

We’re both still working remotely and getting paid, so no real impact there. Our expenses are actually lower, so except for the stock market impact on our retirement savings, we’re doing well.

5

I’ve had my work moved online and it’s working so far, but there’s a good chance I won’t have my current job(s) after May. Fortunately, I don’t have any debt at all and no obligations other than my current bills for utilities and maintenance fees for our apartment. Our investments have been throttled, but that’s everyone.

6

DH is working 30 hours/week from home, 10 hours he has to go in.

I am furloughed, and the only money I was still making was about $200/month teaching Hebrew, which I am not doing over Zoom.

We have savings, and have taken out liquid saving account (our other accounts have penalties for early withdrawal), and put half into a second account we opened. We transfer to our spending (debit cards and bill-pay online) account as we need.

We calculated that our saving could carry us 10 months, and then be depleted, so we set aside half, and now are prepared to live for 5 months “hunkered down.”

We also have a small annuity that gives us just about enough money to pay the utilities every month. We have no car payments.

We have a very strict budget we are sticking to. Because there are not nights when people have to stay late at work, of life other wise interferes, getting a homemade meal to the table is easy, so we aren’t spending money of take-out food anymore.

We plan meals two weeks at a time, and order what we will need for them, which we don’t already have from Amazon Fresh-- these are mainly fresh produce and dairy-- albeit, the one thing we did stock up on that we normally do not buy or keep in the house is some shelf-stable milk, and some powdered milk.

We looked at where we were at the end of the first week, and decided that I should get some crappy part-time job for the duration. I need to bring in $200/week. I signed on to deliver for Amazon and Uber Eats (NOT transporting passengers for Uber. I’d end up getting called by the Dionne quintuplets at the airport, just getting back from Rome.

The jobs are not as crappy as I’d anticipated. I spend most of them sitting in my car listening to NPR. Last week, I made $212, and spent $17 on gas. Yes, I know there is wear& tear to my car, but it’s a 2002 Audi, so I’m not especially worried. I called my insurance company, and to insure me as a delivery driver costs an additional $12/month. 3 bucks a week. That makes my cost of business $20, and my take-home $192. That was for the first week, during which I did not start until Wednesday. So I’m optimistic it will work out.

Our credit cards are at about 10% use right now, which is typical. We find that if we don’t use them a little every month, our credit score drops. We decided to apply for a couple more cards with limits around $2000. Right now, we have “the Big One,” with a limit of $9,500, the “Medium” with a limit of $4200," the “babies” two cards we actually carry with us that have limits or $500. We don’t carry Big and Medium. If we get these cards, we can potentially live VERY frugally on credit for 8 months. We additionally have a Meijier card, that we reserve for gas (it gets us a 10 cent discount on gas), a Walmart card, a Best Buy card, a Home Depot Card, and a Target card. All those cards get us discounts, which is why have them.

The “half our savings” in the second account we decided to put there to prevent accidentally spending it. It’s there in case one of gets sick, and needs hospital care.

I know that’s long, but we spent an evening hammering it out, and half a day setting it all up.

I think we are ready.

7

401k got hammered, credit-card debt is rising, but I hope that $1,200 will pay off a good chunk of it. And I’ve spent over a thousand dollars on groceries in one month.

8

Just a personal update. My wife’s company announced a bunch of layoffs today. She’s fine for now, but I wouldn’t say she’s secure long term. We (both her and my company) have seen participation in clinical trials drop to zero. People aren’t doing anything elective, and the facilities that normally run trials are all focusing on caring for the sick. My company has a commercial element, but as I mentioned upthread, that’s taking a hit, so it’s only a matter of time before the board says to lighten the load.

9

I’m able to continue working, from home or otherwise, so my finances have not been affected. In fact, since as of today I’ve decided to start working from home, I’ll actually save some gas money, and seeing as I’ve been going out less (since everything is closed), I’m saving a bit of money there, too. With this stimulus check as well, well, I guess I’m coming out ahead? That said, I’d lose all of it just to go back to normal. I worry about my brother and his girlfriend making ends meet, since both are out of work.

10

We’re both working, but lovely wife’s business is down and my contract was already set to decrease sharply in June. I’ve lost a few paid workshops. OTOH, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to take a big vacation we booked for June, so that will be a savings.

11

I’m “working from home” but the workload is hilariously low. It might increase next time. Only one immediate family member is seeing an income loss, and he’s on welfare (temporarily lost his very low-paying job).

A lot of businesses are being affected in the UK. Restaurants closing, such as Carluccio’s (Coronavirus: Carluccio's collapses putting 2,000 jobs at risk - BBC News) and a rent to own place (Coronavirus: Carluccio's collapses putting 2,000 jobs at risk - BBC News) which I wouldn’t miss, but did employ people.

12

My office is still open, but I’ve been teleworking since last Tuesday. My co-workers and I can do our jobs from anywhere (with internet), so my salary isn’t affected. I know how lucky that makes me.

I refuse to look at my 401(k) balance: I have ~20 more years to work, which means I’m still playing a long(ish) game.

I’m saving money on gas and tolls, but spending more in other areas – including big donations to help local musicians and wait staffs, buying gift cards from small businesses, etc. And I recently went on a “get dinner delivered” bender, which cost way more than I normally would have spent on food those days. I’m still in good financial shape, but I won’t be if I keep up that kind of spending for the duration! Time to start being a little more careful.

13

I’m still working remotely. The college I work for has gone all online, like everyone else, so I’ll be teaching all online classes… I think. I’m actually contracted to work at a boarding school (the college provides part of the academic portion of the overall program) and that place is likely shut at least through April. I’m told I’ll be able to stay on and work through my contract, so that’s good. I realize how lucky I am and what a privilege it is to be able to say I still have a job.

My wife lost her job two weeks ago. So right now things are a bit tighter than they were, but we’re also saving a lot of money on gas by not commuting to work and not going out to eat.

14

Doing okay for the foreseeable future. We have quite a bit of savings, the spouse is still working (he works at Apple and can work from home) and my life basically hasn’t changed much (I’m a self-published author, I work at home, and I often don’t leave the house more than a couple times a week under normal circumstances. Also, people really want to read right now.) We don’t have kids, so no kids-at-home stuff to worry about. The cats are very comforting.

Haven’t been eating out (take-out) much but we’re doing our small part of supporting our favorite pizza place by tipping $20 on a $20 order, and we’ll keep doing that whenever we get takeout from local places.

15

I’m working from home and my job is secure. My husband, who is our primary breadwinner by a long shot, is worried about his job. He’s a physical therapist and they’re considered essential, but the patients just aren’t there. A combination of no non-elective surgeries happening along with people just being careful, their visits are down by 50% right now and expected to drop further. He’s only working 20 hours a week at this point. Right now, the company is allowing them to take PTO to get to 40 hours per week, but we’ll see how long that lasts. They’ve furloughed a bunch of employees. The covid check we get will be added to our savings account in case we need to start dipping in at some point.

Our 401ks/IRAs, etc. are actually good. The day after the very first big drop, when it came back up a bit, we pulled all of our money out of stocks. We kept our stuff in bonds and put the stock stuff into a money market account. Our contributions are still going into stocks. We have to be careful about when we jump back in, but I’m pretty comfortable that we went against the accepted wisdom this time. At the very least, it saved my husband from massive anxiety.

16

My workplace considers itself essential, so it’s still business as usual. But I’m 62 and was scared going in, especially after reading last week of six Amazon warehouses where someone tested positive, so I asked about taking time off, which I am allowed to do. I’m at home, not working (my job can’t be done remotely). I’ll be burning my vacation days for a few weeks, then they’ll stop paying me. Fortunately, I have quite a bit of savings and can afford to be off work for few months, if necessary. And no debt. Obviously, my retirement savings isn’t what it used to be either. But my worst case is that I will have to work longer than I thought I would have to back in January. I work with people who are much younger and wouldn’t have a lot of savings even if they were good at it.

Bottom line: unless a family member gets this, the only bad thing that will happen to me is I’ll be working until I’m 65, maybe more. I’m one of the lucky ones.

17

My employer give everyone a 20% to 50% salary cut. The best case is that my employer gets purchased in the next few months. Depending on who purchases, I could be out of a job.

Spouse lost about 30% of income.

I’ve been slowly getting out of the markets over the last 18 months. What’s left took a big hit. We do have significant savings and will manage no matter what happens.

18

We’ve spent a lot on groceries as well: when we can get things, we buy what we can (without going insane), which means we’ve got a very well stocked freezer, and a bit extra in the way of shelf-stable stuff). That should settle down soon (the freezers are jammed), but in just over 2 weeks we’ve spent about 1,600 on groceries. I anticipate it’ll settle into 350+ per week soon. At least some of which is because we’ve signed up for a CSA box each week due to concerns over availability of produce.

Our retirement money has, as others have said, taken a hell of a beating. We’re a couple years away from retiring and hopefully things will have bounced back by then, but it’s conceivable this will cause that to be postponed.

Our jobs allow telework, thankfully, and both are relatively secure. So, arguably, we’re spending less there since my husband doesn’t commute at all now (I used to go to the client 1 day a week when I could - and the last couple weeks I drove in and spent a fortune on parking vs taking the subway). We’re using almost no fuel for the cars of course.

We are postponing some major household work (new roof etc) because our “nest egg” is some stock which is presently worth far less than it was before. There are some other expenses that we’ve backed down on as well since the only spare money we had was that nest egg.

19

No impact. I got out of the stock market when Trump was elected, so our nest egg is safe. Now, if the government collapses and can’t pay out its obligations, we could be as fucked as everyone else would be; but I think that’s an apocalyptic scenario. The only realistic impact to us would be if one or more kids loses his/her job and I have to mail checks to keep them afloat.

20

No impact, yet. My company does a lot of work with hospitals so I don’t see it losing a lot of money, I’ll probably keep my job. My wife works for a hospital. Probably has hit the 401K, but I didn’t have a lot in there in the first place. No investments, for better or worse. We’re not eating out nearly as much so I’m sure that’s saved us some money, but not by choice.