I pit people who think they are too good to work!

The BBQ Pit
21

I constantly hear people while unemployed talk about how much effort they are putting into the job search. Sending out hundreds of resumes over 2 years without a job? You know what, after a few months of that wouldn’t you stop and think that my method of job searching isn’t working out so well, and I should try a new approach?

Sending out hundreds of resumes, ‘applying’ for jobs, monster.com, etc. is not how most people find professional jobs. Networking, contacts, recruiters, temp agency - that is how you find a job.

22

Somthing I noticed from the OP that no one else has mentioned…What about the wife? Why couldn’t she get a job? Did she go to college? Does she have skills? Even is she has no skills she could get a job in a clothing store or Target something like that. I know places like that tend to hire stay-at-home-mom types who are looking to bring in supplimental income. She doesn’t have to mention her husband doesn’t have any actual income to suppliment. It doesn’t have to be permanent just until her husband finds a job. It’s got to be better than running up all the debt

23

There’s a pretty big difference between being an out-of-work just-out-of-college student with no real obligations except to find a roof and some food and being a parent/homeowner twenty years down the line. It’s brutally difficult to fling away the investment (financial and emotional) in a home that you’ve been paying a mortgage on for years (and may not even be possible if the local economy has taken a dump.) Not to mention that most landlords want you to be employed, so how do you sell a house when you have no place to move to?

Anyway, think about it. How much of a dent will a minimum wage burger flipping job actually make in a deficit for an average suburban family? Around here, minimum wage is $6.75/hr. Assuming a 40hr /week, that’s $1000.00/month gross. Maybe $750-$800 take home? That’s less than half of the mortgage/escrow payments for my fairly modest house. Yeah, it would get you out of the house, and it would slow down the dwindling of the savings, but ultimately, taking a minimum wage job would be financial disaster. You’d be better off spending the time whipping out resumes and improving your skill set.
Especially if you didn’t know in advance that the period of unemployment would be extended.

24

even sven, what is this secret of which you speak? I’ll be out of work starting next week and would loooooove to know. Feel free to email. :slight_smile:

25

I once found myself suddenly and unexpectedly without work and shamefacedly went on unemployment. I thought it would be for a month or two while I shopped my degreed and experienced self around to get a job in my field.

It was a year and a half before I found something.

Why not get the burger flipping job, you ask? Afraid for my lily-white hands? Actually, what I discovered during this time was that unemployment in my state pays just about exactly what a full-time minimum wage job would have brought in. (Incidentally, unemployment wages are taxed as regular income. That’s something I sure didn’t know at the time.) Unemployment wages are also reduced by whatever amount you earn per month, so it’s not like working that job would have helped me get ahead or anything like that.

It seemed to me that it would better for both myself and the state by living on unemployment while I searched for appropriate work. My reasoning was that a full-time McJob would leave me little to no time for job hunting and interviewing (particularly since I was riding the bus), and furthermore, being underemployed can actually make it harder to get a good job than simply being unemployed (I know this from experience hiring and recruiting).

By using the state’s support, I finally found a full-time job that I’ve held for nearly two years now and have furthered my education (getting my master’s in 15 days!!) so as to try and prevent this situation from happening again. Is debtor’s prison really a better choice?

26

It’s easy to say you wouldn’t consider a hamburger job beneath you if you aren’t really faced with that choice. It’s definitely beneath ME, I don’t care what anybody thinks.

27

Me too, but I’ve done it before, and, if necessary, would do it again.

I’ll tell you guys, though, Pizza is a much better way to go than Burgers. Better wages, better food.

In case, you know, it ever becomes necessary.

-Joe

28

An excellent point. I preferred stripping to taking a hamburger job when my unemployment ran out. There’s more dignity in stripping.

29

Okay, here is the secret. Don’t go telling it to everybody. It only works if you live in a place where Craig’s List is active.

Put an out out on the resume section of Craig’s List. In this ad, list and detail your skills- everything you are good at. Everything you have ever done in any job that is neat or useful. This needs to be funny, honest, and entertaining. You’ll want a spin or a theme. I was the “super-employee” and spun all my varied skills as superpowers. My BFs was “a failed actor that needs a real job”. The idea is to spin your problems- my varied work history was spun as a sign of versitility, and my BF came up with a good explaination why he was looking for his first job at age 23. Make it funny, and reveal a few of your flaws while you are at it. For example, my BF said “I don’t have much initiative, but I take orders well.”

DO NOT POST YOUR RESUME. Add “I can send you a resume if you want to look at it…”

They will never need you to send a resume, they will just ask you to come in for an interview, and usually you are the one they will remember because your ad was so interesting.

Make sure you post this on a Monday. Ads posted after, say, Wednesday, or on a weekend, won’t work.

30

I’m not saying I wouldn’t do it if I had to, I’m just saying I would definitely feel it was beneath me. I’ve done it before. I worked a lot of hamburger jobs when I was young and my first job after college was slinging pizza at a mom and pop pizza place. I agree that it was actually kind of fun…especially compared to the menial, soul-killing, anti-humanitarian fast food places. Working those jobs in my early 20’s was bad enough. If I had to go back and do it again now, at 40, I’d sure as hell have an attitude about it. I wasn’t really commenting on whether people should do what they have to do, but the disingenuous, sanctimonious judgements of people who are not in that situation about how It’s a “walk in my shoes,” kind of thing. It’s easy for people to say they would work at McDonald’s. When the rubber hits the road, though, they might find themselves responding more selfishly.

31

Okay, here is the secret. Don’t go telling it to everybody. It only works if you live in a place where Craig’s List is active.

Put an out out on the resume section of Craig’s List (don’t bother answering ads, they almost never amount to anything and there are better ways to spend your time) In this ad, list and detail your skills- everything you are good at. Everything you have ever done in any job that is neat or useful. This needs to be funny, honest, and entertaining. You’ll want a spin or a theme. I was the “super-employee” and spun all my varied skills as superpowers. My BFs was “a failed actor that needs a real job”. The idea is to spin your problems- my varied work history was spun as a sign of versitility, and my BF came up with a good explaination why he was looking for his first job at age 23. Make it funny, and reveal a few of your flaws while you are at it. For example, my BF said “I don’t have much initiative, but I take orders well.”

DO NOT POST YOUR RESUME. Add “I can send you a resume if you want to look at it…”

They will never need you to send a resume, they will just ask you to come in for an interview, and usually you are the one they will remember because your ad was so interesting.

Make sure you post this on a Monday. Ads posted after, say, Wednesday, or on a weekend, won’t work.

32

I’ve been out of work for years, now. I can’t get the SS administration to believe I’m disabled, but I can’t get McD’s to give me a call back even for a job interview.

You can be out of work for an obscenely long time, even while looking for work.

33

I was out of work for seven months in 2005. I turned down several jobs – some paying upwards of $15/hr. The reason was simple: I needed more money in order for it to be worth it. Since I was drawing $370/wk in unemployment benefits, I essentially was getting paid $9/hr to watch my kids. Any job I accepted would have to pay me that much PLUS the amount it would have cost to put the kids in day care.

Once the right job came up, I snapped it up without hesitation.

34

I wouldn’t say it’s beneath me, but I’m not 18 any more, either - I’ve paid my dues for many years (lord, it’s actually decades!). Frankly, I am too good to work at entry-level, low-paying secretarial jobs - I can (and have) run the whole office, but I’d go do data entry before we’d lose the house or starve.

As we’ve seen in this thread, it’s a lot more complicated than just thinking you’re too good to work or taking the first job that comes along.

35

Finding a good job is a job in itself, which I’m sure you’ve learned by now reading this thread. Picking up the cheapest gig is great when you live with your parents–as you probably did as a sixteen-year-old–and you don’t have expensive rent or mortages. For some people, the day’s earnings at minimum wage job are completely eaten up by travel and daycare costs. It makes more financial sense to just stay home.

Also:

You can’t go to job fairs if you are working at McD’s.

You can’t make a million phone calls or send out a million resumes when you’re sweeping out stables.

You can’t improve your skillset if you’re too busy delivering pizzas.

There’s nothing wrong with using unemployment benefits and welfare programs in the short-term. A good chunk of your paycheck goes to these programs. What’s wrong with getting the most out of your tax dollars when you need the help?

I was unemployed for a few months after I graduated from graduate school. I took a week-long, low-paying gig identifying trees for a local forestry firm. I did it because I absolutely had to get out of the apartment, and also because the paycheck helped me feel better about my dwindling savings. But there’s no way I would have taken that particular job on a permanent basis, even though I love trees and being outside. I didn’t get an advanced degree just so that I could be someone’s lowly field technician. I had enough confidence in my abilities and prospects that I felt a better opportunity was waiting for me. And it was. If I had spent my job-hunting time at McDonald’s, I wouldn’t have been able to send in my resume right after a certain job listing was posted on the internet, and my future boss would not have called five minutes later to make arrangements for me to fly me down and interview. When opportunity knocks, you gotta be standing right there at the door with your suitcase in hand.

Yeah, being prideful is a sin, but having faith isn’t.

36

Sorry, Monster.com came through for me 2 times. State Farm in 2001, and this feb my brand new job. My HR professional friend networking her little ass off got me nothing. I did 78 application/resumes with her recommendations and had no result other than a single prospective employere asking me in for an actual interview.

37

Man, I’m so lucky to never have been unemployed in my life.

38

As has been suggested … when they can’t afford them anymore.

Just to help the conversation along here, this is my 3rd home. The first was a dump that cost around $75K. The second was better and cost $125K. The third is what I’m currently living in now and cost $250K.

Did I jump into the McMansion for 3/4’s of a million bucks for my first home? Shit no. Why? Because I knew I couldn’t afford it if something went sour. That’s also the reason we were able to live off our savings. We saved some and paid some off our mortgage.

The type of people that you seem to be defending are the ones who will crank up their debt to their maximum and if one things goes wrong, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.

Expensive car, expensive house, expensive trips, electronics equipment, private schooling, personal fitness instructor, whatever these people seemed to need $40K a year to get by on, is obviously too much for them to cope with when their circumstances change.

Sell the car and buy a bomb (loss maker, but hey, may reduce your debt). Sell the house and move into something else. Maybe they can’t because without work no-one will rent anything to them or the bank won’t refinance. That’s a tough situation.

Even if the bank forecloses on them, they still get any profit they make from selling the property. The bank doesn’t get to keep everything, they only get to keep what they’re owed.

If they have so little equity in their home then maybe, just maybe, they haven’t been planning well or hoped that nothing would go wrong.

Well, something did and I don’t think it fair to bankrupt their way out of it.

Would I have really sold my house if I couldn’t find work. Yes. Easy to say, hard to do, but we invested a bunch of time in finding out what we owed, what we could get and what we would have left over. So it was a serious consideration, not just a throwaway line.

39

But how do you decide when you can’t afford it anymore? Sure, if you’re unemployed for two years then it’s reasonable to sell your house and downsize/rent. Even after one year. What about 9 months? 6? 3?

Very few people know how long they will be unemployed. If you think you might suffer a large loss if you sell you house (say the market is low right then), and you’re pretty sure you’ll get a job soon, it might actually make sense to struggle to finance your mortgage payments until you’re re-employed.

Of course, this is a crapshoot. But unless you look at each case individually, you don’t know where the break-even point is.

40

Or if the market is extremely hot - if we sold our house now due to unemployment, we would probably never be able to buy again in Calgary with the way housing costs are skyrocketing. It would make a whole lot more sense for us to pay our mortgage with credit cards for a while than dump this house and have to move to another city to be able to buy a house again. And renting here is no better, either - we bought our house just before the market took off, and our mortgage is lower per square foot than most rents, especially when you take the yard into consideration.