I'm Jobless

For a few years, I've been blogging about personal finance, sharing all I learned as a business journalist in plan English with my readers here. When the economy turned, I turned with it: readers started asking a lot more about how to be safe in this economy, how to save cash, live on a budget and preserve their jobs. Unfortunately some of my friends and readers of this blog lost their jobs to the Great Recession.

I never imagined I'd be one of them, but I am. It's taken a while to decide I should blog about this; the psychological effects of losing a gig are as great as the financial ones. You start thinking things like "Who cares what an unemployed journalist has to say?"

Then you get over it (or at least I did). Truth is I'm one of millions of people who are still without jobs, even as other pundits talk about a recovery. And I've got it good: I have savings and I'm connected enough in my industry to have decent leads on contract and freelance work. In a way, this is a blessing: I'm free to work on projects that have been dormant for months or years. Some of them, like a radio pilot I recorded last year, have gotten more traction since Jan. 1 than they did in the months before I lost my gig.

Revitalizing this blog fits in that category. Being newly unemployed is giving me a first-hand look at what so many others have gone through, from the frustration of job hunting when you're limited by geography, to the maddening bureaucracy of filing for unemployment benefits, to the absurdity of what the state hands you in exchange for all that red tape.


It'll be an adventure I share, along with my reflections on career, next moves and the normal personal finance observations I've always posted here. Hope you ride with me.

*Tomorrow: How I got here and why it's a blessing*