About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
1. I cooked a stir fry and that’ll be good for two meals: Dinner and a day of leftovers.
I’m very proud of myself for including two veggies (green beans and snow peas) and two proteins (pork and tofu). I wanted to add more veggies (napa cabbage, bean sprouts, carrots) but I would have to go much further afield to shop at a produce place that lets me control the volume of veggies. The place we went to prepackages normally loose veggies. While that probably reduces waste for them, it locks me into 1+ lbs of each veggie which means 5 veg types is entirely too much to make a single dish. I couldn’t even fit all the green beans in this one.
That means either I buy more types and some of it goes to waste OR I have to figure out how to use it all up in more than just one stirfry, fail, and then it goes to waste. I settled for only 2 veggies and not wasting.
It’s been hard to find the time to cook in the past 2 years of hellishness so these are baby steps back to a routine that I feel better about.
I probably know all this already, but I’m going through Jim Wang’s Recession Prep list anyway just in case I’ve missed anything.
Increase Your Emergency Fund. ✅ The usual guidance is 3-6 months but I lived through the Great Recession, so nope, I’ve always operated on a 12-18 month cash buffer. The monthly dollar amount was much lower about 8 years ago, though, so I had 15 months based on those numbers. I’ve now revised that up to use the current monthly dollar amount and recalculated – we have 12 months of cash or cash-like instruments.
Avoid Big Purchases. ✅ Define “big” was my first thought. Here he refers to car and house purchases. I was defining it as $100-300, so there’s a range. Cars: We have no plans to buy cars or houses. I do have a small maintenance fund for each, cars and house, to pay for smaller repairs, too. Both need beefing up, we can’t do anything major like install solar on it.
Renegotiate Your Debt. ✅ We only have the mortgage and the interest rate is under 3% so we are leaving this alone.
Add Income Diversification. 🚩 I’m feeling very YUCK on this point. We have some crafty things to do both for fun and money but they depend on sales and are unlikely to be a steady trickle of dollars. I keep looking at online leads and getting fed up when I see all the AIness of everything in every possible gig. Barf.
Keep Saving for Retirement. ✅ and 🚩 We’ve taken care of this for the year in our tax-advantaged accounts. I also invest separately for our retirement because of my lost investing time, but might have to put that on hold. I hate that part.
Be Realistic About Your Risk Tolerance. ✅ and 🚩 My investing style is Very Aggressive along with Buy and Forget it. Fidelity likes to neg me about this. But Fidelity also likes to neg us about our contribution rates being too low after we’ve maxed out a 401K so what do they know anyway. My current plan is not to use money from our portfolio until 2028, so for now, we’re leaving everything there alone. I need to set a date for re-evaluating that but that’s a later thing.
Start or Update Your Budget. 🚩This would just be refining the budget, for us. I haven’t quite got my head around how to trim our budget. We spend most freely on food, and then on fun experiences. We picked up a few museum memberships this year before the whole implosion so … we’ll make the most of those and then let them lapse.
Review Your Emergency Plan. ✅ I’ve been doing this review in chunks. I feel responsible! There are some bits that I still don’t have information for (like how long unemployment will last), but I have mapped out some key actions to take. The first day after my last day of work here will heretofore be referred to as G(ot)TFO day.
1. GTFO day: Apply for unemployment
2. GTFO day: Contact PiC’s employer to upgrade our vision plan and remove the working spouse surcharge. That will increase his take-home pay by a little bit after both things are reconciled.
3. GTFO day: Contact Fidelity to roll over my 401K. Do I want to stay with Fidelity or to roll it over to Vanguard?
4. GTFO day: Gleefully delete all the work related bookmarks that are saved in my browsers. Export an updated set of bookmarks for my records.
5. For the next 6 months: Monitor that they actually pay the severance correctly and on time. They have historically not been able to do either thing.
6. For the next ?? months: Stay on top of the unemployment requirements to continue getting paid.
Year 7, Day 34: I’ve had an intermittent sore throat for three weeks. Four weeks? I expect that’s the stress expressing itself in immune insufficiency – my body’s so tired and strained under the stresses that it’s trying to fall sick to any virus that comes along.
Kameron Hurley nailed it: “Flooded with cortisol, your body coursing with adrenaline, you’re expected to sit quietly and walk quietly and speak quietly and smile and smile and be a villain. While I certainly have drug assists for these things, a number of stressors hit all at once these last two months, and it’s made it feel like I’m being chased by wolves AND bears while my family is simultanerously on fire and there is… nothing truly physical I can do with all that energy. My body wants to fight it, to outrun it, but the actual way to deal with these challenges is just…writing more fucking emails and moderating my speech during difficult conversations. Afterwards, you just want to run around the street screaming about how ridiculous it all is.”
I’m taking my antivirals every day in hopes it’ll be enough to fend them off. I’m taking my antidepressants every night to help me survive another day. We discussed adding an anti-anxiety med but my doc advised that it should be expected to take some time, on the order of 6 weeks or months, to work right. Given my huge spike in anxiety is caused by the layoff and the whole mess is presumably going to be over in less than 6 months, it seemed like overkill. But maybe it’s not. Maybe the state of the world – horrible as it currently is – has me on edge enough that it might actually be worthwhile to consider starting anxiety meds to help because I’m only ever half a step back from the cliff’s edge these days.
Year 7, Day 35: I’m so irritated by almost everyone these days. People not bothering to show up for meetings that were only held for their personal benefit and then wanting a special catch-up (have neither the time nor the patience for that), or arguing with me about the meaning of the words that I said – I think I’ll be the boss of the actual meaning of my words thank you very much. It was actually more irritating because another person in the exact same conversation understood precisely what I meant.
I’m generally irascible but these things feel like they cut to the bone a bit more than they ought to.
Year 7, Day 36: Filed under the “The worst they can do is say no (and in doing so, deeply irritate me but I’ll be MORE irritable if I don’t ask)” heading, in order of worst to least worst irritation:
A) I’ve got negotiations going about the exact text and severance amount for our separation contracts (that will deeply irritate me when they argue with me because they definitely will);
B) a Vision Plan claim for my glasses for going out of network;
C) and a warranty claim for a 5 year old pencil sharpener that is trying to work but can’t. The last one is really an at least I tried before spending new money on a replacement thing but honestly every penny always counts for one reason or another.
Oh look, it’s basically my current boss! Not the one who told me I don’t have a job anymore, the one who I directly report to but couldn’t be bothered to say a word about that since it happened.
Anyway. If I still reported to him I’d have to be stressed about his utter lack of engagement but now I can just shrug.
Year 7, Day 37: On the one hand: The job and the company have been 100% horrible and I have hated everything about working for them outside of the paycheck, so big picture, leaving is good for my health and my family.
On the other hand: The timing is harder to make peace with. I wanted to make it to next bonus season and invest that; I wanted another year of a 401K. So the timing is not horrible but not good.
I’m neutral on it not being on my own terms. Leaving on my own terms would likely have looked like holding on until I couldn’t anymore and then going to a new job, probably without much time in between to decompress. This way means I continue to be paid for months after I stop working, it buys me time off for decompression.
So I’m not panicked for the short term, we can cover the bills through next year. But the long term – that I have concerns about. We have enough to do the bare minimum for a long time but not to live comfortably long term. This is one variation on my nightmares: My husband’s care costs have reached £65,000 – we’ve had to sell our flat.
We can handle a layoff and even two for a while. But a long term or terminal illness means not only are we out of the sick person’s income but also we likely don’t have the caregiver’s income either. Stack on top of that: possibly we’ll have then lost our healthcare coverage either due to increased costs or lack of access. Then you’re eating up your resources in huge chunks.
For example, PiC’s subsidized employer provided healthcare is about $400 a month. Paying for COBRA for that same healthcare plan, which only lasts 18 months, would cost 6x as much: about $2500. That’s more than our mortgage. Oh and we’d still need to pay for our mortgage and property tax, utilities, eating.
A friend says that my financial planning is trauma-informed and they’re not wrong about that. But it’s also lived experience informed. I remember what happened when my parents sold their business and my mom got sick and suddenly the money was gone with no more coming in. I remember what it was like to suddenly have to carry the weight of the whole family alone. I won’t be alone this time but the numbers going very bad, very quickly? That’s a very familiar scenario.
Year 7, Day 38: Kicking myself. There was 2% cashback on the thank you gifts that I ordered. I’d been dithering over putting in the order for a few days waiting to see if it would go up but it didn’t and I have a pretty strict timeline to make sure these go out on time. Finally clicked that submit button, felt like I’d accomplished something. The next day I find the cashback went up to 10%! ARGH. That’s significant with the order this size ($800). I know I couldn’t have known but I’m still irritated and kicking rocks a little bit.
1. FINALLY. I installed WP Armour as a spam blocker after the last three bombed and this one actually works. HUZZAH!
I can finally stop wading through floods of spam comments.
2. I finally found my missing water bottle that had been tucked into a never used pocket of a duffel bag!
3. My stubborn little cucumber seed has FINALLY germinated after 4 weeks of sitting in a heap of soil in the compostable cup. Now I have 2 snap pea sprouts, 2 very very little green bean sprouts and 1 tiny cucumber sprout.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
***
Dividend income. We received $1,108.90 in dividends from the stocks portfolio which all gets reinvested.
Litter 1: JB and I picked up litter and found 4 extra Safeway receipts which netted 100 Fetch points and $2.85. I appreciate every penny!
Litter 2: We picked up trash on our way out of a store and ended up with 5 random receipts that scored big at Fetch: 5500 and 1100 points in addition to the usual points for the more mundane receipts (75). Yay for cleaning up and getting points for things I don’t normally buy. That’s about $6 worth of points.
Litter 3: Grocery shopping yielded 2 extra receipts on the sidewalk (50 points).
Year 7, Day 27: I’ve got maybe 3 months left. I’ve calculated the PTO to be earned and, if the math is right, I’ll have 3 weeks to add to the severance runway. Did the same for my sick time and am booking off large chunks of that before the end. After the severance and PTO run out, we have 14 months, or 12 months (plus some healthcare, some house maintenance and no dog), in liquid funds. We have an ok amount of time after my severance runs out if my job search is as bad as, or worse than, the last one.
Using the same conservative monthly amount (covers needs, a few wants) to break down all our major assets, we have 12 years of spending in the brokerage and 13 years of retirement savings. Emergencies, large home repairs and other things of that nature would shorten that timeline. If the retirement savings grows minimally (3%) between now and 2036, that stretches to 21 years of monthly bills. That’s a super simplistic view, of course, and intentionally so. I needed a very basic framework to share with JB because they started worrying about losing our home if I don’t have a job anymore. I’d previously said we could pay off the house, which we could, but I found that being able to say “Even without a job, I have our bills covered for 25 years” gives them a more concrete way to understand they don’t need to worry. I don’t feel like I got this because 25 years doesn’t cover retirement (intentional or not) but the breakdown gives me a place to set my feet when I tell them not to worry.
Year 7, Day 28: The fog is hovering so low this week, it feels like we’re wrapped in winter. The pumpkin plants and the one sugar snap pea plant have been sitting outside sheltering in a bucket for five days and nights and seem to be thriving despite the wind and fog so they might be ready to put into the container. Not sure when I will be ready to put them in, though. Definitely not today. My body is giving me a warning buzz that if I do much physically, I’m going to crash. Yesterday was a high-energy expenditure day, so this isn’t a huge surprise. This does cast a bit of a pall on my job-hunting. Everything I read turns into an “I could do that, I have done that, I don’t want to do that all over again”. I’m so tired.
I did an hour of research looking up all the bits and pieces of legalese that I don’t know enough about to agree to, still waiting on the lawyers I’ve reached out to for some replies. Did a volunteer job training and then a task that I trained for. Submitted some FSA claims. Researched candidates for the upcoming primary. I’m in a pickle where I don’t like either of the candidates that I have to pick between so it’s a matter of choosing the lesser evil.
Year 7, Day 29: One of my crow friends showed up solo today, they’re usually in pairs, and landed right on the driveway waiting for treats! They have never done that before! That was a bit of a delight. They even stayed there while I rolled treats to them. So far, only the ravens have been this bold. The crows usually stay up high on street lamps or the roof or the car and wait til I set down treats and walk away. They show a decided preference for dog treats, too, peanuts will be eaten but last. Actually, is that right? Maybe they’re saving the best for last? Do crows do that?
Bigger picture thoughts: We’re not planning to sell the house or move, we’re happy where we are, so that’s not in the plans for the short or medium term. Prices are so high here that we couldn’t make an even trade. We’d have to plan to leave the area, or the state entirely, if we wanted to sell and keep any money. The idea of having to pack, move, unpack and rebuild community all over again is more than exhausting. I’m not good at it!
Year 7, Day 30: It’s deeply irritating to see billionaires fined for anything less than $999M for crimes. Anything less than that is the equivalent of them waving off a gnat! What’s the point?
I now maintain three budgets simultaneously: 2026 with my layoff (real); 2027 with my layoff (real); and 2027 (projected worst case with loss of 2 incomes). This gives me a place to project costs in both scenarios and to know what I can and can’t do with our money. I realized last night that I had added unemployment income but not healthcare costs to the 2027WC, so I’ve added a $2500 monthly expense using an employer estimate of the cost of COBRA for now. That year I’ll need 9 months of saved cash to clear all our bills.
That makes it ok to buy one large callable CD at 4.1% for 18 months right now to earn $500 over the expected 3.1% in the savings account where it’s sitting. I usually buy non-callable CDs but it’s worth buying the callable one now for the slightly higher interest rate for however long it last. Our remaining cash will stay put until we see what’s what. I’m keeping an eye out for other ways to earn extra $500s and more.
Year 7, Day 31: Today’s worries: I’ll need a job again in a year and there won’t be any kind of job worth doing and definitely not paying well enough for the effort.
6 months of severance won’t keep us afloat long enough. (So I’ve decided to negotiate for more after all, the worst that can happen is they say no. Maybe they’ll agree to half of what I’m asking for. Who knows.)
I’m afraid that things won’t come together in 6 months, or 12 months, or 18 months and I’ll have to figure out something while at the end of my tether instead of making this a time to rest and recuperate and then stepping gracefully into a new good growth period like this one turned out to be after the last recession / layoff.
But. I’ve done a thing! Ordered samples to QC whether this staff thank you gift idea is good quality, made a list of who I’d need to hand deliver their gifts to in order to save on shipping costs, run shipping estimates for the people who live too far away and must have shipping. I’ve plotted out a timeline for ordering and delivering all the gifts.
If the quality is good enough, this is going to run something like $700 for the whole team? I hope not more than that. For now while I wait, I write out cards. That’s the hardest part.
1. Annorlunda Books is back to publish another book by @asakiyume.bsky.social!
2. I’ve been appreciating all the cute animals that Instagram has been serving me even if I’m still baffled why it won’t just show me the people I actually follow.
4. I treated JB and myself to a local conveyor belt sushi dinner which was both cheaper than if we’d tried to feed the whole family and much more fun than if we’d had SmolAc along as they are famously a giant pain in the patootie when it comes to every possible fun dining experience.
