I have all I can do to keep from FREAKING OUT!
Seventeen months and about two hours ago, I learned (via e-mail) that I was laid off from ExpertCentral. I stayed on there until the end of the month, but I’ve been freelancing (a fancy word for “unemployed”) since then.
Here’s how it is now… The money is gone. All of it. All the unemployment. All my part-time teaching income. All my savings. All my share of the consulting income. Wiped out.
…or just about. I have enough to pay my car insurance and Visa bill that are due on Thursday, but that’s it. Once those are sent out, I’ll have a balance close to $0.00 in my account…most likely going into my account’s cash reserve. My Visa card is currently being frozen in a cup of water in the freezer so I won’t be tempted to use it.
I’ve never been this poor before. Even when I was a little kid I would have a couple hundred dollars in my bank account…from gifts at Christmas and all that stuff. Now? Nothing.
So what am I gonna do? Well, I’ve got a little money invested in stocks. It was SUPPOSED to be a long-term investment, but I can pull it out for an emergency such as this. That would get me another couple months. I can also mooch off my parents. In fact, they’d rather have me do that than take money out of my stocks…but my stocks suck anyway and since my parents are planning on building a house this spring, they have enough money troubles to worry about already. They’ve been sending me some money for the past few months, but having them cover my rent until I get some income would be too big to ask.
Anyway, I’m on Monster.com almost every day looking for a job and refreshing my resume, but I can’t even get calls from headhunters. Nobody has job openings. …and when I DO get calls from headhunters, I never hear back.
So the job market sucks and it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to find anything even remotely related to my field in the near future. (…and since I can’t afford classes and nobody is willing to train, new skills are out of the question.)
I’m also trying to grab more consulting clients for Digital UI, but that’s not working out well either. It’s been about a year since we got our last paying client. We’re still doing some work for them, but 6 hours a month doesn’t really pay the bills.
I’ve been mailing out letters to companies with sucky web sites telling them about us, offering “a 33% discount off our standard rates”, and hoping that just ONE will give me a call. No such luck yet. I’ve still got a bunch more letters to send out. Hopefully I can hit a winner soon. (We’re also offering a 10% commission to anyone that finds us a client. I plan to have that affiliate program up on our site in the next few days.)
Being this desperate for money, would I go back to FreakBoss? HELL NO! I’d rather work 18 hour days cleaning toilets. That would probably pay better too.
I’m not going out to eat anymore and I’m not buying anything that’s not absolutely necessary. In fact, I’ll probably have to sell off that Macross box set I just got after waiting on pre-order for a year and a half. It’s still sealed up since I know it would sell for more sealed…but I haven’t put it on eBay since it pains me greatly to do so. I’ll probably sell the Trigun box and DVDs first since I really don’t like the poor quality of the Paul Champagne box and could buy the official box once I have money again.
Anyway, that’s how it is, that’s why I haven’t seen Lord of the Rings yet, that’s why I’m not throwing more big parties, and that’s why I’ve been really depressed, irritable, and not sleeping well for the past week.
Something has to change.