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It has long been an underlying tenet here at the BlueCollarDollar that you look for something to do that provides you those things while you still have a job. If you failed to follow that advice, now is the time to take some sort of inventory of your likes and dislikes.

For the newly unemployed this is really a lot easier that you might think. For the long term unemployed person its time to look at your approach.

First, the newbies. You need to take financial stock of where you are. I don't recommend jettisoning all your worldly belongings and minimalizing your life... yet. But look to assess where you stand from the point of minimums and waste. The minimums should be tallied from all of your bills. There is an outside chance that you are the rare individual who has no bills other than the basic necessities such as food and shelter. You can skip this part and go to the next section on merit.

If you have bills, add them up and subtract them from the total of all cash assets including your unemployment benefit. Cash assets include any savings or other cash income that was due you outside of the check your employer paid you. Wait for the 401(k) rollover until your head clears some. That is a big financial decision that is best left for just a little later.

Now we will take a look at those debts in order of importance going from the least to the most.

Determine your low priority debts. These are the ones that are owed to creditors that have no collateral. That means, your credit limit was based on your ability to pay the creditor but changes in your ability to pay (your job) have left the circumstances altered. Without collateral, there is little these creditors can do. These kinds of debts include doctor, lawyer, any service provider, and credit cards. These creditors, despite all of their huffing and puffing can not collect on their unsecured loans. There will be some short term damage to your credit accompanied by harassing phone calls but it is a survivable (short-term-promise-you-will-never-let-this-happen-again) occurrence.

Student loans are a middle of the road priority. The payment not made will result in garnishment of tax returns or when you get back to work, wage garnishment. Try and call the loan holder and ask for details on possible suspension of payment or lowering it temporarily.

Pay your taxes. Being unemployed does not get you off the hook for what you earned in the current year or what you owe on your unemployment benefit. Don't forget your property taxes as well. Your tax payer is surprisingly understanding though if you take the time to write them a note explaining your current economic condition and attach that to the correct form.

Pay your rent, mortgage, and utilities. Providing yourself with shelter and the amenities that make life livable should be your highest priority. This doesn't mean refinancing and taking cash out of your house to sustain your lifestyle. If refinancing in advance of a layoff will lower your monthly bills significantly, then by all means take whatever action you would take in normal economic times. You will have little luck trying this after the layoff.

In every situation, take the time to write your creditors asking for help. If they do not respond, then you may be left with no other option but to become delinquent.

It is easy to look at the waste in your life as the reason you are so cash strapped. But those spent dollars altered the way you think of yourself. So you want to be careful about slashing your way to misery. You still will need to sell yourself as you begin your job hunt.

Just a little note here. This unemployment period should not be treated as a vacation, even if your severance package (lucky you) was enough to make the transition comfortable. Get busy looking. Take your time to be measured in your approach. You want to be frantic without seeming so.

These are all however, short term adjustments for the possibility of long term problems.

Tomorrow, part three: You will probably not go back to your old job.

Today's Commentary: 11.12.03
Jobs: A Special Report - Part One
Let's face it. There is little likelihood that we will return to those full employment days before Bush took office. It is easily estimated, based on the latest job reports that we will will fall far short by election time. Take note of that.

Latest Numbers CPI: +0.3% in Sep 2003 Unemployment Rate: 6.0% in Oct 2003 Payroll Employment: +126,000(p) in Oct 2003 Average Hourly Earnings:+$0.01(p) in Oct 2003 PPI: +0.3%(p) in Sep 2003 ECI: +1.0% in 3rd Qtr of 2003 Productivity: +8.1% in 3rd Qtr of 2003 U.S. Import Price Index: -0.5% in Sep 2003

Below you will find a few simple ideas that should help you if you still have a job and if you've lost yours, some suggestions on how to find something different.

Unemployment Survival
First there is the shock, even if you knew it was coming, is still a difficult transition from viability to rejection. You may have thought of what you did, the struggles and the accomplishments of your job was actually a career. This is denial of the simplest stage. You had a job. It was employment that sought to exploit whatever skill you had and profit it from it. You were part of the bigger mechanism and you can not call that a career. A careers are statistical accomplishments and defeats rolled into an average. That average is only for personal use but gleaning the best of those times for job advancement, and in the upcoming pages, resume building is important.

Too many factors played a roll in your dismissal from your duties for company XYZ. The economy has played a major role in downsizing and customers dried up, sucking in their own purchasing departments like some sort of backdraft. This stop in spending by customers leads to the simple conclusion reached by many other companies as well. You control costs with inventory and labor.

Labor is used to produce inventory. You were no longer needed. Manufacturing took the greatest hit and any recent pop in numbers does not reflect a return to employment in manufacturing any time soon. Jobs will increase steadily in service sectors, retail (albeit briefly throughout the holidays) and in the health care industry. The tech jobs will recover when productivity begins to suffer. productivity, not to get off topic has given employers something to think about for the time being. The number is up without rehiring. This means that the staff that was left is working harder and longer hours to produce what more people did. This is a technological advance that will further hinder employers from rehiring all too soon.

So when the cuts came, every part of the company's operation was eyeballed for over-employment relative to future costs. Managers on every level, high ranking professionals were pink slipped, and technical workers, the backbone of growth in the new century were cast asunder with all of the rest of the nine million other workers. This across the board firing was unprecedented.

Then worse news started circulating. Those jobs were not coming back. Laid off always had such a temporary sound to it. No longer.

This is a psychological hurdle that America has faced in recent history. There is little comfort in knowing that you are not alone. There is little comfort in knowing that every month, 100,000 new faces show up in the labor force ready to work for far less than you can survive on.

The first part of your strategy should be calm, cool, and collective behavior when the shoe drops. Let's not burn any bridges, create any scenes or go off blaming yourself for poor performance. It may have been the size of your paycheck, based on past accomplishments that was the culprit.

The one thing you should do is ask if there is a severance package. It might be possible that there is. Your failure to request something as an exit payment will not be offered by the person doing the firing. They are just as uncomfortable as you. So ask.