@mario g. Apologies for not responding to you the first round, I scrolled too much while writing my response! There’s pretty much nothing fun about the job hunt itself, but it certainly is educational!

@Tim: I wouldn’t say I’d have no problems in the New Year, I hope not, but I take nothing for granted these days. As for your point about self-examination — most certainly. I know where my weaknesses are, mostly, and have asked former colleagues for evaluations of my management style.

There’s always something to learn and improve.

@Best Bun: Thanks for the good wishes I wish you all the best in your journey to paying off the mortgage.

@Tiger Upper Cut: What have I to fear? The fear of depleting all my resources before I get another job. Of having to start over or get into debt before things get better. For example, I interviewed with more than one company who stated that I was their strongest candidate, but the state of the economy forced them to cut back many positions and they couldn’t take on new staff. That’s being repeated over and over in many unemployed friends’ or acquaintances’ experiences.

I see you checked my net worth but if you skim my About page (I know it’s lengthy), you’ll see that I have a family to support, so I’m worried about them if anything happens to me or if I go unemployed for a long time. I can’t *ever* let my sick mother be put out on the street.

So it can’t be all about me – unfortunately, in my family, I’m the last line of defense. I have to think about them just as much as myself, and if I fail or “fail” I have no one to fall back on. I’m fiscally conservative/cautious, and my experiences tend to support that position. It’s not to say I won’t make the best of my time now, just to answer the part where it seems like I have plenty of money so no worries. That money will run out, and as Best Bun’s noticed, I’m a planner.

Are you married or have a boyfriend by any chance? If so, perhaps you can convince him to take a sabatical. If not, you have all the time in the world to find one. It’ll be fun!

Best wishes from Best Bun.

I’m not saying you weren’t a stellar employee, what Im saying is that nobody is perfect, and you need to recognize your ow flaws. Are you too sensitive and take things too personally? Do you need to work on managing up? Could you have been more innovative? Could you have build a bigger support network within your firm in different offices?

Just food for thought as you go into the next year.

@Tiger Upper Cut: Just noting that particular incident was their planning to defraud the gov’t, and also trading tips for tax fraud, among other things. That’s all. And no aspersions on you whatsoever, but as mentioned above to frugal scholar: I’m only cautiously optimistic, I don’t have the nerve to call it Funemployment yet.

@MoneyFunk: Told you you’d figure it out eventually.

@Tim: Without getting into extreme detail, I’m unemployed because according to independent audit, the office was being run into the ground financially and materially by my bosses. For convenience’s sake, they shut us down completely. The report stated that I was the employee keeping the operations afloat in the face of extreme adversity, but they couldn’t save me and can the others without facing possible lawsuits.

I’m not certain if being grateful for the silver lining to the dark cloud is what you meant by denial? If it sounded like that, let me clarify: I wouldn’t have left that job without another one lined up had the head office not decided to quickly close operations entirely, just because of the people I dealt with.

VH’s stories about her employers are not much different from my employer’s habits, but I choose not to dwell on or share those stories now that I’m out. Best to move along and take a positive view so as not to poison the waters for the next job.

And it seems that our state’s standard for unemployment is 6 months with possible extensions, we’ll see how that shakes out. I’m not going to count on any extensions as I’d rather be prepared for the worst case scenario as I continue the hunt and interview process.

I hope your unemployment benefits get extended, b/c 6 months seems like a long time, but maybe not that long in this climate. I thought the benefits were 10-12 months?

It’s OK to be unemployed. But, try and get out of the denial process. Cry inward and outward if you must. Just make sure you focus on your areas of improvement if you want a job. It’s competitive out there, and tons of people are competing.

Best to you.

Anyway, the job hunt process was quite an adventure. Three months into it, I was dangerously on the verge of slacking so I had to step it up. I went old school and knocked on doors whether or not they had a Help Wanted sign at the door.

I described it in brief on my blog.

It was far more effective than going to, say, Apple One or registering with Monster.

I got interviewed in the first week of my campaign and got hired within a month.

Great post. I wish I had the freedom to stay unemployed right now. If that happened to me, right now, we’d have to make some serious cut backs to stay afloat.

I hope you do find the next great career path. And if my inkling of that next path is right, I hope that it truly works out for you.

BTW, I love how you tie the Ramsey saying into the post. Nice touch.