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It’s being dubbed the “Do-It-Yourself Recovery”. Across Canada, every media outlet is headlining the latest unemployment figures released yesterday showing a trend that I would suspect is happening with just as much fervor across the U.S. It’s self-employment and it appears to be propping up the economy. Here in Canada, the figures for April defied all forecasts that predicted another 50,000 jobs would be lost. Instead, something... 

Yesterday I invited readers to share the sacrifices they’ve made following job loss. What they’ve had to give up in the face of some harsh economic truths. Certainly, 2009 was the year many of us took a look in the mirror and asked, what do we really need. Reader dbvanhorn put it very well: “…there’s so much crap we’re told we can’t live without, until we do.” At the other end of the spectrum are the intangibles. Those... 

Yesterday, I met my first prospective tenant. I’m making a big change in living arrangements in order to avoid making other changes – like selling my house. So I’m giving up my privacy. My sense of self-containment. My freedom to act, behave and express in any way I want at any time of day or night — well, within the limits my family will accept. It’s certainly not as big a change as others have had to make, and it’s probably... 

If any of you have been reading my blog for any length of time, you may have noticed that this past week or so I’ve been rather quiet. That’s because my free time lately hasn’t been so free. In the past month, I’ve been preparing my house to take in a renter in my basement. And it seems lately every evening and weekend is being spent clearing out …  Read More →

I was recently contacted by a reader with a great writing style eager to share her own musings on job loss. Her post below hits on a topic I think a lot of us will identify with — why you may not want to be best friends with the people you used to work for. Like me, she’s leery of using her real name for fear of burning bridges in the working world. So from here on, let her be known as DWF. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________... 

A few weeks back I posted about the quintessential recession marketing tool — the T-shirt . You could argue that it’s the most egalitarian form of public self-expression. (Or perhaps it was until blogs appeared.) And that post had some examples that made me laugh-out-loud (like “Scumbag Millionaires”). You don’t need to have big bucks to pay for media. You don’t have to rely on some editor somewhere to judge... 

When I was laid off, my children knew right away. I’m not good at hiding things and I sometimes wear my heart on my sleeve too much for my own good. Plus, my kids are big. Like young-adult big. So when I lost my job, I felt a deep sense of shame in telling them the news. I felt like I had failed them. I wasn’t the parent they could be proud of. No child boasts about a parent who spends their days at home in sweat pants, on the phone and net... 

Last weekend I wrote about a casual mention broadcast by CBC that V alue Village was owned by Walmart . It was news that took me by surprise me so I did my own research. I didn’t turn up any link between Value Village, Savers (the U.S. for-profit company that owns Value Village) and Walmart. However, I did contact CBC directly and yesterday I received a reply. Here’s what I was told when I…  Read More →

First, thanks to everyone who took a moment to share your kind words of support in the previous post. I could definitely feel your solidarity against the big bad spam enemy. And second, the forum will stay up. The developer who helped me mount it has made a very generous offer to reduce his fee dramatically in exchange for adspace. So let me give him a shout-out here. His name is Yoav Givati and his company is called Chalk It Out . He does web... 

Almost two months ago I added the forum to Fired For Now (that tab up there next to “Home”). I did this because I had started to notice that people had begun responding to one another in the comments section of the posts. It seemed these economic times begged for community, so I decided to add a forum to the blog and throw it out there. I didn’t know what to expect — whether it would be ignored or jumped on. Now, I’m...