Another hot topic during the session was, not surprisingly, where to get cash to cover living expenses that, pre-pink slip, used to be covered by wages.  As discussed during the meeting, once you’ve looked in all the obvious places (severance, unemployment benefits, part-time work, emergency fund, etc.), things start to get a little tricky, what with the income taxes, penalties, exceptions, and many other factors that play in when tapping other sources.  This Wall Street Journal article, How to Tap Crisis Cash, does a good job analyzing and comparing the pros and cons of the various options.

(Note: If dealing with post-pink slip money management has you feeling like you could use a good stiff drink, take a look at the most recent Pink Slip Lemonade recipe supplied by Chef Patti Anastasia: Pink Slip Lemonade Mimosa.   She promises it will put a sparkle in your day!)

If you’re in the Nashua, NH, area and you’ve recently been laid off, you can work off the extra calories for free at the Nashua YMCA. That’s right: thru August, the Y is offering free “summer relief” memberships to residents of the local community who have recently experienced unemployment.  Check out the Y’s Web site for details.

The news of this freebie was just one of many valuable takeaways from yesterday’s Network for Work meeting, at which I presented on the topic “Making the Most of Your Money: Post-Pink Slip and Beyond.” The talk generated a lot of great suggestions, questions, and feedback from members — exactly the kind of “power of many” culture, and resulting shared benefits, this group has been lauded for.

In the week to come (and probably beyond), I’ll be blogging much more about this session: answering questions submitted by attendees, sharing best-received tips, and digging deeper into areas of greatest interest.  So look for plenty more Pink Slip Lemonade recipes where these came from!

My pink slip came in January 2003. I remember it clearly. It turned out that it was the beginning of the rest of my life. But that day, it didn’t feel like it. I didn’t see it coming. I was shocked. You know how it is when a VP calls you into their office at 8am. Your first thought is “Oh crap, what did I do wrong”. I actually got good news that day, my job was ending, but I got four months notice and a generous severance package if I agreed to stay on until May 30th to teach the outsourcing company how to do the work of my department. Not exactly how I wanted to spend the next four months, but the rest of my department was shown the door that day.

At that point in my career, I had been a technical writer for 22 years. After a week of job hunting, I knew that I wasn’t going to find a job like the one I had because my job was my invention. I was an information architect; very little of my time was spent writing technical manuals and that was not what I wanted to do.

Somewhere in the back of mind was a plan to become a personal chef. I read about personal chefs in cooking magazines. It was the perfect retirement career for me. When we were riding the internet wave, it was plausible that we could retire from our high-tech careers in our 40s, then do something fun for part-time work. The internet bust put those plans out of my mind. Shortly after my pink slip came, those plans started creeping back into my thoughts. Not just creeping, swirling around in my brain distracting me from everything. I had to figure out how to make it happen.

It was going to be a huge leap. I knew nothing about starting and running a business. I had always worked for someone else. High tech offered a big salary, there were a million reasons not to do it. But something in me wanted to jump off the cliff even though I was scared out of my mind about the leap.

Lots of things made this change possible. The biggest thing was that my husband and I were on top of our finances. We had worked with a financial planner for years. We had a budget so we could see where we could cut back, we had saving plans, we had my severance pay. When we bought our home, we looked only at homes that we could afford on one salary and we were almost 10 years into our 15 year mortgage. We had been using health insurance provided by my job, but we could switch to health insurance provided by my husband’s job. We could get a home equity line of credit before my job ended. Another big part of the financial side of it was that my husband was willing to forgo my earning potential in high tech to pursue this dream. I did research on starting a business. We agreed that my business had two years to prove itself; if I wasn’t contributing to our household expenses within two years, we would reassess my career plans.

I started my business before my job ended. Within a month of my pink slip, we made the decision to take the leap. I had a boatload of vacation time so I took a vacation day almost every week to work on my business. I landed my first client in April 2003. And I never looked back. By the time my job ended on May 30th, I knew that even though this fork in the road wasn’t going to be easy, it was the right fork in the road for me to take. My business celebrated its 6th birthday in March 2009. Getting laid off was a blessing. It pushed me to do something that was risky, but that has had great rewards. What I do now makes a difference to others. That makes a difference to me.

Oh, and about that Pink Slip Lemonade drink recipe… in case you didn’t catch it on Twitter earlier today, Chef Patti of Anastasia’s Table personal chef service has completed her testing and released the recipe for Pink Slip Lemonade… just in time for the weekend. Enjoy!