Pocketmint

Tag: unemployment

1. Spoons, decision fatigue, and a glimpse into poverty

   17 January 2013

   In recent years, people who have chronic illnesses have adopted lingo which may seem odd or fanciful to the uninitiated, dealing as it does with the presence or absence of spoons. The choice of cutlery as a metaphor was random, but it appears to have filled an explanatory void for a whole lot of people. […]

2. Pocketmint reboot

   22 October 2011

   Three years ago, in October 2008, the stock market crashed and — not coincidentally, as I was then employed by the brokerage arm of an international bank — I promptly lost my job. The following month my partner Jak took a 10% pay cut, as the market continued dropping and layoffs and hiring freezes broke […]

3. Less income, more savings

   6 June 2009

   Yesterday I promised to give an update on our personal financial situation and how it’s changed over the last half-year. In November I wrote that we were down to a quarter of our prior income, as Jak’s employer had cut his hours by half just as I’d been summarily dismissed from my full-time job. I […]

4. Back in the saddle

   5 June 2009

   Well, here we are, seven months after I lost my job, more than six months since my last update. My profession and field — and perhaps also, temperament — is such that employment cycles are inevitable. Full-time job to unemployment to freelance to full-time job and around again. Dot-com boom, dot-com bust, economy surge or […]

5. I believe this qualifies as an emergency

   14 November 2008

   I’ve been quiet for a while, going through a number of struggles that have left me without the — in the vernacular of my childhood, the ‘gumption’ — to keep writing frequently.  I’m trying really hard to get the spark back now, because I know in the long run the Pocketmint project is important to […]

6. Inflation or unemployment: pick one

   8 August 2008

   The last time the economy took a sharp downturn it hit me hard. With dot-coms failing right and left, suddenly there was a huge glut of Internet-industry workers. Employment levels took four or five years to fully rebound, during which I got by on intermittent income and credit-card debt. This time, though Jak and I […]