These jobless folks, usually singles in their 20s and 30s, find that life without work agrees with them. Instead of punching the clock, they’re hitting the beach.
Kimi Yoshino
Los Angeles Times
6/4/2009
Michael Van Gorkom was laid off by Yahoo in late April. He didn’t panic. He didn’t rush off to a therapist. Instead, the 33-year-old Santa Monica resident discovered that being jobless “kind of settled nicely.”
Week one: “I thought, ‘OK . . . I need to send out resumes, send some e-mails, need to do networking.”
Week two: “A little less.”
Every week since: “I’m going to go to the beach and enjoy some margaritas.”
What most people would call unemployment, Van Gorkom embraced as “funemployment.”
While millions of Americans struggle to find work as they face foreclosures and bankruptcy, others have found a silver lining in the economic meltdown. These happily jobless tend to be single and in their 20s and 30s. Some were laid off. Some quit voluntarily, lured by generous buyouts.
Buoyed by severance, savings, unemployment checks or their parents, the funemployed do not spend their days poring over job listings. They travel on the cheap for weeks. They head back to school or volunteer at the neighborhood soup kitchen. And at least till the bank account dries up, they’re content living for today…
Read the complete article at the LA Times
H/T Da Techguy:
…if you haven’t paid the vast majority of tax due the previous year by Jan 15th, or so, you pay an additional penalty.
Given the California IOU’s business (and just being broke) I suspect a lot of people didn’t have taxes deducted from unemployment [payments]. Given the massive amount of unemployment in the country, there are likely going to be millions upon millions of people getting a nasty tax penalty at the time they can least afford it…
CAJ note: The LA Times article helps to demonstrate why employment figures from the Department of Labor don’t always give an accurate picture of employment/unemployment/underemployment in the US.
