How to Help Your Unemployed Spouse Find a New Job After a Layoff
The experience of a layoff is difficult for any marriage. My wife was laid off in January, and like many in my position I looked hard for ideas on what I should do to help. Internet searches yielded two kinds of articles: 1) posts from career counselor types who had some decent general advice, but which often lacked the grit and specificity of those who were dealing with the challenge personally, and 2) posts from people who were in the midst of helping a currently laid off spouse, but were using the medium to cope with their current grief, and were not yet sure what was working.
One of our happiest days as a couple was when my wife called me earlier this month to say she’d been offered the new job she wanted. Now that she’s landed, I am reflecting on what worked and what didn’t on my part in helping her get there. This is not to exaggerate my role. My wife was the one who tolerated being alone in our suburban home for almost nine months, experienced all sorts of rejection during her search, located the ad for the job she now has, wrote and sent in the application, and was successful in two rounds of interviews with a full slate of candidates. That being said, I learned in the process that there were things I could do as a partner that could help:
Accept that there will be a grieving period. If your spouse worked for a particular employer or in a given field for a number of years, there will be a need to grieve. Accept that this will happen and that fighting it is counterproductive. Different people will grieve in different ways, most of which will involve minimal or no job searching. Having seen the process—and how it can end happily—I believe that it is entirely reasonable for someone to go for a month with minimal attention to the job search, like making an initial visit to an outplacement service, and then gradually transitioning into the search in the second month, if you can afford it. (Outplacement services may allow the job seeker to pause their subscription so the grieving period will not count against the period of assistance the outplacement service is under contract for.)
Help your spouse identify matters that require immediate attention after the layoff. Important benefits your family needs may have been tied to your spouse’s employment, like health and life insurance. A vital way you can help in the beginning is by figuring out what needs to be done to replace them. There may be some silver lining here too. When I looked at life insurance options, I found a source that could provide term life insurance at a fraction of what my wife’s former company offered.
Identify the skills you have to help in the job search and apply them. Two people skillfully working together in a job search can be more effective than one. Whether your forte is networking, doing research, or something else, applying your skills to help your spouse is far more likely to advance the ball than just nagging. Since I am familiar with the Internet and write a lot, it was natural for me to help my wife set up her Linkedin.com account, and help revise and edit her job search correspondence.
Put the most critical aspects of your financial situation in writing. Probably one of the most important things I did was figure out where we were financially, write it out on one and a half pages, and give the document to my wife. I summed up how long we had before we used up her severance and then the rest of our cash in a particular savings account, and what our lives would be like at four different levels of income she might receive for a new job. I also outlined how possible positive events could affect the long-term scenario, like me getting an expected raise at the end of the year and the prospect of eventually refinancing our mortgage when she landed. While she was not jumping for joy with the news—who would be—writing this out was ultimately reassuring because there was some better than expected information, and my putting it together gave her confidence that I had a handle on the situation. She did not need to get a job that paid the same as her old job for us to continue towards our major aspirations as a couple, and even if she found a job paying below what we needed to keep things on track, good things that could mitigate the shortfall were likely to happen.
Look in to the tax ramifications of the layoff and if appropriate reduce your tax withholding. A point related to getting a handle on your financial situation with the layoff is to assess the tax ramifications and how they might help you. If you have a mortgage and file jointly, particularly if you purchased your home in recent years and have a large tax deduction for interest expenses, you may be able to reduce the tax withholding from your salary since the benefits of the deduction were previously spread between two salaries but now are not. This complex calculation can turn on other factors too—such the tax ramifications of any severance package your spouse received, and whether tax is withheld from your spouse’s unemployment benefits. But since checking your withholding may help address the shortfall of going from two incomes to one, it may be worth consulting a professional tax advisor if you’re not comfortable doing it yourself.
Identify options for what to do if the unemployment continues beyond a certain point. A point related to putting the financial situation in writing is to think ahead on what you can do as a couple if an offer does not materialize before a given point. This may not be something that is productive for you to speak with your partner about regularly, but just as he/she will be occupied in thinking about to how get her or his career back on track, you can think of how to keep the ship sailing while finding the new job is in the works. Mention this to your spouse at the right times to provide assurance that regardless of what happens, things will work out in the end and you will be together.
In our case, we had established a regular plan for investing before the layoff, including regular tax deferred contributions to our retirement accounts and monthly stock purchases. Because the market was at historic lows and we had reserves to pick up the shortfall while my wife looked for a job, we had continued these regular investments. Even as we did this, I began to review alternatives for what we could do to stretch our savings if the situation continued. I determined that if we stopped the stock purchases, reduced my retirement contributions to the minimum level required to receive all the matching contributions, and changed the federal tax withholding on my paycheck to adjust for the loss in income, we could go another three months on the account we were using for the shortfall. As things turned out she got her offer before we needed to take these steps, but knowing that the option was available made things easier as time went on.
Be supportive of purchases that will help the job search. There are many ways a couple coping with a layoff can learn to save money—ours included using entertainment coupon programs to allow occasional eating out, and changing our electricity provider to save money on our electric bill (see my post Save Money to Invest: Shop for Electricity)—but skimping on job search resources should not be one of them if at all avoidable. Because my wife had previously been assigned company IT equipment, she found herself without a cell phone or laptop when she was laid off. My cell phone was on its last legs, so we spent the evening after her exit interview buying spanking new iPhones for each of us under a family plan. I also suggested that we purchase a laptop for her so she could work on her job search out of the house. She ended up doing most of her job search on the laptop, and the call with the job offer came to her iPhone.
Encourage your spouse to seek job search advice from a number of sources. The employment environment today has challenges that have not been seen in a generation, and in the most severely affected locations several generations. That being the case, it’s fair to assume that any one expert is not likely to have all the answers, though many will have very helpful information. Accordingly, job seekers should seek advice from multiple sources, and then use their best judgment on what to do. As part of her severance package my wife received outplacement services from a major outplacement firm, which while helpful in some respects were lacking in others. I encouraged her to contact a career coach I had used, and she did. Since my wife was applying for jobs in industries where she had never worked, the coach suggested that she write a “functional” resume structured with headings that described her skills, as opposed to chronologically listing her jobs. Most of her interviews, including the interview for the position she accepted, came when she had used her functional resume.
Do little things that will help make your spouse’s day easier. There are probably many things you can do that will require little or no effort on your part that will make a huge difference for your job-seeking spouse. Something that made a big difference for my wife, particularly during periods when she was not getting any responses, was asking her if she wanted to have lunch with me during the day. It made her feel much better to get out of the house to meet me downtown than just staying home and spinning her wheels.
Say things that will help maintain a positive mental attitude. There is a natural human tendency is believe that life will continue to be the way it is. That’s one reason a layoff is so shocking—one minute you’re employed and financially secure, the next minute you’re not. Once that happens, there may be a tendency to believe that the bad result—unemployment—will go on forever. In one of my wife’s down moments, I recounted a recent experience when I was trying to fill a bare spot in our lawn. I planted new grass seeds, but only a few came up after a week. So I planted more, and a couple of days later some of the seeds I had given up on began to sprout, and then once the new seeds arrived the bare spot was filled. The moral: you never know when a seed you plant will grow, and the result may surprise you. I reminded her of this anecdote whenever she was down about the job search—including the morning of the day when she received her offer.
Be open-minded about the kind of job your spouse will land. When the process began, both my wife and I had preconceptions about the job she would find to replace it. The job she found was different and probably a better step in the long-term than what either of us would have seen her landing when the process began. The position she accepted is a contractor position for a large company that will initially pay far less than her old job. However, it will give her the experience to transition to a permanent job in a different, more recession-proof industry that pays more and has more family friendly opportunities than the industry she was in.
Focus on improving yourself, particularly in ways your spouse will appreciate. Psychologists will tell you that if you want to find out how difficult it is to change another person, try to change yourself. During the job search, the temptation to criticize your spouse will be overwhelming. Her or his job search will inevitably be less than perfect in some respect, and it’s appropriate to comment constructively (and particularly to offer to do something to help using your own skills). After all, your ability to improve each other may have been one of the reasons you hit it off in the first place. However, the truth is that you have no idea how well you would be performing if the situation was reversed and you don’t want to find out.
If you need to be a critic, you may be much more productive in turning your critical eye inward and working to improve yourself in an area that would be meaningful to your spouse. My wife had long complained about my eating habits. Towards the end of her search, I decided to try the popular diet, the “South Beach Diet” conceived by Dr. Arthur Agatston. The results were outstanding. I lost 8 pounds in a few weeks, look and feel better, and have much healthier eating habits. Moreover, she appreciated that I was working to improve myself, so that she was not the only one of the two of us working to improve their station in life.
Of course every situation is different. In many respects we were lucky. I remained steadily employed, we had been living well within our means to start with, and we are located in an area that remains economically stronger than the national average. Most importantly, my wife was responsible and structured in handing her job search. After the grieving period she settled into a regular routine of getting right to the search after I left for work, going to the gym in the late morning, and continuing the search and doing errands outside the house in the afternoon. So while not all of my advice will apply in every case, hopefully some of it will. Good luck, and may you soon enjoy the happy day that we did!
[...] How to Help Your Unemployed Spouse Find a New Job After a Layoff [...]