The stock and real estate market are at highs, but millions of people are still unemployed and out of work.. On this episode of The Agent of Wealth Podcast, host Marc Bautis welcomes back John Williams, who is a wealth advisor at Bautis Financial, back to the show. Marc and John talk about how to financially plan after recently losing a job.
In this episode, you will learn:
- How to ensure a job loss doesn’t wreck your financial plan.
- Budgeting tips to look for ways of reducing your expenses.
- 6 options with what to do with your retirement plan when you leave your job.
- Where and when to start when looking for a new job.
- And more!
Tune in now to learn about what to do after a loss of a job during these unpredictable times!
Resources:
Bautis Financial: (862) 205-5000 | bautisfinancial.com | Retirement Seminar | Schedule a Call
Welcome to the Agent of Wealth Podcast with Marc Bautis from Bautis Financial. In this podcast, Marc helps guide you towards financial freedom, ensure you never run out of money and create a balance in life that prioritizes what is most important to you. Join us for this journey, as Marc draws from years of expertise and guest experts to solve the multiple wealth building challenges involved in your financial life.
Welcome back to the Agent of Wealth Podcast. This is your host Marc Bautis. On today’s show, we have John Williams. John’s a wealth advisor about Bautis Financial. And if you’re a longtime listener to the show, you may remember John from a series he did on college planning and he also did another one on cybersecurity.
John took a little hiatus, but he’s back on as a cohost and John, welcome back.
Good to be back. And what a difference a year will make. I did college planning a year ago, and now we’re sitting here trying to decide whether or not kids are going to be able to even go back to college.
It is crazy, but college planning is still probably a relevant topic.
Yeah, just a little bit of a different list to get to prepare.
On today’s show, we’re going to talk about what someone should do if they lose their job. And the economy is moving in the right direction, the stock market’s at highs, the housing market’s at highs depending upon where you live, but still a lot of people unemployed.
Yeah. I mean, I think that like there’s obviously a shift in focus and it’s always amazing to me how much of a difference sometimes there is like, you’re looking at the Dow Jones and it going up and up, but then you hear these stories and it’s always amazing to me how much of a separation there can be between, what do they say, Wall Street and Main Street?
We get those questions all the time where someone would look at the stock market, they’ll correlate it to what’s going on in their world or in the economy or what they’re hearing on the news, and you can’t really do that. They’re just two separate things. Of course ,there’s some correlation, but just because the stock market’s up now, doesn’t mean it’s going to crash because there’s a lot of unemployment.
When this pandemic started, I think we saw a lot of people concerned with the drop in their investment portfolios in March, in late February or early mid-March. But then, what we’ve seen since then is people losing their jobs and that becoming a big concern of what someone should do with that.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I know the job outlook is getting better, but it was scary there for a while. I mean, I think the first week where the shutdown really started, it was the biggest drop we’ve ever seen inside of a week. What was it like 13 million jobs? Yeah, so there’s definitely some people who are out there who have this on their mind working through this and people out of work and in between opportunities, if you may. And I always found this to be sometimes a good time to look at some of these things you wouldn’t normally look at or some of the things that you’ve always had on your mind. But now that you have your back to the wall, it becomes a nice time for you to kind of force yourself into action.
I think what kind of even complicates it more is that losing your job is emotional. You get that, it’s a hit. It’s a gut punch. But at that same time, there are also some steps that you should do immediately that you should do in the near term. You kind of have to focus on that versus feeling sorry for yourself or picking yourself up from getting that gut punch when the job loss comes.
On today’s show, we’re going to cover basically everything that someone should do. And once they lose their jobs, there’s some steps that are pretty straightforward, pretty intuitive, but then there’s some other things that some people may not think about.
Focus on What You Can Control
For sure. Where do you want to start here, Marc?
- What money is coming in (income)
- Where is that money going? (expenses)
I think at a high level, you want to focus on things you can control. We can’t control the market. We can’t control when you’re going to get another job. But, I think the big thing is: “How am I going to pay my expenses now?”
And I think that’s where we want to focus. We’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about what to do with health insurance, what to do with your portfolio, your retirement account, creditors, all that, all those types of things. But I think we should start with paying your expenses.
Yeah, for sure. It’s cash in, cash out.
Everyone’s different. Some people have a better handle of what their expenses are. But some people don’t. And it’s definitely, I mean, obviously like you said, your back’s up against the wall, so it’s a good time to figure out where your money’s going. But this obviously is relevant to someone who didn’t lose their job, knowing where their money’s going. First step: how does someone figure out where their money’s going?
Yeah, sure. I used to work with an advisor and he used to have this saying. He’s like, when we talk clients, he would say: “Do you have a month left over at the end of your money or money left over at the end of your month?”
And sometimes, we just kind of flow through. We’re spending money and then we get to the end of the month and we’re like: “Oh, it’s getting a little tight. Let’s pull back a little bit.” But I think this is a good time for you to have a little bit of a better idea of the flow of money and just kind of look at each line item, basically, right?
And I would separate them from, “This is in an expense that we can’t live without.” Or, “this is a discretionary type of expense or you know, fixed expense.” Or , “this is something that okay, if times were great and we have money coming in, we’re going to take that $10,000 trip to Greece, but this is not the time to plan that.”
I guess the first step is like you said, line item as different ways to do it.
We can go through with the tool that we have that would do that analysis for someone. Or they can basically take out a credit card statement, take out a bank statement and manually do it if they want to do it that way.
Yeah, sure. I mean, there’s some great tools out there. Like you said, we have one. I mean, sometimes if you’re really just looking for simplicity or you’d want to start somewhere, sometimes you just open up Excel. I mean, it’s not, probably not the greatest thing. And we obviously get it a lot, but you can at least start there and just start to like really kind of dial out, pick out what those buckets are going to be and kind of itemize everything before you get started anywhere else.
Step one is: figure out where your money’s going. And step two is: figure out what’s coming in.
Obviously, you lose a job, that income’s not coming in. But there may be a severance, there may be unemployment insurance, you may have a spouse that has money. There may be investments that are generating income or real estate property.
Step two, figure out what’s coming in; and what’s the gap between what’s coming in and what’s going out.
For sure. And obviously, there might be some people who might be lucky enough to be offered a severance depending on what that situation is going to be. Obviously, that’s going to dictate a lot of what that’s going to look like.
And then, there’s unemployment. Obviously, there’s going to be restrictions on unemployment, depending on how you were. I mean, essentially if you were let go, you’re going to be eligible for unemployment, right? Depending on how long you were working. If you were fired, for reasons that were your fault, it might be a different situation. But if you were essentially let go, you should be eligible for that benefit, as well, right?
Can you talk a little bit about what unemployment looks like now? Versus obviously it was different than in 2019 before the pandemic started.
Sure. Yeah. And it can range quite a bit, too, between the states. Obviously, it’s a federal and state benefit, so depending on what state you’re on and it’s amazing how different the, if you live here in Florida, it’s I think the max before anything that came up with the CARES Act and anything that were any extras, if you may, it was like $275 a week.
No matter how much you were making, I think in New Jersey, it’s upwards of seventy…
It’s in the sixes but close to it yeah.
There’s going to be obviously a range there and looking back, and every state is going to have a different idea as to what is going to be the requirement as to figuring that out. It’s typically about 60%, of the base period, up to a max.
And there’s obviously a lot of talk about what’s going on and how that’s, some of these extras. All you need to do is turn on the TV, you’ll see somebody talking about how they’re working together to get people more money.
One of the biggest tips I would say is, if you look back over the past four months, five months, unemployment, getting unemployment, getting answers to unemployment questions has been a disaster.
First thing you get, you lose your job, apply for unemployment just because it takes, I mean, there are people now, still now that haven’t received those initial unemployment payments. Step one, just apply for it, figure out if you’re eligible for it later. Just apply for it now.
But going back to expenses, a couple of things I wanted to cover is we talked about that you can separate your expenses into ones that are imperative. And then, also those discretionary ones.
One exercise I like to do is take that credit card statement. Like we said, we have a tool that can do this, do it for you, go through it line by line. And I call it like the presidential line item veto, where he goes through a bill and he’ll cross out certain things. Do that to your expenses.
Now definitely is the time to reduce, try and reduce your expenses as much as you can. Make that line item veto, go through, try and reduce them. If something’s critical, then obviously you need that expense in there. But it’s definitely a good time to reduce expenses.
And one of my favorite budgeting tools is a tool called YNAB. It’s an acronym, Y-N-A-B. It stands for: “You Need a Budget.” But they actually have some tips and on how to reduce your expenses for like a time when you lose your job.
And one of them, which I thought was pretty cool and I know you’ll probably appreciate it is they recommend doing some zero spend days to your month. Try and pick a day and don’t spend anything. And they equate it to intermittent fasting of someone that’s on a diet. It’s a little bit of a wide analogy, but I think it comes into play. But the goal here is figure out what you can do to get by. And that’s one way of doing it.
Let’s say you don’t have a severance and you have these expenses, you want to know where and when the nuclear, the real pressing solutions come into play, right? You want to know exactly where you stand. This way, you can plan properly, right? You can have a timing aspect to this.
What to Do About Insurance
I think that’s where the planning piece comes in, right? Because what we’re trying to do with this exercise is figure out: what’s the critical amount that it costs to run the household?
Then we look at the income coming in from whatever those various sources were. And what we get is a gap. And just as an example let’s say, someone spends $10,000 a month to run their household and they look at the what income is coming in from all those sources that we talked about. And it’s $5,000. Well, we’ve got to figure out where’s $5,000 going to come from and how long can we continue paying that $5,000? And that’s where the planning aspect of it is.
Knowing that will, I think essentially give you peace of mind, at least knowing, I mean obviously it’s a nerve-wracking time, but I think just having an idea; alright, I got like five months to pull this together. Right? And just try to work hard to kind of get back and that gap, you can make that up from savings.
You can make it up from, one of the things as part of the pandemic is you’re allowed to take $100,000 out of a retirement account without, if you’re under 59-and-a-half, having to pay that 10% penalty. That’s called the Coronavirus Distribution where you can take out a $100,000 and you have actually three years to pay it back if you wanted to pay it back. If you don’t pay it back, you do pay tax on it, but you don’t have to pay the 10% penalty. You may have a HELOC.
Were there restrictions on that, Marc? Could you just pull that out? Because I know there were certain things that were connected with somebody having the Coronavirus or somebody close to you having it.
That’s the other thing too, is the government, the IRS has always been changing the goalposts on some of these, call it stimulus packages. Initially, you had to have the Coronavirus yourself or your income, your work be impacted by the Coronavirus to be able to take out that distribution.
They updated those rules so now that if you or your spouse or partner has had the Coronavirus or has had their work impacted.
Like the example where, and I’ve seen this come into play, one spouse has had their income severely impacted, yet they don’t have a big retirement account. The other spouse has continued working, they have the big retirement account. Initially, they weren’t allowed to take a distribution from there. However now, because their spouse has been impacted, they can take that distribution from it. That’s the other thing too, is, you have to dig and figure out what the rules are and they’re constantly changing rules, but it’s important to see what you’re eligible for and what you can take advantage of.
So step two in the planning piece is: figure out what assets you have or what, and I mentioned it earlier, you may have a HELOC, that might be able to hold you over for a certain period of time. It’s all hands on deck.
How we do it on our side is we take all the different available assets, put them on the table and figure out from a liquidity, from taxes, from the market potential loss or gain on it and prioritize them. We might say: “Okay, I have $50,000 in savings. I know that’s going to be the first asset I’m going to go through to pay my bill to pay that gap over the next, say four or five months.”
And then, we looked at: what’s number two on the list?
And that may be a HELOC or there may be an investment account, or the last resort may be that coronavirus distribution. And you’re eligible for, if you can avoid taking a distribution from your retirement account, because it has other consequences, but it’s if it means losing the house or not being able to eat.
Hey, do what you got to do.
Exactly.
That’s important to do it. We were talking a little bit about unemployment insurance and I think the one thing I wanted to talk about a little on that was the tax ramifications of unemployment insurance, because I think a lot of people think when it comes to government, money received from the government, Social Security, in this case, unemployment insurance.
I think there’s always a lot of confusion of whether it’s taxable, how much is taxable and what tax someone would pay on it. And a lot of times it just gets lumped into the other income that you have.
I guess the answer is that unemployment insurance is taxable and you’re going to owe tax on it.
Of course, it depends on what your spouse’s income, what income you’ve earned, how much tax you’re going to owe. And there are a couple of ways to handle that tax.
The good thing about it is on unemployment insurance, you don’t have to pay FICA taxes. That’s your Social Security and Medicare tax that you would normally pay. If you were working a regular job, that is:
- 7% of your income
- 7% covered by the employer
One good thing about it is that you don’t have to pay that.
A lot of this is related to the fact that they’re not going to withhold it like your job. You have to take action on it. And one of the actions is to not take an action and deal with it in April of the following year. And that, it’s what a lot of people do.
It may not be the best option because now all of a sudden you might be throwing money when you file your tax return. You want to look at it and you can either treat it like if you were self-employed and make quarterly estimated tax payments, orr the IRS has a tax form that someone can elect to fill out. And with that, they would withhold 10% of your unemployment monthly or weekly unemployment. I think it’s W-4B, is the actual tax form that you can fill out for that.
You fill that out before you start getting the payments and then they’ll actually take it out for you?
Now, timing is obviously, of course a mess with getting your monthly payment to you. They’ll probably not. It’s not like you’re going to send it in and all of a sudden they’re going to process it the next day. But yeah, that’s a form that you can use if you want to withhold unemployment, the portion of your unemployment benefits. That’s definitely an option, as well.
The next big thing we want to talk about is health insurance. Because obviously, you lose your job, most of the time, you’re not going to be able to keep your health insurance, unless you utilize an option called COBRA.
COBRA is a way that you continue on your same health insurance plan. Some people love their health insurance plan, love their doctors. COBRA is one way you get 18 months of coverage where you can keep your coverage. I guess what I’ll call it, the bad thing, is it’s expensive. Depending upon how much your employer was subsidizing, you’re now paying both sides of it.
It’s one of the disadvantages of having a really good program because when you lose your job and have to pay it, it might be a good benefit that you have at work. They may be paying for it a hundred percent, right? But that program, sometimes you don’t even know how much it costs, right? You’re like: “Oh, great. I have this free life, free health insurance.” And then boom, you look at the COBRA bill, right?
Yeah, we see that a lot, too, where people don’t realize how expensive health insurance is and some of these employers have pretty decent plans. You can always go on one of your other options if you can compare, go on the exchange, which you can find at Healthcare.gov and compare.
Compare what you’d have to pay for your existing, if you kept your existing plan versus what’s available on the exchange.
The Affordable Care Act, when you say the exchange is what you’re referring to now, it’s my understanding that this is a life event that qualifies for being able to get onto the exchange.
Correct?
Yes. Normally,you would have to fit in their window, which is typically towards the end of November. And then, but this, if you lose your job, you’re able to kind of just pop up in a new window.
And it’s also another special enrollment period if you want to, if you have the ability to jump on your spouse’s plan, as well. You may have each had your own health insurance covered by your own employer’s plan. All of a sudden one spouse loses their job. You have 30 days to figure out if you want to go on your spouse’s plan.
And there’s pros and cons to that. Some of that plan may be better, maybe worse. The spouse’s employer’s not going to subsidize it at all. You’re going to be paying the full amount, so you have to look. Just like how we approach everything: get the details down on paper, look at the pros and cons and make the decision that way.
You know, we were talking earlier today, you were talking about some changes they made with the COBRA coverage as far as the timing of it.
Usually, you have 60 days after your qualifying event, which is job loss, to determine if you want to elect COBRA coverage or not. With the pandemic, they actually changed it. You have 120 days until after the pandemic is no longer considered a national emergency, which with the cases the way they are now, that could be awhile.
A National Emergency was declared on March 1st. It impacts anyone who’s eligible for COBRA after that March 1st date. And one of the, I guess, you’d call it a strategy:there’s risk involved with it. But what some people are doing is they’re losing their job, they’re not electing COBRA coverage, and they’re essentially going without health insurance, unless they have like this major, really expensive health event.
And if that happens, what they’re doing is basically going back retroactively, activating their COBRA. They have to go back and pay for all those months that they didn’t have the coverage, but it covers that emergency. And now, there’s risk involved.
But if the funds are at such a crunch where saving that COBRA premium can really help you, it’s an option. But you’re obviously kind of playing with fire depending upon what type of medical coverage you need, and then having to go back and pay this big lump sum, which you might not have been planning for.
I think the point is how unique that rule is. I think obviously, this is one of those times where we say: “We’re not giving you advice on not paying for your health insurance.” But it’s pretty unique how creative and how far the government really is going to try and figure out ways to help people in this. It stands out to me as being pretty unique.
I don’t even know if it’s the government trying to help people out. It’s probably more of one of those loopholes that they didn’t, that people are always looking at and that they didn’t intend. The government didn’t intend for people to do that, but I guess they gave people, extended that time that they have to elect and gave people that option. It winds up being an option.
But the other thing too is as part, if you’re able to negotiate part of that severance package, negotiate, try and negotiate to get COBRA paid for. You could get your health insurance paid for, for a period of time.
I think that spreads across all this, you don’t want to be shy as to… I think in the end, the human resources is going to be super helpful. Because they don’t like letting anybody go.
I mean, it’s not something that they’re excited about. I think that it’s a mistake if you don’t call them right away and kind of say: “Hey, look, you know what’s going on, what do you recommend?” Because they likely have been through this before and they can say: “Hey, you know, in the past, this is what we’ve done.” And they may have something to offer you that you never even thought of.
And the other thing too, while you’re negotiating your severance, if they’re going to give you a severance package, another recommendation is trying to negotiate a lump sum payment versus if they spread your severance out across weeks at a time, a certain number of weeks.
And unfortunately, we’ve seen a couple of people that they’ve had the severance spread out, company declares bankruptcy, and all of a sudden they get stiffed on their severance package.
Now, a company that’s going to declare bankruptcy- I’m sure they’re going to push back and negotiate against paying in a lump sum because they know exactly what they’re doing. But, essentially, your severance is an unsecured debt to the company.
Paying employees is pretty senior in a bankruptcy situation, correct?
Yeah.
I mean, not that they’re going to have the money. I guess, it’s senior relative to the equity shareholders or some of them. But you’re essentially a non-secure creditor and it’s not the first time that companies have done it. But what I’ve seen is that you’re going to be collecting pennies on the dollar if you’re able to collect anything from a company that goes through bankruptcy.
It’s not a high success rate.
Sure. That makes sense.
Moving onto the next topic, we wanted to talk about your retirement account, and we recently did an online webinar about six options that you can do with your 401k, 403b and the pros and cons of each of those options.
We’ll link to that webinar in the show notes, but it’s really around, you want to consider the fees, the service that you’re getting from the 401k plan, your investment options, the organization of having all these 401k plans all over the place. But can you just go over what the six options that someone has?
- When you’re leaving, of course the plan’s already there, right? You can simply just leave it there and you should have access, do nothing, just basically do nothing option. You can basically keep it there and you should have access to it, and you can manage it and have access to it’s managing it in a way that you really, they basically will have, if there’s a portal you’re on, you can have access to it, and you can still continue to have that access.
- And then, option two would be to roll it over into the new plan so that when you get a new job, you can basically take that money and have it rolled over without there being any tax implications. You can make a comparison to the program you have, the retirement plan you have now, and you can roll it over into the new one.
And you’ve mentioned, and I’ve heard you talk about, like, it really depends, sometimes when you leave a job, you just want a clean break, right? You don’t want anything to do with this company, depending how you left. But, depending on how you feel then, initially you could just, you could either leave it there or move it over.
- The third option would be to take a lump sum from a distribution, from your plan. And some people call this the nuclear option. You’re kind of wrecking your retirement. You’re going to pay taxes. You’re going to pay penalties. It may move you up into higher tax brackets. That being said, sometimes it’s necessary. It’s an option. You obviously want to use this one as a last resort.
And especially, considering what we’re talking about. Right? Like, so if there is, again, they call it the nuclear option, but if you need the money, you need the money, right? I guess you’re just considering all these different options.
- And then, the one that’s really relevant now, is: you can convert your 401k into a Roth IRA. And we’re big proponents of looking at this option in 2020. The main reason is if you’re losing your job, your income may be down. You may be able to convert over to a Roth with paying less tax on it. It may be a great option. The other reason why at one point this year, this was another option to consider is that the stock market took a drop in March. You may have been converting a lower amount and therefore paying less taxes. I guess you want to say, fortunately, the stock market’s come back, so there’s no gain on that side.
But it’s definitely something. One of the things we do is a Roth conversion analysis and just look short-term: what’s the impact if you converted some, all or all of it to a Roth? And then, also long-term: what are the long-term benefits once it’s in that Roth? Obviously, it has to meet a couple of stipulations, but never having to pay tax on that money coming out in retirement again.
And can you combine the two and actually roll part of your pay taxes and roll part of, let’s say you go from one company, your old company, and you move it from their plan into your new plan.
And then, say the new plan has a Roth option. Do you have to put it all into the qualified part of the plan? Or can you actually split it up in that group?
Yeah, it can be split. It’s never all or nothing. You can even combine, we’re talking about the six options here, but there can be a combination of it. Even if we said, like the lump sum distribution, you don’t have to take the full amount. If it’s a small portion of it is what you need to get you by, you can take that. It doesn’t have to be the full option.
That makes sense.
Like I said, we did a full, 45 minute or whatever length it is, webinar on this, where we go into details on how to make that decision. And obviously, we’d be happy to talk to anyone about the pros and cons.
- Well, we still have one more that I actually missed, which is, they actually roll it over into an IRA.
Obviously, we like that one based on flexibility. Most 401ks have a menu of 15/20 different investment options. The IRA is limitless, whatever pretty much any investment option is available.
The other thing is fees. Very few IRAs charge fees. 401k is just by nature that there’s record-keepers involved, administrators, advisors, the Department of Labor is involved, there’s auditing, reporting, and those fees usually trickle down to the participant. The IRA is not always the best option, but a lot of times it is based on flexibility control and the different investment options in there, so definitely consider all six and figure out which one makes sense.
Of course. Yeah. And I think that the biggest thing that we didn’t even mention through all six of these is the consideration of how much you’re, the person is actually actively managing what’s in what investment and how asset allocation is in the actual account.
I think having control makes it a little easier just because you know where it is, and this is a good time, maybe you have a couple of extra minutes because you’re looking for work, to get it into a place where you can do some of these things to actually take a look at what’s actually there.
I mean, a lot of the people that we talk to are like: “You know what? I have a 401k sitting somewhere and I haven’t looked at it in years.” And they literally have no idea. And look sometimes, you just get busy and sometimes you lose your login information and you just don’t know how to find it.
We see both extremes. We see people like that who haven’t looked at it in years and are usually pleasantly surprised because over a period of time, their balance is going to go up, especially if you’re adding to it.
We’ve also seen the reverse. We’ve seen people who day trade their 401k account. Everyone’s going to be different. Probably the day trader is going to like the IRA, because they can go and buy Tesla and Bitcoin and all kinds of crazy stuff in it. Whereas, like I said, you have that menu of 15 things in the 401k, so you don’t really have that flexibility in it.
But there’s no right or wrong way to do it. It’s just what’s right for you, with those parameters that we went over initially.
Where to Start?
The last thing I wanted to cover is probably just as important as these other things: it’s not the time to bury your head in the sand. You need to find another job. Where should, and especially since a lot of people losing their jobs now, they haven’t maybe not even looked for a job in 10, 15, 20 years, some people. I’m sure it’s different probably when they found their last job. Where should someone start with that?
I think that just starting at the top with your resume is probably a good place to start. And to your point, if you haven’t looked for a job in a long time, you might not even have a resume. And if you do, it’s completely outdated. Like: “Oh, I did the stock room at the Gap at the mall.”
Just revamping that and also considering how important the resume is because back then, there may have not been some of the software. I mean, there’s applicant tracking systems where your application will get pumped through.
There’s ways to set up your resume that just simple things you can do, keywords that you can put in your resume to make sure that you’re going to be at the top of the list or the top of the pile, if you may. And managers are going to be reading it.
It’s really important to kind of have that shored up. A lot of resources out there. You can go as far as hiring someone that’s an expert on this to actually shore up your resume to make sure it’s absolutely as good as you possibly can. But this day and age, you can go online. There’s resources everywhere to help you through this. And just resource after resource out there to help you figure that out.
And it kind of goes along with like the LinkedIn part of it, too. I think they’re kind of one in the same these days. LinkedIn is almost like your online resume. Updating that is going to be really important.
We did a whole series on jobs and employment. And one of the ones we did was with career coach, Jeffrey Goldman. And he talked a little, gave some tips, went into more detail on this about it. The other thing we’re seeing, are people who weren’t necessarily happy with their job and had an idea for a business and are basically taking the plunge now. It’s kind of pushed them into starting their own business. There’s a lot of complexity that goes into that. And whether you’re able to start a business. But there’s no better time than now to figure it out. Obviously, it’s a lot of moving parts, but that’s something, as well.
As far as the planning part of it, when we’re talking to people who’ve changed jobs recently,
one of the things we’re talking about is, the first thing is that you may not be able to get your dream job. You’ve just lost your job and we’re in the middle of a pandemic, there’s a lot of unemployment, which obviously is improving. But, you may not be able to get your dream job. One of the things that is part of the planning part is figuring out how much salary income you need to be able to pay your bills. And maybe it’s a bridge job to you until the economy gets better or until the pandemic ends.
It’s kind of like chess: look at it as one move ahead and always know: “All right, this is where I’m at. This is what I need, and this is where the future, my future step is.” But for the planning aspect, that’s one thing that we look at.
And again, it all goes back to, you do what you have to do, right? And I think just once you hit the pavement, I think the other part of is too, as you start getting on these websites and these job sites, you just never know what you’re going to find. I think just the key is just to stay active and keep plugging away at it. And like I said, you never know what you’re going to find as far as an opportunity.
Yeah. And the other thing, our networks are open. We interact with a lot of people every day. If there’s someone in our network that can help you, we’d be happy to help anyone with it.
For sure.
Yeah. I think we could pretty much talk for hours about what to do with your job loss. I think we covered at least the high points. But it can be complex. It can be confusing, especially at a time where your emotions are running high from the event, from the fact that we’re in a pandemic.
We’re just about out of time for today’s show, but one way you can reach out to us through our website, Bautis Financial.
We’d be happy to talk, have a free consultation, talk to you, see if we can help. As we mentioned earlier, we also have a tool where someone can start building their own financial plan where they can start seeing, like you talked about earlier, what are their expenses? And really have a tool that helps categorize them for you. And you can get to that by our website, BautisFinancial.com/startplanning.
Like I said, it’s a way you can build your own financial plan. Some people like doing things by themselves. That’s a way that they can get started with that.
Very cool. And then of course, you can call us if you want and set up that consultation. I love for people to know and really just understand that we just, we would just love to talk. I mean, even if you just have questions, don’t feel like there’s any obligation, but we’re here for you.
All right, so thanks, John. Thanks everyone for tuning in. And we’ll talk to everyone next time.
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