Part of the Statistic

You may have seen the news reports that 240,000 Americans became unemployed in October. One of them was in our house. The owner of the company Mike worked for scheduled a conference call at the end of the month, and informed the employees that the company was filing for bankruptcy and laying everyone off, effective immediately. It certainly came as a surprise.

For us, it's a bit unsettling, but not a disaster -- I'm still employed, and Mike has some promising leads on work for next year. (But getting the information from the unemployment office was an eye-opening experience, because the monthly unemployment benefit is not much more than our mortgage payment. So, if we'd been a one income family with no savings, it would be really tough going. And I'm sure there are a lot of people in that position.) It's never great to be laid off, but we feel fortunate that our situation should allow us to get through this bump in the road without big problems.

I was reading the news online after that phone call and discovered that the company one of my uncles works for (a very different kind of business) also declared bankruptcy on the same day. It's amazing how quickly a bunch of idiots making bad loans on Wall Street can trickle down to so many different parts of the economy, and how much trouble it can cause. (I know that's a simplified explanation, but it still seems like a house of cards!)