Please tell me what you think....brutal reality is fine.

Was just laid off and have full severance until March. (very lucky). The clock is ticking. My wife doesn't work as she watches our two kids, 8 yrs and 6 mos. Our monthly expenses, including mortgage and utilities/food are about $4200/mo. (two cars...try to get rid of one.)

I have been out of work for just a little over a month and the clock is ticking.

I have an MBA and 20 years marketing/financial services experience primarily in the credit card field. I am 42.

I have been applying for jobs online with no answers. I have been using my network of friends and on LinkedIn to pass on my resume - nothing. I have been following up with HR and hiring managers via email about the positions - nothing. In the past 30 days I have applied to 70 jobs, including government ones.

My last salary was $150K/yr. I have been applying to jobs nationally and even internationally. I'm willing to go down in pay if I have to and have been applying for jobs at significant lower pay. I've been applying jobs in my old industry and outside...the new industries want someone with years of experience in that industry at my level.

We have some money saved that would keep us going for another 4 months and then everything is gone. I'd rather not throw that money away to save the house for another 3 months just to watch our credit get killed, our money drained, and the house go into foreclosure anyway. Plan is to sell the house, if it'll sell, and move in with my 80 year old mother. It'll be tight, but it's a roof.

My wife could get a job, but with full unemployment, she'd have to make over 60K/year annualized simply to cover everything. She doesn't have a degree and probably wouldn't make enough out of the gate to cover everything.

I'm not whining...these are my challenges. Some people I know were out of work for 3-6 months. Some over a year.

I'm not going to let up...will keep applying for jobs and following up. There's a little bit of panic in here, I know, but I have to be realistic.

What do you think I should do, if anything, outside what I'm already doing?
PS: spam links will be reported. I'm looking for honest bona fide answers.

This is happening to a lot of people. I had arranged for a backup job a couple of years ago as I suspected that rough times were ahead so my salary went from 125k to 85k and am now facing the challenge of trying to make a budget that balances.

The backup job transition did not go smoothly, even though I was only out of work for 26 days, I did not receive a paycheck for three months, the paychecks did not arrive in a timely fashion for another two months and did not receive benefits for five months so I had to maintain the Cobra. I have a heart condition and was expected to have died by 2006 so the co-pay for my meds is about $1,000 every three months (It's $3,000 without insurance). The government plan that reduced the Cobra payments only apply under a certain salary limit which would've been fine had the replacement job started paying immediately but since it did not, I've had to draw on what meager retirement funds that I had so there's a good chance that by the time the year is over, my taxable income will be over the limit and I'll be hit with five months of additional Cobra payments to make. There isn't much left of the retirement funds to begin with, when you're told you are going to die within two to five years you tend to spend a lot of money so the years between 2001 and 2006 pretty much wiped out any reserves that I may have had even with taking on the Brazil project to try and rebuild some finances in 2004-2007. The Brazil project left me with an insurmountable IRS debt even though the work was done in Brazil. The company also reneged on the last $20,000 invoice for time and expenses on that project, I had to let it slide as they were still my primary source of income.

The commute is killing me, it's costing me $170 per month just in gas but taking public transit will actually cost more from where I am. I've thought about getting a scooter to ride on fair days, a $100 per month savings in gas would be worth the $1,000 investment but most of the way is freeways which means a minimum of 150cc, preferably 250cc scooter and you have to take a motorcycle course in this state to ride a scooter (motorcycle safety courses can cost as much as $195) then once the summer begins, riding in 100F heat isn't very safe with the helmet et al.

I had an insurance rider on my mortgage that would make the payments but you needed to be out of work for a minimum of 30 days to collect anything and although I asked for a later start date, the new employer put the start date early in order to schedule in an orientation seminar. There was an insurance rider on my loans that would make the payments if unemployed but you had to file for unemployment and I already had a replacement job lined up. I don't qualify for any medical assistance as my income is too high and I've already had to go through what I was putting aside for the property taxes. Even once the benefits started which are better than before, I couldn't afford the co-pay for my meds last month and had to ration till I could get the money to get the meds, not a safe thing to do with heart meds.

My girlfriend doesn't have any marketable skills and it turns out that she needed significant amounts of help this year as well. If I didn't have a girlfriend, I would probably be still in the black today.

My sister had a stroke so her salary went from maybe 200k to 0 and where her husband works may fold soon so that income would go from 100k to 0. They're planning on declaring bankruptcy and moving back to Canada should that happen.

I don't think we've seen the worse yet, jobs are still being lost, none of the stores have stocked for Christmas as they do not want to be left with unsold stock, this means that a good 70% to 80% of the retail market for the year won't be realized period simply because all the stores are in survival mode. Even the oil companies have another rather deep round of cuts coming up though that's not common knowledge, that's just from my contacts.

Selling homes won't help a lot of people in a weak market, selling cars is problematic as well. Your best chance of a job is from your network of co-workers and people you've done business with. Even during the good times, people would only take risks with an unknown at the entry level and there they are looking for someone fresh from college. It's my network of former business associates that got me the backup job and it'll be where supplemental side contracts will come from.

I suspect that I would have to go into a Debt Management Program or declare chapter 13 bankruptcy, probably within a week or two, maybe another month or two. I've decided that the Debt Settlement Programs are mostly scams that just leave you with all the risks while they collect a fee, if you're going to default it might as well be on your own. I'm going to file for forebearance but I don't think the banks will do it till I've defaulted for a while and once you've defaulted, they would probably want the back pay before granting forebearance.

I know one girl whose been out of work for over three years (mind you due to being a home maker for a few years and then having a divorce so she has the challenge of re-entering the job market) so I count myself lucky that I had a backup job and can take on side contracts. I have never ever been this tight on money, not even as a student. I would be happy if I could return my finances back to where it was as a student.

I find that psychologically, I'm starting to block, to lock up, avoiding conflict so I'm going to ask my Doctor if there's anything that can be done to get things moving again, to quell the anxiety, calm the basal ganglia and get me to the point where I can keep at my problems and focus on my work. As with the heart condition which the Doctor's refer to as an "End of Life Condition", the battle is lost if you can't keep your wits about you. It's ironic that I would survive such insurmountable medical challenges only to be wiped out by financial challenges. Still, if I can keep from freaking out, something may come up to get me through this mess.

At least in my case, the problem is self limiting, no money, no medicine, means death for me. Even if I let the replacement job slide so that the insurance rider picks up the mortgage and try to qualify for the various medical assistance programs, my health condition pretty much means I won't make it till I qualify for anything and I'll still be wiped out with property taxes. If it happens while I still have life insurance then at least my family would benefit and my family needs it desperately. One thing that might work is trying to get three months of meds together, walking away from everything, going back to Canada and try to survive the three months till Canada's health system kicks in to keep me alive (this means trying to scrape up enough to drive the 2,200 miles since cards are maxed, it also means loosing everything that I have).

It's so close too, loan consolidation would put me in the black but I don't have the equity in the home to do it and the debt ratio is too high for personal loans. Forebearance would put me in the black but that's unlikely anytime soon. Even Obama's MHA program might help but you have to establish an escrow for the property taxes and with only four more months till the taxes are due, that would mean doubling or tripling my mortgage payments. I still have a little money left in a long forgotten 403b that I've managed to dig up (lost track of it while sick) which I could use to last a couple of more months, use to establish maybe half of an escrow for the taxes, or maybe take out a loan or a card debt or two. I had money in another account that I lost track of when I got sick but returning to work for the State would've locked that money back up in the benefits savings program. If I'm lucky, it may have been passed to the state unclaimed funds while I was really sick and therefore outside of the benefits program, that would take care of a couple of loans or a couple of cards if I can find it and if I can claim it, of course it would screw up the income taxes and the Cobra payments for sure.

My lunches for the past week were from the dollar menu paid with coins found in spare change jars. I'm down to just pennies and foreign currencies now. The dollar menu items from Burger King tastes better than those from McDonald's but I think the McDonald's items are a better value. I used to work for McDonald's back in high school, I wonder if there's any part-time work there?