Summary: Here are the FIVE things I learnt that may be helpful for you or a friend you know maybe experiencing one of these “out of body” experiences:<br> <br> * Being on Social Welfare Is Not Fun<br> * I Should Have started Preparing Sooner<br> * Have an Open Mind - Find a Coach and Model them<br> * Consider Taking a Pay Cut – Get Back in the Game<br> * Find a Plan-B Option that Works for YOU <br> <br> Personal Lesson<br> <br> I remember it like yesterday, started just like any other Friday: drive down the freeway, get to work have my marmalade-on-toast, and work on completing the financial statements for publishing to the market the following week. At 4pm everything changed, I got the call to the CFO’s office, Legal Counsel also present, felt the situation was a little bit unusual, and sure enough I had been made redundant. I can still feel the shock of the reality of the feeling, very humbling, had until 5.30pm to make my way out.<br> <br> I wasn’t bitter or disappointed in the people that had hired me to be their Finance Manager. I knew the company was struggling and that the shareholders were putting pressure on the executive team, but there was so much going on, I didn’t expect it that day.<br> <br> I got back to my office and made the call to my wife telling her I was out of a job. Like a lot of people we didn’t have any Plan-b whatsoever - we were "all or nothing" - single income family with a mortgage, scary. It was a real blessing for us in a sense though, that we had literally just sold our home and so all the gains made on the home became our day to day income, this was only meant to be for a very short while. But soon enough, it became clear that the world was going through the global financial crisis, this was September 2009. Recruiters were not returning phone calls, people were not leaving their jobs. There was zero happening for 6 months straight, not one interview!<br> <br> The FIVE things I learnt<br> <br> * Being on Social Welfare Is Not Fun<br> <br> I had no idea where the nearest welfare office was and didn’t even understand how the whole system worked. I quickly found out that it does provide a safety net for families but doesn’t do more than maybe pay the rent. It didn’t cover the car payment so driving our once ‘fancy’ German car that at the time had another party listed on title i.e. bank, was no longer fun. I now had to drive carefully each night and be on the lookout for any suspicious looking cars near our house, make sure it’s not the sheriff!<br> <br> My advice: You don’t want to be on welfare.<br> <br> * I Should Have Started Preparing Sooner<br> <br> The social welfare system will not help you professionally get back into a good role - things may have changed now, yes the teams assigned to you will help you write up a resume and prepare you for an interview but in my experience they kind of didn’t even do that – just had to tick the boxes and show up each fortnight.<br> <br> Tip 1: Don’t leave it too late to have a Plan-B action plan. It took me 6 months to just get a contract role.<br> <br> Tip 2: Think about whether your savings can last you long and If not, then start putting a robust savings plan together or better still a Plan-B income source for you and your family.<br> <br> * Have an Open Mind: Find a Coach and Model them<br> <br> In November 2008, my wife and I attended a real estate coaching seminar, the concept was residential property sub-leasing - we had never heard of this approach to generating cash flow, it sounded interesting but life got in the way and never did anything with it. Immediately following my redundancy, we decided to hire the sub-leasing coach and invested over $10,000 from the sale of our home to kick this project off and this was our first venture as business owners. We operated this for about two and a half years running about 30 rental rooms in 3 larg...
