Because of restructuring that’s taking place where I work, I went on Amazon.com and bought a brand new right off the printer book called Rebound: A Proven Plan for Starting Over After Job Loss. I don’t need it (so far, anyway) but it has some things you can do after and before, just in case. Some of them make sense any time.

Control your spending (Duh!) on food:

• Don’t eat out
• Don’t buy something you aren’t fond of eating just because it’s on sale
• Don’t go to the grocery when you need things, go to your cabinets or pantry first. When things you need and love go on sale, that’s when to buy them.
• Take note of the stuff that’s on the front and back page of those supermarket or grocery circulars that come to your mailbox. Yes, it’s advertising, but it’s also useful. Those items on the front and back that you see first are usually loss leaders designed to get you in the store. Loss leaders are stuff priced below cost that lure you into the store to buy more things while you’re there. You are smarter than they are, just buy the loss leaders and get the heck outta there. If they are charging less and you need it, that’s a win for you. Just don’t buy the stuff you don’t need.
• Use coupons – yes, they can be a pain in the butt, but they will save money. Look online for coupons too.
• Use the loyalty card. So they get info on you – you get less costs on food.

Control your costs on insurance:

• Raise your deductibles on homeowner and car insurance. The difference between premiums when your deductible is $1,000 and when it’s $250 is big.
• If you have term insurance, see if you can get lower rates on your coverage. Premiums have dropped and the company may want to keep you even if it means lower premiums for them. If you don’t ask, it won’t happen.
• If you have whole life insurance, get term life instead.
• Make sure the new policy is in place before you end the old one.
• Some place you are associated with may offer discounts on health insurance – my home insurance is through the Farm Bureau and they have a policy – it may be less of a premium than COBRA where you pay all of the premium, including what your former employer paid.

Control your communication costs:

• Cable TV or Satellite TV – are you watching those premium channels? If not, drop them. Actually, watching things that are negative all the time can be a bummer. Since that’s all of television, for the most part, why bother? Drop it all and get that digital converter box coupon. PBS is your friend.
• Subscription movie services – cut back on the number of movies you get to 1 at a time – it will give you some entertainment, which you may need.
• Cell phones are a pill. If you won’t get slammed with a huge termination fee, cancel and keep them both. Cancel that super-unlimited service with 30,000 hours of texting a month and transfer your number to one of those prepaid phones to cut the costs down. (This will really suck if you have an iPhone, sorry.)  If you have to keep it, you might consider dropping a home phone. You’ve got to have one or the other just so you can get all those calls from prospective employers. If you have high-speed Internet, try Vonage or MagicJack.. Vonage, at somewhere in the range of $15-20 a month is less than Ma Bell. MagicJack is something like $20 a year.
• Magazine subscriptions – if you cancel them you’ll get a refund. Decide if you need the refund more than the magazine. You might also want to check out those recurring things like a subscription to the Consumer Reports site (you aren’t going to be buying enough big stuff to make it worth while) and if you’re on the fruit of the month or coffee of the month plan, drop those too.

Things you might do before you get canned:

• Save several months worth of income and put it into an online bank. Online? What?  Yep. Make sure it is FDIC insured but online banks tend to offer a higher rate of interest simply because they don;t have to buy or lease land and put up a building. The ideal amount to save is (as if anyone except the rich will do this) a couple of months worth of income for people who make $35,000 or less. And what if you make more than that? Statistics show you’ll probably meed another month’s wotrth of income for every $10,000 you make over that. If you aren’t good at selling yourself, save more. Now, I know full well, nobody can do that easily without living on beans and rice for twelve years, but try, damn it. If you can’t do that, you might try the next thing, which is:
• Apply for a home equity line of credit – or HELOC – this is a fall back loan. Don’t actually spend any of it until you need it. A HELOC is like a bucket of money sitting there that doesn’t charge interest until you borrow some of it – and you don’t have to take out the full amount at once. You can borrow a grand here and a grand in a month. You can’t get a loan once you have no job, for the most part. Interest rates are lower on these than credit cards. Both times I was laid off we used credit cards and took years to finally pay them off. HELOC payments for interest are mortgage interest and are tax-deductible.
• If your life insurance is only through your employer, get a term life insurance policy.
• Get a physical and get anything fixed that needs fixing. (Especially the dog or the cat.) If you have to go out and buy insurance n your own, you’d have to worry about creating a host of pre-existing conditions, but nobody can afford to go out and get their own policy anyway.
• Use eBay and Craig’s List to sell all that crap you’ve been meaning to get rid of. Transfer the gains into that online savings account or pay down the credit cards.
• Tell people you love the truth. That’s your spouse and your kids. If you have an ex- what you tell them may need to depend on your relationship. You know them better than I do. (Thank God.).
• Stop window shopping. Go for a walk instead. You don’t need to buy all that stuff anyway.
• Give up those bad habits. Stop drinking and smoking. Both are hard to do, but you need to do it anyway. Give up pay-for-view. If it’s a movie, NetFlix is way cheaper and you can wait until it’s on DVD. If it’s a fight, what were you thinking, paying that much to watch a fight? Go to a bar and piss someone off. You’ll see a fight up close and in detail – just don’t buy a lot to drink first.