There’s a security out there that tracks the average (mean) length of time someone is employed and that figure broke thirty weeks in January. The average person looking for work will not find it in seven months… seven months of job hunting. Seven months of going to job fairs. Seven months of searching online at job websites.

If you’re submitting resumes and calling companies, there are only so many resumes you can submit, calls you can make, before you start burning out. If you start burning out, you reduce the chances you’ll ace the interview because your brain is being beaten into submission by monotony.

That’s why it’s important for you to sprinkle in other activities throughout the day. It’s hard to do this because when you don’t have a job, you feel like you have to get one. To get one you have to submit resumes, call companies, and do all the things involved in “job hunting.” Then you fall into a vicious cycle… no job, want job, must search, keep searching, burn out… you get it. So how do you introduce activities that aren’t directly related to looking for a job but improve your prospects?

Volunteering

You have skills and volunteer organizations need skills. Whether you have trade skills or office skills or you’re just a fast and hard worker, local volunteer organizations can use you. By working as a volunteer, you don’t lose unemployment benefit eligibility and you can flex some of your skills and keep them sharp.

Also, this gives you a great answer to a common interview question: “what have you been doing since your last job?” Being able to say that you help an organization solve a problem is a fantastic answer.

Freelance Consulting

If you’ve exhausted your unemployment benefits and are still having difficulty, consider freelance consulting. A lot of companies need talent but can’t afford to add someone to their payroll, so offering your services as a consultant can bring in some much needed income while keeping your industry knowledge and skills fresh. If you think you might be able to do this, consider going to some local business events like chamber meetings to meet other business owners or search online sites like Craigslist for freelance gigs.

The freelance road isn’t for everyone and it’s not easy but if you’re able to leverage your skills this way you could accidentally start your own business or find your next job.

Pick Up a Complementary Hobby

Want to teach yourself something useful by accident? Pick a hobby that builds on a skill you might find useful in your main career. Let’s say you’ve been doing web design for the last five years and you’ve become pretty good, why not take up a little reading on graphic design or search engine optimization? Start a blog tracking everything you learn and you never know, that might blow up and become a nice side income for you. If nothing else you pick up some new skills that complement your career skills and you become a better hire down the road.

Do Something Fun

Do something you’ve always wanted to do but never had a chance to. This won’t really keep your skills fresh while your unemployed but it will keep you fresh. It’ll break up the monotony and make you a more appealing candidate when your job prospect improve and you get called into interviews. You want to go into interviews with a lot of energy and excitement, which are very difficult to fake especially after months of searching.

And when you do something fun… it’s fun!

Do you have any good suggestions for what a job seeker should do, outside of direct job hunting activities, that can help him or her become a better candidate or a better person?

How to Keep Your Skills Fresh When Unemployed from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

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Last week, as I was research the “catch” on a return of premium life insurance policy, I wondered if it was possible for you to self-insure your life. The idea behind self insuring is that you take a lower level of insurance protection and save the difference into an account. With auto insurance, you could take away comprehensive insurance coverage, rental car coverage, or raise your deductible and put the savings into a high interest savings account.

I do this today with my auto insurance. For my Acura Integra, I didn’t carry comprehensive insurance and was able to saving hundreds of dollars a year. When it was totaled, through no fault of my own, I rolled the savings over to do the same thing with my current car, a Toyota Celica. As I’ve gotten older and the premium on excluding comprehensive insurance decreases, I’m tempted to add comprehensive again and pay for it with the fund. I’m able to because of good driving and good fortune, but I think that self-insurance is something everyone should consider.

The General Idea

The general idea behind self-insuring is that you want to reduce your level of coverage and put the difference in savings. The obvious benefit of this is that by having the difference in savings, you earn interest. The not so obvious benefit is that when the more dangerous accumulation period is over, that is the time it takes for your savings to grow large enough to cover potential problems, the benefits accelerate.

It’s like buying a car (self-insuring) and leasing a car (not self-insuring). The first few years of ownership or leasing are pretty much a wash, which is why leasing is appealing to businesses. However, there comes a point several years down the road where the car is basically “free,” excluding some maintenance, after you pay off the car loan. I see self-insurance in the same way, as long as you can avoid calamities for the dangerous accumulation period, you can get ahead by self-insuring where it makes sense.

Where this makes most sense is where the potential catastrophes are relatively small, to whatever benchmark you feel comfortable with (net worth, savings, etc.), and the savings you could get by downgrading coverage is great. There aren’t many cases where this is possible but there are a few notable ones.

Auto Insurance

This example is cleanest with auto insurance because it’s easy to see the savings. If you’re able to save $50 a month by raising your deductible from $500 to $1000, then after ten months you’ll have saved enough to cover the difference in the event of an accident. In this case, by raising your deductible you are exposing yourself to $500 of risk. If you can save $50 a month, then the accumulation period is 10 months… so avoid accidents for 10 months.

On auto insurance, like with many insurances, you have a lot of options:

• Comprehensive insurance
• Rental car coverage
• Deductibles

Homeowners Insurance

With homeowners you may be required by your mortgage lender to keep a certain level of insurance coverage but you may have options picking the deductible you want. Again, like auto insurance, compare the prices to see if it makes sense for you to increase the deductible and put the savings away to cover potential problems.

I’m hesitant to offer up removing flood insurance and guesstimating how much it would cost to repair “typical” flood damage, though those riders are certainly worth considering.

Life Insurance

Is this possible with life insurance? This is really the scenario that prompted this post in the first place. When I started thinking about it, what are we really insuring against? Ultimately I settled on the idea that life insurance exists to do one of two things:

• Insure against a future income stream — this risk is most obvious for a single income family where the death of the breadwinner really puts the family in a bind. If the spouse hasn’t worked in a long time, it’ll be difficult, especially now, it won’t be easy restarting.
• Insure against current debts — this is the risk that probably affects more families and it’s because of the mortgage. If either spouse dies, the survivor is still responsible for the debt. If it’s the breadwinner who dies, that makes the situation even worse because you have both the loss of income and the demands of a loan.

I ran some numbers and it doesn’t seem feasible to self-insure for this sort of thing. If you assume 8% APY on your savings, which puts it into investing terrible (rather than savings account territory), you need to save $71 a month to reach $100,000 in thirty years. $213 a month if you want to reach $300,000. If those issues are concerns for you, I don’t think self-insuring makes financial sense.

Final Thoughts

Remember that you’re up against actuaries, with years of training and tons of statistical data, so self-insurance can be a risky proposition. Even if you’ve had a lifetime of safe driving, you never know when you’ll run into a string of bad luck that saps your self-insurance fund of all its money. It takes a certain time of person, who isn’t afraid of assuming this level of risk, and careful financial calculation.

Do you self-insure? If so, what do you self-insure?

(Photo: ej_imageries)

Consider Self-Insurance Against Calamities from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

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Home sweet home — I’ve always love that saying. There is something wonderful about coming to place where you can feel safe, peaceful and rejuvenated. With all of the known dangers out in the big world, home can be a wonderful respite. Sadly, we are bombarded on a daily basis with the news of things that can harm us. Unfortunately some of those things can be found in our safe haven…our home.

Instead of throwing up our hands in frustration, I believe in the power of getting educated and making small changes with big impact on or health and environment. Here are three small changes that can improve the quality of life in your home sweet home.

Cleaning

To maintain a healthy eco-friendly kitchen the first place to start is to get replace any products that contain ammonia and bleach. Both of these ingredients are clearly labeled as toxic and do not belong in the same room where you prepare food. While small exposures to these toxins may simply irritate your breathing, skin and eyes, it can be very harmful to young children and anyone with a compromised immune system. There is a reason the labels say “poison”. There are better, safer ways to clean up in green style.

Another very important reason to skip the commercial brand in your kitchen is that they wreak havoc on our environment. Just think of the runoff into our drains, water supply and eventually our local water systems, lakes, rivers and oceans.

Here are some safer alternatives that I use in my very own kitchen. Not only will you turn your kitchen green, but you will save some ‘green’ along the way.

• Borax — aka sodium borate, is a naturally occurring compound that disinfects when used as a cleaning agent– Simply use anywhere you would use commercial brand abrasive. You can make a pretty fabulous cleaning paste by mixing together a paste of borax and natural liquid soap.
• Distilled White Vinegar
• Baking Soda
• Plant-based liquid soap (with no fragrance)
• Lemons
• Olive Oil

Eating

The food choices you make every day can help to create a greener kitchen for you and your loved ones. One of the most profound changes you can make is to begin to educate yourself about what you are REALLY eating on a daily basis. The best tool you have to create a green healthy eating life is to read the labels on everything you buy and to choose more things that don’t even have labels, other than those cute little stickers, i.e. fruits and veggies.

When it comes to buying produce, there is a coding system that is universally used in the industry to indicate whether an item has been grown organically, conventionally (read: with pesticides), or in a lab. Here are the codes you will find in all stores:

• Organically grown food has five digits and starts with #9
• Conventionally grown food always has four digits
• Genetically grown food has five numbers and will start with the #8 or #3

To keep it simple, I always remember to look for the nine! And whether you choose organic or not, always remember to thoroughly wash your fruits and vegetables with either a store bought natural produce wash or simply use a bit of plant based soap and wash any residue or dirt away before eating.

Storing

When it comes to storing food in our fridge or pantry, we have been taught over the years that plastic is the way to go. We’ve learned that the “burp” of the trusty Tupperware is what we need to watch for to keep foods fresh and healthy. Today, we know about some of the dangers of plastic when it comes to food storage. The two main words that have come to light are Phthalates and BPA.

Phthalates are a type of additive that is used to make plastic softer and more flexible. They are also found in a wide variety of other places like cosmetics and cleaning materials. They are even found in some foods like milk, meat and butter! There has been much controversy as to the safety of phthalates and its effect as an endocrine disruptor, especially in younger children.

Personally, I understand that we are exposed to so many toxins in our environment, and you may ask “does this REALLY make a difference”. Well, as the mother of a young child I am always looking for ways to reduce the toxic burden in my home and in our lives. Choosing to eliminate plastics is a simple way to create a cleaner, greener kitchen in my home.

BPA – Bisphenol A — is used to make plastics such as water bottles, food can lining and sports equipment. BPA, another endocrine disrupter has been linked to obesity, neurological issues, and because of its levels of estrogen levels, has even been linked to breast cancer, among other conditions.

Yes, this seems like a pretty bad situation. However there is good news. Choosing alternative storage is healthier and actually less expensive. Here are some great ways to eliminate Phthalates and BPA in your kitchen.

• Choose stainless steel and glass containers – I like to keep glass jars from food products such as olive and pickle containers. These make wonderful storage containers for grains, nuts and anything else you can think of. I even use an apple sauce jar for my daily green smoothie on the go.
• Mason jars make great cups and storage jars.
• There are non-leaching PBA free plastic alternatives showing up at markets around the country due to high demand. If your store doesn’t carry one, make sure to let the manager know you are interested.

What are some ways you are “greening” your kitchen?

(Photo: elanaspantry)

3 Easy Steps to a Greener Kitchen from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

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