Jewish Musings, Wednesday, January 10, 2024

[peachymom1]

What’s on your mind — how to make kugel? This week’s Torah reading? Life goals? Prayer? We are all engaged in weight loss/weight maintenance journeys and we are all Jewish or at least interested in Judaism. We like to eat, we like to discuss. It is our goal here to provide each other support on our journeys, to share experiences, to call on our rich cultural heritage and texts, and to help each other grow spiritually.

Some of us take weekly turns starting the thread:

Frieda (hopefully)?
Holly
Lee
Louise
Lynne
Peachy

And for those of you that stop by to read this thread without posting — you are welcome to, but you are also welcome to chime in. Don’t be shy!

[peachymom1]

Good morning everyone! Well, yesterday was a whirlwind of a crazy day. As you all know, DH and I share a home office; I start working at 7 a.m., and his start time was 7:30 a.m. The first thing DH saw when he logged on to his company laptop was a meeting invitation from his boss’s boss, so he immediately knew something was wrong. The meeting was an hour or so later, and that’s when DH got the bad news that he was laid off. The company is downsizing, and half his department got the ax. DH has been with this company for almost 24 years, so this is a scary time for him.

In California, you have to give an employee their final paycheck on their last day. If you don’t pay them in full, you have to keep paying them every day until you do. I actually had this happen to me back in 1998, when the company I worked for was acquired. They laid off my boss a week later, then decided that I was no longer necessary, so they laid me off too. Three days later, I still didn’t have my final paycheck in the mail, so I called HR and told them they’d better be including my pay for each day I didn’t get it. And they did – they overnighted me my check, and they did indeed add in the extra days, plus my severance pay and vacation hours. Anyway, back to DH, the company email him the separation letter that they want him to sign, and the letter gave the amount that would be deposited to his account. The bad news is that they didn’t give him any severance pay. The good news is that they did deposit the correct amount, including over 300 hours of vacation pay he’d accrued. In California, vacation hours are considered the same as salary, and you can’t make your employees use them or lose them, like you can in other states.

The other good news is that it’s much easier now to file for unemployment benefits than it was the last time DH lost a job. It’s all done online, and like the disability benefits I received when I was medical leave, the whole process is easy and straightforward, so DH already has that ball in motion.

There’s one more silver lining. DH’s employer offers a flex spending account for medical expenses. If you’re not familiar with FSAs, it’s a benefit that a company offers so you can contribute money from each paycheck toward a set amount for the year, to be spent on medical expenses (e.g., copayments, prescriptions, dental work, eyeglasses, etc.) Your contributions come out of your paycheck before it’s taxed, so it lowers your tax liability too. If you leave the company before the year is up, you can still use the full amount that you committed to for the year, even though you haven’t contributed the full amount. Since DH has only gotten one paycheck this year, he only contributed one payment toward the whole amount. So now he can spend the whole amount he signed up for, even though he only made one contribution out of 26 for the year. And that’s exactly what we did yesterday – we went to our optometrists for eye exams and new glasses, and we spent the whole megillah. Yay!

It’s a big bummer that DH has lost his job, no question. I don’t know how easy or hard it will be for him to find another job. I know how much it stinks to be out of work, and I will do everything I can to cheer up DH or at least distract him when necessary. We will be OK financially for a while, and since we’re both over 59 ½, we can withdraw from our 401(k)s if we have to. So we won’t starve or be on the streets anytime soon.

One more silver lining I just thought of. DH just bought a new suit and shoes last week for DS33’s wedding, so now he has something nice to interview in!

Does anybody have any silver lining stories they can share? I could use all the cheery stories I can get!

Thank you all for listening!

[lee058]

Good morning everybody. Hope you are all well and SAFE! Please pray for Israel.

Re today's topic: I need to call the plumber to fix DS's toilet; it's making weird noises when he flushes. DH said DS would have to pay for the repairs. The silver lining is that DS has enough money to pay for it; such a blessing. DH and I are kind of tight since we just had to buy the new stove, even though we got a good deal on it.

And speaking of money, DS will have his student loans paid off in April!! I am so proud of him.

The sun is coming up and the clouds are all lit up. I'm taking it as a good sign.

Have a peaceful day, Lee

[hollygail]

I had been working at a wholesale (tree) nursery for about 14 years (my title was something like Administration Manager; basically, I ran the business aspect of the entire company). I had a terrible fight with one other employee and gave my boss my two-weeks notice. It wasn't easy, but I'd had it with this one individual (a "rising star"). Within a few weeks, the mother of one of my religious school students asked me what kind of work I was looking for and told her husband who had his own law firm. Shortly after that, he hired me to run the business aspect of his firm. The pay was almost twice what I'd been earning, and it turned out to be the best job of my life. Everyone there respected me and treated me with respect. There was no b.s. in that office.

Some years later, this same woman got jealous of me (how is beyond my understanding; her husband was totally in love with her) and he had to let me go. Since I was also the head HR person, he had to find a way to do it, so he reorganized the entire firm and eliminated my job. I filed for unemployment insurance, which the government kept extending because of the high unemployment rate in the US at the time. So I collected for two years (!!!). Within two weeks after it ended, I got a phone call from the friend of a friend (whom I'd met once or possibly twice) to ask me if I was looking for a job. He hired me over the phone for a temporary assignment at a company he was helping; it was supposed to be for a few months and lasted almost a year. The agreement before I started had been that as soon as his own company got up and running, he'd take me with him and that's what happened. I stayed with him until his business failed. By that time, I was over 65 and started collecting Social Security and Medicare coverage started too.

And since then I've held both Sunday school and mid-week religious school teaching gigs for numerous synagogues in the county, often working for two or three synagogues during the same year (Sunday mornings at one, Sunday afternoons at another, mid-week classes at one or two of them and/or for other synagogues). On top of that, I've been tutoring b'nei mitzvah students (mostly teaching Torah and haftarah trop and often how to lead parts of Shabbat services).

Yes, there are silver linings. Best of luck to your DH on the new chapter of his / your (plural) life!

[gazelle18]

My life has been full of silver linings. To pick just one, our house flooded during hurricane Katrina in 2005. Literally every physical thing I owned was in the trunk of our car. To make a very long story short, we ended up using the insurance money to buy a lovely (dream) home in a nice neighborhood, I learned how to truly count my blessings, and a storage unit I had been obliged to keep as a lawyer (old legal files had to be kept for 7 years) flooded as well, so I got out of that obligation. (Apparently you don’t have to keep destroyed papers!)

Peachy, I’m sending good vibes your way.

[lee058]

hollygail, The 28th would work for me. Let's see, 10:30AM PT would be 1:30PM ET, right? Please let me know.