Transitions - Laid Off

I meant to write an article about this a long time ago, but I ended up getting rather distracted and never putting it together. This is an article about getting laid off in March of this year and how I transitioned to my new job a few weeks later.

 First off – getting laid off was not the only thing going on in my life when it happened. I was married in January of 2011 to my sweet wife Ashley (my greatest accomplishment in life was wooing her heart over our short dating/engagement period of about 6 months). I registered to take the professional engineering exam in April of 2011 – and found out my wife and I were pregnant with twins shortly before that. I was scheduled to sit for the professional engineering exam (an 8-hour full day test I had been dreading from the time I was first made aware of it in college) on October 27^th. My baby girls were officially due on October 13^th, and I was also finishing out my Masters in Business Administration in December of 2011. The twins were born on 9/23/11, I took my P.E. on 10/27/11 and graduated with my MBA in 12/2011. I heard back that I had passed the P.E. in December as well. I was laid off 3 months later in March of 2012.

Adding to all of this, I had bought a foreclosure in Collierville which was well-known as a bachelor pad for most of the 3 years prior to me being married. With the aid of my father, we furiously spent our weekends attempting to make my bachelor pad into a home suitable for my family prior to Ashley’s due date.

 Now that I've set the scene:

 I was already aware that my company was doing poorly – work got slower and slower and it was tough to stay busy. Our department was seemingly way overstaffed and from what I could tell the company had been poorly managed for some time. I had started as an intern in 2007 and had been working for around 5 years when a board member walked over to my desk and asked me to come with him. I joined 2 younger engineers from different depatments and instantly realized I was being laid off as I could think of no other reason the other 2 young engineers, two board members and I would all be in a meeting together. My head got hot – stress instantly rose within me and I began frantically thinking about how my life was about to change tremendously.

 There are many reasons for why I was chosen to be laid off, I’m sure – I don’t feel that is relatively important to this article – so I am purposely leaving that out.

Thankfully when I walked into that last meeting at Allen and Hoshall my wife and I had been contemplating for some time paying off her new honda civic and the only reason I hadn’t up till then was because I was worried there would be layoffs soon at my current job. That caused us to have a healthy amount of money in our safety fund and I knew we would be okay for the short term. I was told I would be paid to the end of the month – I think that was about 28 days when you factored in my untaken 2 weeks of vacation pay. Since I was a little worried about layoffs I had recently burned every possible piece of data I might ever want from the company servers onto a collection of 9 dvd’s and had stashed them at home. I had also already been very discontent at my job and had been looking pretty seriously into finding a new job for some time, had met with a technical recruiter who helped me revise my resume and had already looked into several leads unsuccessfully. The very last thing I believe was God’s total favor being that I had stumbled upon an audiobook copy of a book called “what color is your parachute” and had listened to it very closely the previous week. This book is all about preparing for being laid off, and it really helped me to think very critically about my possible plan while I was calm and unhappily employed the week prior to being laid off.

  

Immediately after hearing the news and prior to collecting my things, I called my wife and told her the news. Her reaction astonished me… she simply asked “why did they lay you off?” as she was rather surprised. I told her I wasn’t sure, and I loved her and would be home as soon as I could be. She didn’t sound worried at all, and looking back now I know she wasn’t. She knew the whole time that God had plans much greater than ours. That he knew when he gave us the twins what we would need, and he would be our provider. She simply knew that God watched us closely, and he was aware of our situation. That conversation was the absolute best way for her to help me in that moment and it was exactly what I needed from her. It was amazing and made me smile in one of the darkest looking days I have ever seen.

 I packed up my jeep, and drove home – after a few minutes of total bliss realizing that I would never have to return to my dreaded old job – I prayed out loud for a few minutes then picked up my phone and started calling everyone I knew that might know of anything. I told them my situation, what I was looking for, and asked them to please let me know if they heard of anything that might fit. I had quite a few soft leads after that first day and spent most of that night at home looking online and updating my profile on job search sites and emailing out my new resume with a new fresh cover letter. During the meeting where I got laid off one of the board members had told me he was aware of a couple companies looking for a mechanical engineer and wrote their numbers down for me.

After a couple days, and absolutely exhausting all of my contacts – even posting my situation on Facebook, I had 4 pretty good opportunities lining up. I began interviewing the following Wednesday, and had 3 interviews at companies I wasn’t very excited about before I had scheduled an hour long phone interview with the company I really wanted to pan out. I had actually already sent in my application and spoken with HR at Barnhart about 3 months prior to being laid off, but I had seemingly been brushed off and nobody really told me why. I sent in my resume again, and one of the people I had emailed called me and told me to look at Barnhart. This was one of my favorite MBA professors at Union, Keven Westbrook.

 Amazingly so, Keven had recently started training the sales staff at Barnhart and had a pretty solid relationship with some important people at Barnhart. He called to ask why they hadn’t hired me already, and the human capital VP gave me a call that night and set up the hour long phone interview. During our phone interview I remember him saying if we had gone to college at the same time we would have been best friends. We had very similar background, both coming from reformed Presbyterian churches and our thoughts on everything lined up perfectly. I told him I had a few other offers to look at and he told me he felt pretty certain he wanted me to come to Barnhart quickly, and I could come in the following week for a face-to-face interview.

  

In the meantime I had interviewed with 3 other companies, and had firm offers from 2 – each for substantially more than I was making previously. The stress had already started to subside and excitement was building quickly. My interview at Barnhart was intense, I interviewed with 6 senior engineers for 45 minutes each – and left feeling good about things, but mentally exhausted after telling my story to 6 different highly intelligent men. I took an engineering aptitude test that had 5 questions on it – 3 of which I solved easily and 2 of which I had no idea how to solve but did my best to show I knew how to set up problems really well… I was moving from a background in refrigeration to a completely new field much more kin to steel design and civil engineering type work.

 That Friday Barnhart sent me my official offer letter and I called and accepted. They said I could come to work whenever I liked, I told them instead of coming the very next Monday – I wanted to take another week to enjoy with my wife since I hadn't really enjoyed the prior 2 weeks since I was so stressed.

  

After all of this I don’t feel this is exactly the typical layoff story. I don’t feel anything I did really prepared me for this or helped me to get through it faster. I really think God ordained everything and I am so greatful he had a wonderful plan that brought me to where I am today. I calculated it later – Allen and Hoshall ended up paying me for 28 days after I was laid off – I started at Barnhart on the 29^th day. God watches us closely. 

Resume

Yesterday – while listening to a Danny Silk sermon (http://podcasts.ibethel.org/podcasts/follow-your-favor) about finding your favor, I was thinking about how important it is to know that thing you do better than anyone else – and by knowing that to direct your life in a way that you can use that skill or skills as much as possible.

Really this is a lot like learning to write your resume – just instead of trying to use it as an annoying calling card for employers nationwide – you only use it yourself to manage your life. When I was laid off and for a good while prior to being laid off – I spent a little time asking my closest friends to tell me what they thought I was supposed to do with my life. I felt very unhappy with my current job and I spent most of the ride home every day praying that God would remove me from it and give me something new to apply myself to. Typically I would start my prayer with “again…. Please give me a way out of there Lord”…. Wondering why I would pray this prayer every day after work and I still felt trapped and every way out I had tried so far had failed. I struggled with these feelings most of the time I was there – and wavered between trying to “love” my job by telling everyone I was content and happy and hoping these feelings would just become my actual feelings and being miserable and feeling trapped forever in this job. I do feel this prior job had an important purpose in my life, and I wouldn’t change my past – but God’s timing is always perfect and I know I will continue to learn better and better to just trust Him and stop struggling so much to control everything.

Anyways, I believe God uses time to generally move his people towards the things they are meant to do with their life – I think often we fight that flow by trying to organize our life ourselves and not listening to God’s voice or our friends and family who tell us what we shine at. I feel in retrospect that if I had taken time to look hard at my own interests and what made me feel passionate instead of worrying about income and what other people wanted to do with their lives, I might have noticed sooner that my old job was not where I was supposed to be. I tried to make myself fit into that job – but really I should have realized that I needed another, my old job was only a stepping stone to something else.

When you write your resume, you put everything in there that will convince this employer that you are absolutely a must-hire. When you think about your own future and your personal resume, look at what it is in your life that you get excited about. What makes you want to stay up late exhausted working on? What makes you want to jump out of the bed in the morning when you realize excitedly what is waiting for you. Work is something that should be wonderful – it isn’t something we should dread. Sure – sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to because we’re working towards an ultimate good, but I sure don’t want to dread waking up every day for the next 38 years – I’d rather just sell everything I own and go get a hotel in Peru for 35 cents a day. Guinea Pigs are cheap and a delicacy – and the view is spectacular. 

Engineer Budgeting

First of all I know this borders on being OCD – when I talk about this people roll their eyes. I think it’s important and I enjoy doing it – I’m sure there are easier ways of getting the same kind of accuracy. I don’t think everyone needs to be this precise, but I thought it would be a fun article to write and non-engineers might find it amusing. I use Yodlee.com quite a bit – it does a snapshot type deal of all your financial accounts and keeps track of bills. I’ve used it for years and love it. You don’t have to visit each site, but just log in here and it shows you a dashboard of everything. As far as security is concerned yodlee probably already has your log on information since it manages this for many large banks and it’s security record is stellar.

One of my passions in life – embarrassingly so sometimes, is that I love watching and keeping track of my finances meticulously. I never really cared much about money growing up, I did have a small lawn-mowing gig growing up where I did make a lot of cash – at least 15 year old Kyle thought it was a pile… but other than that, I pretty much grew up with my parents providing what I really needed and I got a lot of what I wanted by begging or mowing grass.

The real lane changer financially happened during my senior year of college. I had an opportunity to sign up for a class called “Personal Finance” that only 4^th years were allowed to take due to the high demand. I was a little worried about my future – knowing in the next year I would suddenly have a lot of financial responsibilities with very little financial know how. I would watch my parents balancing checkbooks and paying bills and I never really took the time to ask about the specifics. Regardless, I felt very unprepared going in to this class for my post-college financial world.

An older lady taught this class, and she was very thorough in her methodology. She taught us all the basics, simple budgeting, 401k, Roth IRAs, Mortgages, Interest Rates, the future value of money – I was stunned. We did everything in excel and she made us make pretend budgets and keep track of our spending and create reports and in the end I felt pretty confident that I knew how to manage my finances as an adult.

In my first job – I started as an intern and while they kept me pretty busy doing busy work I would eventually run out of stuff to do and have to wait for an older engineer to give me more work.

During this time I couldn’t really “not work” and had to work pretty hard at staying busy. Since I did work in spreadsheets often, I started working on creating a more useful spreadsheet to keep track of my finances. I started with something simple I pulled off of crown financial and it quickly got very complicated, then I would spend hours making it simpler and adding features as my needs got more and more complicated with time. I liked the idea, but since I was single and living at home I really didn’t need to budget very closely – I had plenty.

After a few years, the economy started to stutter and my company lowered our salaries by 10%, I had already begun the process of applying for an MBA program that would add a substantial increase to my monthly bills, so I felt very unsure about things financially and decided to forego the MBA and hope the 10% returned soon so I could get back on track with getting an MBA.

Today Kyle knows – that because I did not keep a close eye on my finances that uneasiness was really rather conservative. Eventually I was told by the MBA program that if I did not sign up by the following semester I would have to take an extra semester of pre-requisites to qualify for the MBA program. So I buckled down for a few months and started inputting each receipt into my spreadsheet so I would know if I could handle the $650 increase in expenses each month for the two and a half years it would take to finish the MBA. After that I never stopped putting every receipt into the spreadsheet – sorting them into fixed expenses and non-fixed, and then into all the different categories they could be. Doing so allows me to understand where the money goes and knowing where the money goes allows me to make intelligent decisions about how I spend my money daily.

It does not make much sense to try to explain the spreadsheet – I decided I would just post a default one (I used a make-up salary of 30,000 and made up everything else on it… FYI), so if anyone wanted to play with it they could. My old job paid salaries on the 1^st and 15^th, so I had structured the budget into a monthly budget tab. My current job pays our checks every Friday, so now I switched to a weekly budget.

Download Link: (It does have macros in it, so you'll have to enable them to use the cool button features)

Budget Spreadsheet Example

There are 7 tabs in the spreadsheet:

Budget – where a weekly budget is kept, at the end of the week you simply push the “Next Week” button and the excel sheet automatically creates a new week and moves any excess “Banked” money in the budgets to the next week. This way you can watch your banks – when they grow or shrink too much you can adjust your budget to be more accurate in the long term – or know you need to move money from one category to another.

Summary – Summary simply keeps track of your monthly low point financially, for me this occurs right after our mortgage is taken out. I like knowing this because if something does happen – say I get laid off, I know I have that much money clear and free at any point during the month. I try to keep a nice big safety fund in there (When I was laid off in March it took a lot of stress out of my life). It’s also a good measure of how each month went – if the summary gets bigger and bigger then things are well, if you continually lose money then your budgets are working out correctly.

Utility – utility keeps track of utility bills, I did a lot of energy conservation type work in my old job and found it extremely interesting to track my utility bills and notice how it changed with the seasons, or when I made an improvement like installing insulation upstairs or adjusting thermostat settings. I also compared my utility bill costs – kwh/sqft or therms/sqft to national averages to see where my house stood. If there is any interest I can talk about this more later.

 Annual Bigs – Annual bigs is the tab that keeps track of anything big that happens once a year, like insurance costs, vehicle tags, life insurance, cell phones, gym memberships – stuff like that. I also use this sheet to keep track of home repair costs, vehicle repair costs and some other etcetera stuff I like to record for posterity’s sake.

Mortgage – this sheet keeps track of my mortgage, I actually molded another person’s spreadsheet to this and it keeps track of extra payments made… stuff like that. Pretty self explanatory. I ended up making the decision to switch to a 15yr mortgage right before I got married… because I keep so close track of my finances – I could make an intelligent decision, know that I was capable of doing it – and it will save us a ton of money in the long run. I should have the house paid off a few years before the twins enter college, which will be helpful…

Retirement – this sheet simply keeps track of retirement, the cool feature here is that you can adjust what your pre-retirement interest rate (I used 8%) and your post retirement (4%) and see how that affects your retirement salary – it will automatically calculate this by giving you a inflation raise every year and depleting retirement by the time you’re 99.

DebtsPlan – the sheet is used to plan debt pay offs, it’s very simply created. Just pay off one debt at a time and watch the debt disappear.