The Cost of Losing a So-Called ‘Dream Job’

by John Sherman

When I was 25, I had the job I’d come to New York to get: a writing job. My job was writing. (Technically my job was “assistant editor,” but it involved very little editing, and no assisting whatsoever.) To take this job, I left a stable position with ample opportunities for (financial) growth and more benefits than I have ever seen since. I took a $2,000 pay cut, which, factoring in my bonus (yes, bonus) and the 5% to 8% raise each employee received each year, was closer to a $6,000 pay cut. Add to that the 8% my then-employer contributed to a company-sponsored 403(b) plan, and the math is nothing short of devastating — approaching $10k — particularly in light of the fact that my long-sought writing job lasted only five months, and was among the worst professional experiences I’ve ever had.

I did the math at the time, furtively, not wanting to dwell on the true financial cost of leaving an actual company to write for the Internet, because dreams. Dreams are expensive, I told myself, or would have if I’d thought of it in those terms. Adding to my financial, uh, rightsizing was the fact that I’d just moved, to a nicer apartment in a nicer neighborhood in Brooklyn, for an extra $200 a month. (This I will defend: I went from living in Roachtopia, a four-bedroom apartment I shared with three straight men and a mysterious species of shower-dwelling annelids, to a two-person Apartment, capital “A,” filled with Persian area rugs and an 18″ dishwasher.) Justifications aside, it felt like driving a semi toward a six-foot overpass.

I started the new job on Bastille Day. At the time, it felt pleasantly symbolic — the Bastille being my former life as an artless 9-to-5 drone — but in hindsight may have been an ill omen. Management typically started drinking at 3 p.m., and the entire human relations department was, somehow, the CEO. Professional feedback was delivered in passive-aggressive emails late Sunday night, and never thereafter discussed in person. What turned out to be my final two months were spent in an active job hunt; I was confident I could spin my brief stint as a temporary fellowship and move on to something if not more profitable, at least less unenjoyable.

My final meeting was scheduled in one unremarkably vague late-night email and lasted no more than three minutes.

“We have to let you go,” I was told. “We’re sorry.” My other supervisor uneasily nudged a box of tissues in my direction.

“OK,” I said, and left.

The bloom had come off the writing-job rose in the first month; my only regret was that I was robbed of the fuck-you luxury of leaving on my own terms. After several rounds of drinks that night, purchased by a coven of my then-former co-workers, my task the following day (from a leisurely 10 a.m.) was to figure out how to pay for my life.

This was not the first time I’d been unemployed. My first bout began the September after I graduated college. I left school with a job lined up at an art gallery in Chelsea — a job I left after 10 weeks, once it became clear that the fey, toadish gallery owner had an explicitly and apparently exclusively sexual interest in my career. I packed up my sublet and moved home, where I stayed for a year. It was unpleasant, but uncomplicated; I had no belongings to put in storage and no unpaid lease to sink my credit score. I felt a bit like a hermit crab, holed up somewhere until a different, larger opportunity presented itself. But the months were long.

This time, three years later, I had an expensive apartment full of things — things I would be unable to simply pack up and carry home. I was less inclined to leave this round, in any case; the time I’d spent fighting my way from post-grad unemployment to what I thought was the writing job of my dreams felt like an investment, one I was loath to surrender.

In the meantime, I could hope to pick up one or two shifts a week at the bookstore where I used to work full-time, to the tune of $46.85 a pop, after taxes, which in a month might cover my utilities and a Metrocard, if I continued to have somewhere to take the train to on a regular basis. (I let mine lapse and stayed in Brooklyn.) Then there were self-indulgent variables like restorative booze and inescapable groceries, the luxuries of avocados and cereal spinning through my mental calculations like a slot machine.

But my grocery future full of canned goods was a simple fix compared to the real cash-flow issue I now faced. I had one more check to wait for — cleverly, and likely not accidentally, I was let go at the end of a pay period — and health insurance through the end of the month. I’d almost forgotten about health insurance.

I applied for unemployment. Based on my erstwhile salary, I was awarded $400 a week. Unemployment recipients can elect either to pay taxes on their benefits each week or defer taxes to year-end. For people who normally get a sizable tax refund, the second option may be feasible; last year I paid $1,300 in state and federal taxes, so I opted to receive money post-tax: $292.50 per week. At this rate, my rent alone comprised more than 80% of my income.

In New York State, weekly unemployment benefits are meted out based on the number of days in a given week recipients did not work, but were ready, willing, and able to do so. (Incidentally, “Ready, Willing, and Able” is the slogan of the Doe Fund, a nonprofit that works to fight homelessness through work opportunities.) The maximum number of days per week an unemployment claimant can work and still collect benefits is three, regardless of the number of hours worked, so long as my gross income for the week did not exceed $320 before taxes. If I worked four or more days in a week, which I was lucky to do once or twice, I was ineligible to claim. I never made $320.

At $292.50 per week after taxes for a week with no work, each day was “worth” about $41.79, meaning one shift at the bookstore put me ahead by $5.06 — just enough for a bagel and coffee. A double shift put me ahead by $51.90 for the week. I quickly learned that it was to my advantage to work more hours on fewer days, and tried to act accordingly, but aside from Christmas Eve, I didn’t turn down many shifts.

I could collect for 10 weeks without any further paperwork. After 10 weeks, unemployment recipients must meet with a career counselor. From the first day of my claim, I was to record every job I applied to, interviewed for, or was offered. This is a very sad thing to do, and in the aggregate, it is not encouraging. Ostensibly this was for auditing purposes, to prove, if asked, that unemployed time had been spent trying to become employed. For 10 weeks, my mornings featured a picture-in-picture of Indeed.com and the Excel Sheet of Trampled Hope, punctuated by listless marathon viewings of Community.

My final job check came and dissolved into my slowly evaporating pool of cash on hand, mitigated slightly by regular infusions from the New York State Department of Labor. It was near the holidays, and there was a generous amount of extra work at the bookstore, for which I was grateful. (I later learned most of the shifts I covered belonged to a regular employee who’d left for France for several weeks without bothering to find coverage for herself. Thank you, rude and inexplicably globetrotting bookseller. You helped me more than you know.)

I began a temporary hourly office job in mid-January, and stopped collecting unemployment. I was making $16.50 an hour, which worked out to $260 more per week (before taxes) than New York State had been paying me. This brought my rent obligations down closer to the 50 percent-of-take-home mark that most New Yorkers have accustomed themselves to, and left space in my budget for other unavoidables, like health insurance.

I put off figuring out my health insurance for several weeks after the insurance from my old job lapsed; I felt up to my neck in bureaucratic negotiations with my weekly unemployment claims, in addition to a strange hiccup in which my benefits were suspended for almost a month for no clear reason, involving many phone calls and more hold music than I would wish on anyone forced to sit at home all day alone, searching the Internet for money and validation.

I lost my job three months before my 26th birthday. I had been off my mother’s insurance plan for almost two years, having opted for my the health insurance offered at my benefits-laden nonprofit job, but even if I hadn’t I’d have been kicked off soon. I waded into the health insurance exchange, trying to remember everything I’d only kind of been listening to for the first five years of Obama’s presidency. Monthly plan premiums ranged from the price of a nice dinner to the price of a Baracuta jacket, offering a range of coverage to match.

Because I was collecting unemployment at the time I enrolled in the healthcare marketplace — losing a job is a sufficient “life change” to allow for enrollment outside of regular open enrollment — I was eligible for something called the Advanced Premium Tax Credit (APTC), which took several fine-print readings to fully grasp. Essentially, the APTC allows you to lower your monthly healthcare premiums by borrowing against the tax refund you expect to get at the end of the year. If the amount you borrowed is less than your refund, you receive the difference just as you would any other refund; if it’s more, you’ll owe the difference. I haven’t gotten a tax refund since 2012, but I couldn’t afford to shell out $400 a month, even as a bulwark against a potentially disastrous health-related incident or spring-2016 financial ruin.

I was eligible for an APTC of up to $299 per month, of which I could apply any amount I chose. The plan I selected cost $341.58 per month, for decent mental health coverage and perfectly decent prescription drug copay — two things I was sure to rely on in the coming months, regardless of my employment status. I opted to use $161.58 in APTC, for an even $180 premium. This is still staggering, relative to how often I use it (never), but, of course, medical emergencies are difficult to plan for. I’ve been paying this since February (after nearly three months being nervously uninsured), meaning I’m $807.90 in the hole already for my 2015 taxes.

Since getting a new, non-writing 9-to-5 job in April, I’ve had to adjust my APTC — I’m now eligible to receive just a $9 credit each month, of which I have elected to take the full amount — and now pay a $332.58 health insurance premium. Come November, the next open enrollment period, I’ll be downshifting considerably.

Some time in late January, I got a red letter from the Department of Labor informing me my benefits had been overpaid by $300. I panicked, feeling like a child sent to the principal’s office, and tried to calculate where I might have gone wrong. The letter insinuated that I had willfully misrepresented my working hours, which only heightened my panic. I compared the online reporting form and my cell phone calendar app for several minutes, trying to determine the origin of the problem, but eventually gave up and wrote a check, opting to pay my way out of directly addressing whatever miscalculation they or I had made.

A swell of karmic shame inspired me to send a note along with my check. (Admittedly, I hoped this might also reduce my sentence.) I thanked the invisible horde of pencil-pushers in Binghamton, New York, for their diligence in aiding people in need, and apologized for the mix-up. It was entirely sincere, if a bit self-serving. My check cleared a week later, and a few days after that, I was debited $50 from the Department of Labor, without further communication.

All told, I collected unemployment insurance for 10 weeks — 10 weeks that, over the holidays in a particularly dismal New York winter, felt like four months. The loss in potential wages from my ex-writing job amounts to almost $3,000, before taxes. Other fallout has had a longer tail — namely my health insurance, which cost about $100 more per month than my employer’s health insurance with the APTC subsidy, and about $280 more without it. By November, I’ll have paid about $1,400 more for health insurance than I would have had I not lost my job. On top of that, I’ll still need to make up $807.90 on my year-end taxes. On these two factors alone, I’ve calculated that losing my job has cost roughly $5,200.

Self-esteem is of incalculable value, and difficult to maintain with nowhere to go seven days a week. In my limited experience, the depression that comes with unemployment is far more expensive — emotionally, mentally, spiritually — and long-lasting than its financial cost. Collateral self-doubt survives long after the final check from the Department of Labor, if you’re lucky enough to stop getting those.

The job I got in April pays more than the job I lost, though not quite as much as the job before that. I’m paid hourly, rather than on salary, which makes my time feel more valuable, unexpectedly. Rather than what can feel like a passive-aggressive “gift” of a set amount per year, for which overtime and weekend email are the only fair payment, my week ends at 40 hours exactly. Ironically, though it has nothing to do with writing, my new job leaves me more time to write than my writing job ever did.

A job can be a means of approaching a dream, and even bad ones can net something positive. But expecting any job to answer the dream itself is sure to disappoint. Jobs are full of other people and work email and inane chit-chat about the temperature outside and what day of the week it is; they’re no place to unearth your life’s purpose. It may be I’ve had all the wrong ones so far, but since losing what I thought was a dream job, my dream hasn’t changed, nor has it gotten any less expensive, all things considered. But I have at least stopped hoping it will turn up in a job description.

John Sherman is a writer and copy editor and sometime bookseller in Brooklyn.

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