I have mentioned a few times that right now, I think there is a 50/50 chance my current position will still exist by end of first quarter 2013. I have also said I am not stressing about it. How is that?

Psychology Well, first and foremost, I currently still have a job. I will not know anything more until January, which gives me plenty of time to get used to the idea that I may be laid off, and also plenty of time to get used to the idea and to plan for it.

While I am not going around telling everyone I talk to about the possible impending layoff, I am talking about it here, and at home, to get myself use to the idea. Will it be a “shock” if it happens, yes, but it will be a shock I am much better prepared to deal with.

And remember how I mentioned at the end of August, that when it comes to your spouse, you can never talk too much? As soon as I realized this was a possibility, I told C. Now maybe I’m an anomaly, maybe women are different from men in this regard, or maybe reality is just that different fromHollywood, but I’m always seeing in movies and TV shows when men don’t tell their wives they’ve been fired or laid off. They keep up the charade of going to work every day. I have no idea how they do that. If I couldn’t talk to C about this, I would be stressing beyond anything remotely reasonable. But being able to talk to C means that we both know what’s going on, and we can both work toward keeping our goals on track. We can plan together.

Planning In the past, I’ve talked about planning when purposely making a change to your budget or in the cases of a windfall. In both of those cases, it was planning for more money to come in. This is a case of planning for less money, which is much less fun, but also much more important.

If I get laid off, I will get a severance package. Packages at my company, for people at my level, are 3 weeks paid per year of service. I have been here 8 years. That gives me 24 weeks paid severance. To go along with that, I currently have 4.5 weeks of PTO banked and will certainly be over 5 weeks by the time lay offs would occur. That gives me about 29 weeks, or over 6 months, of paid time to find a job, without having to make any changes to our budget whatsoever.

Of course, C’s experience has taught me that even for someone like me, getting a new job in 6 months or less may not happen, so there are other changes we would make early on. My student loans could go into forbearance- which is $710/month back in our budget right there. C could take out new student loans to pay for his schooling instead of us cash flowing it, like we are now. That’s another $850/month back in the budget. We could cut back on cable and ask J to pay more in rent and bill money. We could lose the DVD portion of Netflix and just have streaming. Our allowance and eating out spending would be dropped. We’d start driving one car again and put the other in “storage” for insurance purposes.

And so far, I haven’t even mentioned the money we already have in savings, or the fact that we could sell the MIL’s condo.

Oh, and did I mention that in my state, I can collect unemployment while collecting severance pay? That extra money would go into savings to build up even more of a cushion for when severance/unemployment ran out.

In other words, I think if I got laid off, we have at least a year for me to find a new job without stressing about money.

Action But all that planning is reactionary. Which is fine. But it also never hurts to be a little proactive. While I am not going on a full scale job search right now, I have started paying attention to a few select employers and have let select members of my circle know the situation. In fact, there’s a position with the city that seems like a pretty great fit that I intend on applying for.

So, yes, I think there’s a chance my position will be eliminated in the new year, but no, I am not stressing about it. I’ve talked to my husband. We have contingency plans in place. And for now, we will just take things as they come. After all, we’ve thought about the worst case scenario, and we’re prepared for it.