I just got off the phone with a strong young woman, 29-year-old Amanda from Cambrige, Ohio. We found each other on Twitter, no less, and her story is offering me hope after just reading about the nation’s unemployment rate shooting up to 8.5%.

Amanda happens to be one of the 651,000 people in this country to lose their jobs back in February.  (March’s figure we just discovered is more brutal, registering at 663,000 lost jobs). After three years at a manufacturing firm in Ohio, Amanda was let go with no severance, just her unused vacation time, which amounts to about half-a-month’s pay.

For her, though, this moment is not a crisis.   

Timing is Everything
For the past five years she’s been making and selling chocolates from her home, and now with her recent kick-in-the-pants, she’s gotten the proper encouragement to take on her small business dream, NothingButChocolate, full-force.  The timing, she says, couldn’t be better. Right before getting laid off her orders had suddenly tripled thanks to a new wholesale client. When that happened she doubted being able to balance both her full-time job and her side gig. “A lot of opportunities had come and I was getting bogged down,” she recalls.  The layoff was a blessing in disguise. “God does answer your prayers in different ways. It’s not always in the way you want…but this is the way it needed to be done.”

Less is More
Amanda understands she’s lucky. She has no dependents and knows unemployment would be much scarier if she had a family to feed. “I have the stress of whether I’m going to pay the mortgage or gas bill or electric bill but it’s my only stress,” she says.  And, while she’s not making as much money as her full-time job provided, she has simplified her life to save money. First things to get slashed: Netflix, her Y membership and time spent driving on the road. “I’m going to walk more since I live close to the downtown area,” she says.  Amanda’s also trading in her microwave dinners for cooking her own meals and her diet Mountain Dew cravings for tap water.  ”It’s just about readjusting how you do things and how you think. A dollar here a dollar there…it all adds up.” 

Thanks, Amanda, for making my day.