Thank you.

Thank you, blog readers, for supporting me in the last couple of months.

I have made veiled and not-so-veiled references to losing my job from the larged managed care company in August.

I have had a wonderful time, working temporarily for a company that embodies true optimism....more on them later.

I just accepted an offer from a non-profit that runs hospice organizations. I can't tell you how privileged I feel to be able to start work for them in mid-December. The jaw-dropping thing is that they actually offered me more money than I had been making. I was prepared to move, cut costs, change lifestyle, etc. They decided to pay me what I was worth and not undercut due to my situation. My word.

There is a particular twinge of hopefulness that occurs when a safety net arrives under you when you are doing your hire wire act of life.


That's where I am right now. Oh, and this is Tom's second week of work, as well.

Thanks for all your good wishes.....

quid

BIKINI GRAPH

I'm heartened by Steve Benen's graph of job losses. You can see we started to lose jobs in this nation as far back as the month of January, 2008... culminating in last year's financial crisis. Remember, 12 months ago? Every day there were reports of 1,000's of jobs being cut. November 2009 on the right is 11,000...the lowest since 2007. December, not posted yet, hangs a little lower at 85,000. Every one of us has a job loss in our family or circle of friends. It feels like it is getting worse. Yet, look at the empirical number of jobs lost in each month. It peaked in January 2009 (the last month George W. was President). Since then, it has, stumbling a little... started to peter out. We sure do want a month where we actually GAIN jobs, and then a lot more, to try to recover what has been lost. When you look at this timeline, you can see that our trend is for job loss to dry up.

I see signs everywhere. I hope you will, soon, as well.

What's Up With the Tampa Bay Economy

We're starting to see signs of life here.

After spending a lot of time in the 10 worst housing cities for decline in America (we are probably still there), we learned this week that home sale prices in Tampa Bay were flat from April to May, with no decline. This is the first time in 3 years!! From May 2008-April 2009, prices declined a total of 20.8%. No movement upward in prices is predicted until 2nd quarter 2010, but we are breathing sighs of relief.

Bad news is still on tap for Las Vegas, Phoenix, Miami and Seattle. They are the four major cities is the US where prices continued to decline in May 2009.

50+ police officers will be hired/rehired in the quad county region around TB. Stimulus money will be used for the first 3 years of salary. The counties/cities agreed to fund the 4th year of their employment. Hopefully, by 2013, the need for the officers and the funds to keep them will be available when we are back on our feet.