My friend is unemployed as well, how it works is like this, once you exhaust all 26 weeks worth of benefits you can receive an extension up to 46 additional weeks. The 1st 33 weeks are under the Emergency Unemployment Program, the last 13 weeks that were passed also through due to the recession are the extended benefits. It varies from state to state of course. HOWEVER!!!!!! There are certain deadlines applied to these extensions and NOT all unemployed persons are allowed for the full amount of weeks. Some states I have looked at state that the 26 weeks of unemployment have to be exhausted by December 2009 in order to receive the extension. There is Tier 1 and Tier 2, they vary from state to state. I think the economy is going to get alot worse going into the end of 2009 and believe they will extend unemployment benefits even further.
There are a lot of "overqualified" applicants for those jobs and plenty of low skilled people who wont leave when things turn up to pick from (from plenty of anecdotal evidence). With 9.5% unemployment, I wouldn't intimate that its due to increased desire to be unemployed from extended benefits. People are taking every job out there.
How can a $75K a year engineer after one month off the job (and receiving unemployment comp) need food pantry help ??? Now THAT is living paycheck to paycheck.
She is among more than 4 million Americans who have been looking for work for more than 26 weeks, representing 29 percent of the unemployed, the most since records began in 1948. http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a00_1SlKgIwo
dont forget the money equation,,money coming in equals money going out, generally due to cost of living and taxes one has very little money,,,
I'm on unemployment, I get 269 dollars a week which is the maximum in the state of Tennessee. If anybody believes the average American can survive on that amount I urge them to prove it. I can only survive due to the fact I have a paid for farm, no car payments & no credit card debt. How long would I be able to survive with a house payment, car payment and 10k of credit card debt? It doesn't matter when peoples unemployment ends- they won't be able to make their bills on the unemployment check alone.
People usually have no business having a house payment, car payment and $10K of CC debt when they cannot even survive for 1 month after losing their $75K salary. The standard advice that is said over and over and over again, is to have at least 3-6 months of money set aside to live on. This is a lot of our problem. People getting houses with 5% down, banks looking the other way when a person in no way qualifies for a house well beyond their affordability. It is hard to feel sorry for the uninformed. You don't buy a house when you cannot even feed yourself just because you were unemployed for 4 weeks.