As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across China and Italy, I watched it unfold with a sense of trepidation. Though it was still business as usual in the U.S, my husband and I could sense the looming threat; this wasn’t a hurricane or blizzard that would disrupt life for 3 days and then disappear. This was something much bigger.
And then the shutdowns began.
If I was still a teacher, as I was during the first 5 years of my career, I might not have worried, knowing my paycheck would still come every two weeks with or without students in the classroom. But I’m a self-employed writer whose livelihood is dependent upon the marketing budgets of the businesses hit the hardest by the pandemic.
With no customers, limited sales, and months of uncertainty ahead, many of my best clients hit the big red PAUSE! button on their marketing campaigns. In my world, that’s the equivalent of being furloughed.
When you have a new house and three kids at home, losing one income is bad enough. Losing two is devastating. Yet that’s exactly what we found ourselves facing. My husband is a small business owner in the IT industry, and the COVID-19 crisis and mandatory shutdowns caused all of his clients to cancel their services through May.
Watching the news, stressed and confused, we asked ourselves the same question as millions of other Americans: How are we supposed to pay our bills when we can’t work?
Looking in New Directions
Surviving the next few months without income wasn’t an option, so I started to look at my career from a new angle. Every yin has a yang, right? If the coronavirus forced some of my clients to halt their marketing efforts, I needed to find new clients who actually had increased their marketing efforts as a result of the coronavirus.
It didn’t happen overnight, but I managed to connect with a few old clients and colleagues in the medical industry, where plenty of marketing dollars were being allocated to describe COVID-19 testing protocols, clinical trials, vaccine development, and so much more. These new assignments offset my lost income and made it possible for our family to pull through.
The CARES Act also softened the blow, but not as much as it should have. We became one of the many families who didn’t receive their full stimulus payment amounts. In our case, only my husband’s portion came through; my payment and the bonus payments for each of our three children seem to be lost until we can claim them on our next tax return.
We also filed for small business help through the EIDL program funded by the CARES Act, but the stimulus funds ran dry before our applications were ever processed. Out of luck once again- so it’s just good we’re used to creating our own luck.
Now, June has started and the economic shutdown is slowly but surely lifting, my husband and I hope we can return to normal. Some, but not all, of our former clients have returned from their hiatus, allowing us to slowly rebuild our household income and hopefully achieve a renewed sense of security before the end of the year.
