No work for a year in London

[Winterlit]

I’ve name-changed for this post.

My husband and I have found ourselves without work for a year while raising two kids in London. We’ve had a string of unpredictable events that depleted our savings in the 3 years before. So, we only had savings for 3 months plus I had made some small investments that I could liquidate. Since then we’ve used credit cards and taken out 2 loans.

We thought it may take us 6 months at the most to find work! We work in tech as freelance contractors (for over 15 years) and all contract work has dried up. A couple of small freelance jobs almost went through but got cancelled last minute. We’re very proactive people and as such have applied to permanent jobs as well as working on a tech product for which we are applying for investment for.

We have had so many contract jobs, permanent jobs and investment rejections - in the hundreds! - over the last 12 months. Moving to a cheaper city is a last resort option I’ve thought about but changing the kids schools + home is not something I want to do. Especially as one of them is in secondary.

I have this feeling that perhaps we’re too experienced to be hired?! Perhaps most of the tech hiring is happening at junior levels. I say this as we know many others in their mid 40s also out of work for 6 months + in London.

I’m not sure why I am posting! Maybe to hear a hopeful story or ideas on how to get out of this mini crisis for our little family.

As a side I had a fairly emotionally and possibly physically traumatic childhood and have been working / self-sufficient since I was 16. My partner has also been working since a young age. We worked many jobs to pay our way through uni. We got together young and supported each other a lot in our careers.

I feel bad complaining as we have our health, our two lovely children and live in a fairly stable country. Apart from the recent riots! We’re both UK born ethnic minorities so it’s close to home. Anyway, that’s a digressions. Essentially, financially this last year has been a lot!

We’ve cut back on many expenses and are living quite frugally with a small mortgage on our tiny London flat. Our biggest expenses are school fees and we’ve given ourselves another academic year to see if we need to change to state school.

My husband and I feel even stronger as a unit through all of this which has taken me by surprise as it’s quite a testing time. We’ve had some issues in the past and had couples therapy a while back which was very helpful. We’ve also always actively worked on our relationship since the beginning which I feel is helping us now.

A bit of long winey post but I guess I am so ready for some tailwind! 🤞 🍀

@Mirabai Because they're taking out loans to pay for their daily living expenses instead of earning a salary even if it's nmw. They're building up unsustainable debt via loans & private school fees they can't afford. They have absolutely zero income coming into the household budget.

Because all the freelance/contract work has fallen through, so the reality is she couldn't be doing that, isn't it?

When you have a family to support, you do what work is available. In the early days of my working life I often temped to bring in money while waiting for grad placements to start or when I found myself unexpectedly unemployed. And that gave me more transferable skills than I already had.

It's also easier to find work when you're in work. It shows work ethic and willing.

You are missing Mirabai and my point, that there IS work available for freelance IT support technicians - we are not talking high end development / programming / AI, but rather updating windows, re-installing the printer driver etc..

I would wager (and have experience in this, having gone freelance myself after redundancy) that within a month, with a bit of pro active touting of skills they can be binging in the same as a minimum wage cleaning job.

I was made redundant as an electrical design engineer, fortunately I was up to date with my electrical regs qualifications, so rather than going for a min wage job I set up as a freelance electrician, just swapping out sockets, changing light fittings etc.

At an initial rate of £50 an hour, with a whole day discount (5 years back) I could make the same in an hour than 5 hours minimum wage - soon you get recommended and your schedule rapidly fills up.

I work with a couple of mobile sole trader IT support techs and they are block booked, the combo of WFH and small business needs keeps them very busy.

IBM's trademark is "Think", think sideways is my motto, don't look at exactly what you want if its not available, but how can you use your existing skills to make some bread in a different way.

Hi OP, sorry to hear about your situation. You and your DH sound resilient and resourceful.

As you personally have taken smaller roles/ minimised opportunities due to family circumstances, have you considered 'return to work' schemes?

They are generally sponsored by large organisations and are particularly attractive to women returning to the corporate world after an extended career break.

Might be worth looking through. Good luck to you.

careerreturners.com/returners/returner-opportunities-programmes/

This is often the reality for anyone freelancing and setting up own potential company and going for loans or grants via for e.g. Innovate UK or VCs. There are huge assumptions around money people have or don't have or how being an entrepreneur works.

At the movement you are on a wing and a prayer, i see what you are saying re private school but maybe there are alternatives that are not as simple as the local high school. There are for e.g. state boarding schools, or if outside of London you may be able to find more acceptable schools with out the issues you are afraid of. At the moment you are afraid of change and what that may bring but as a result you are potentially also sinking.

I think some part time work around other things you are doing could help. But it will put pressure on what you are spending your time on otherwise.

Hope the project you are working on comes to fruition asap

Hi OP, I also work in tech and IMO jobs tend to follow trends.
There are two types of people, those who have a niche programming language/stack after 15+ years. And those who have worked on a variety of things. Which is your husband? Demand for the former has dropped quite significantly as companies want people they can just throw at anything.
Also, your positions as long-term contractors will count against you if your competition is permies with similar skills. As they think you'll leave once the contract market picks up. Age is an issue as well.
I also don't know what you mean by 'learning AI' as creating your own algorithms require higher degree in statistics/mathematics. Do you mean creating products with ChatGPT integrations? Machine learning pipelines?

Have you considered maybe going into application security?

I'm afraid I agree with pp. Op is earning 1500 per month for one DAY'S work. Despite the difficulty that's a great position to be in, and I mean that to be encouraging, not snarky.

I earn about that in self employment from many many more days than just one. I would adore to be able to send my dc to private school. I would be asking school for a temporary discount. Who knows, they might say yes.

Nevertheless they should be able to claim about 190 per week in UC (someone may well tell me I'm wrong), which is a great boost.

In any case to work as a teacher as someone suggested,an independent school wouldn't need a teaching qualification so it's worth a try.

"Why would she work as an office cleaner on the min wage when she could be freelancing tech support to individuals & small businesses for £60 ph?"

Because unless I have misunderstood currently neither OP nor her DH are working at all? If they can get a job at 60ph, great, do that. But it doesn't sound like she can? At this point you take a job, any job to try and get a bit of income coming in.

@OneCoolPearlOP I think all the contracting + freelancing may be working against us on our CVs for permanent jobs.

In terms of learning AI - we’ve built a lead gen and lead qualifying marketing tool for a specific domain using agents / LLMs. We’re in talks with a couple of companies from this domain who are interested in buying the software for this. From this learning we have been building some open source tools to help developers build similar apps utilising multiple AI agents with LLMs (our current project that may get investment). It’s fairly hard stuff that we’ve learnt from studying and trial / error. We are not researchers though. We have been building software on the cutting edge of tech for years - applying the latest research rather than coming up with the research. Other than VC investment we have also applied to an innovate grant and another grant based in the USA. Unfortunately we didn’t get either. The reason the current VC is interested he said is precisely because we are not at the deep tech layer of AI but the infrastructure / application layer of AI and have experience for that.

Apols if already suggested but Have you looked at remortgaging across a longer term to unlock / remove equity from your flat?

this would take a huge amount of pressure off and let you keep the kids in school.

I think you need to both do career pivots. Do you know people in your industry who’ve done the same? Given you are still shelling out for school fees I would divert some of that money into a career coach - you both need to get back into work asap.

Take your kids out of private schools now, you are both likely going to drop salaries for a while - you can’t afford it.

She didnt say she couldnt apply, she said she did the calculations and wouldnt get much. Which is true. And probably thought it wasnt worth the bother

However I do understand why you wouldnt just change the kids shschools becuase you were thinking that something would come up at any minute and its a huge disruption to them to change when they might not have needed to

However you could find yourself losing your home soon, so you'll need to take shop work, hospitality, care work, any work and change the kids schooling now I would suggest.

@TemuSpecialBuy it’s part of my recent string of bad luck - the building our flat is in has fire safety issues (post Grenfell rules) which means it’s not so easy to remortgage at the moment. The issues are being slowly remedied so it should be ok in the long term. We did manage to take a mortgage holiday though.

I also lost my father in the last few years plus my eldest had mental health issues following the lockdowns. Those two things resulted in me taking a bit of time of work 3 years ago to help my kid and elderly mum. Things are better now but I took an income hit not working for just under a year, which is why our savings were depleted. I could keep going with random adhoc expenses that came out of nowhere but it’s just life. Sometimes things all come at once!

They have a client paying 1500 for a days tech support a month. They’d be better working on building up that business, or starting to teach. They need to pivot more but they have too many options for it to be at the office cleaner stage.

God i feel for you... i work in tech and our office was decimated we had 30% cut.

I did wonder if you were affected by the cladding fire safety issues - we had some friends that have been struggling with that.

I know others have said it but you really need to think about the private school (im not against private but in these circs it seems crazy especially primary private 😱)

I would cut all extra curriculars if you havent already. I know its hard but its quite a serious situation at this point.

It may also be worth speaking to turn2us (there are a charity who help uou access help you are entitled to)

I don't have any answer to your Qs. just sympathy and my observations.

I have read your op and thread with a huge interest. I understand London, London jobs, Londoners and have come across pp not dissimilar to you and your situation.

You are getting a lot of diverse opinions, advice and help; which is all what any Londoner would need. so well done for starting this thread. so this diversity is what you need to open your mind to all possibilities.

I agree with those who say, once the next year funds for private edu are gone, then you will become desperate, and then maybe it will be at that stage that you will think to implement some of this advice and/or really change your situation.

at the moment, you seem fixated in what you and dh are doing and wanting to give it another year to fail (or maybe to get the break that you need.)

one thing though, this thread is a reminder to those with school kids for one parent to remain in a permanent position and not have them both as contractors/freelancers. yes, money if great when contracting, but many many sectors do go through periods (even 10 years) where contractors aren't required.

I said I had no answers: Oh, I do know that a lot of permanent jobs go to contractors who have been contracting for the company or even in same role. This has to do with a fit/ and employers not wanting to take a huge risk on someone unknown with a history of contracting.

Yes, a lot of pp (not all) are contractors because they are terrible as employees and usually only look for permanent jobs when they cannot find contracting jobs. As you in your case, you are only applying for permanent jobs because you cannot find contracting jobs. As pp said, employers would Q your commitment.

Another observation is that: I know you are building the product together, but you seem to align yourself too much with DH and his experiences? Sorry if I got it wrong, but you seem to lack your own true identity.

Lastly, I am shocked you guys are getting £1500 p/m for a day's job but yet, your title says "No job for 12 months in London'. Combined with kids still in private school (I wasn't concerned with this that much, but combined with first sentence) I think you have unrealistic expectation about life and you are holding on to a lifestyle you simply cannot afford, to keep up with Joneses. Yes, I once earned £1mil from work, but even I wouldn't call getting £1,500 pm as nothing. I even subtracted tax from it, to be more generous with your approach, but still a couple of hundreds a month are not nothing.

Going back to opening your mind, I think I meant broadening your mind, see the world differently, and I am sure something will turn up. Good luck, but sorry to say it is your mindset which is holding you back. I have also admired that you seem able to identify issues, tackle them and keep up the resilience, but I think that is also driving you into sticking to just wanting one outcome.

Even this VC funding may just end up with a false hope unless someone is willing to pay you millions to buy your product, which seems to be your end goal?

I would separate your and your DH approach to this (as it is clearly not working although I see the temptation to think 'we are nearly there') and maybe one of you will get lucky.

Sorry to ramble, but I was hoping one point from this long post, might stand out and help you, as I have met pp like you irl in London and it takes a lot for them to change anything.

I need to add, moving country to places where one of you could be paid a lot and no tax. It would be temporary move. as someone mentioned. also work outside London- one of you could stay in London with kids. You really need to separate the 2 of you to give you a chance at something before the work gap becomes too big.

Also lots of WFH opportunities that might come up for the other. As I said, seperate DH from you and focus on one of you getting something somewhere.

That’s niche high end IT contracts, I was talking about low end tech support to pay the rent temporarily.

Exactly.

Have you patented this tech that you've created?

I have a lot to take stock of. We’ve done what we knew - some of which worked, a lot hasn’t and some might work but is not guaranteed.

I had a hard time when I got made redundant in my first career as there were no interviews for 6 months which made me change careers.

My husband and I have worked together on some projects so our identities are intertwined to some extent although we have very different skills and experience from each other. We always thought we were good collaborators. We have also successfully worked on projects separately as well as with wider teams as a duo. Husband & Wife business partners is a fairly common phenomena.

I have also applied to jobs in retail but no interviews - perhaps I need to rework my CV as it doesn’t match those jobs that well. I worked from age 16 - 23 in retail so lots of experience, but a long time ago. In my first professional job the pay was so low I kept the retail jobs on over the weekends for a few years.

I see a lot of nursery jobs around that allow you to gain qualifications on the job - I’ll start applying to these too.

I feel like this is the most complaining I’ve ever done so I will bow out but I appreciate the kind words and hard truth in equal measure.

I would suggest one of you (probably him as he has better experience) maybe start looking at roles around the country both perm and contract and look at getting Monday to Friday lodgings via spare room and him coming back at weekends - it may be these £90k jobs in London gave a lot of competition but he can get a 65k job in Birmingham and will keep his CV relevant- ( and maybe £400 a month lodging) you stay put where you are and get something maybe outside your sphere but keep things ticking over- I would do this as first port of call

Forget applying for dead end jobs, stop focussing on what you have been doing and get out there and pick up some generalist IT support work, it's literally there for the taking - will pay considerably more than Tesco, and could even become a full time business.

I promise if you hit one busy street of small businesses in London offering IT support you would pick up a few customers, that would lead to recommendations and before you knew it you would have too much work.

What you were doing is a dead duck, nothing after a year, it's a goner, you aint getting back into that. Minimum wage jobs are not the solution, harness your skills and move sideways and then forward.

Think Addressograph, once one of the most successful American tech companies, they invented credit cards with raised type that were used in the old non computerised machines with carbon paper. They didn't adapt when magnetic strips started to take over, they didn't change what they were doing and went from a potential big player in cashless payment to bankruptcy.

You need to adapt your model, your offering, so as not to be out of the game, think what you can offer that people want rather than chasing something that you are, for whatever reason, not required in (probably because of cheaper, younger folks in that market)

thank you. one of my clear advice to op too. 100%

and with respect to op re husband and wife duo/ phenomena- excellent, that I was spot on that op@Winterlit is too linked with her dh. again, with respect, I fail to see how the 2 very well educated people with everything going (ok, at this moment, without jobs for 12 months) cannot see, they need to carve out individual identities and even separate cities to get ONE paying job, as a start.

glad I have understood the op. I did say although don't know her sector, nor have answers, I know London, know Londoners and have met pp like her and her situation. it is not uncommon, but it requires humility, different mindset, etc etc to make the change. yes, and you may have to make 3/4 different changes before you finally settle somewhere where everything is back to normal etc etc. but staying at 0ph is not it.

yes, op may end up with a different business all together if she hits one high street offering IT services as pp have said. again, this is what broadening your mind, open to possibility might lead to.

have also known too many experienced pp in London waiting on funds from vc this vc that and sometimes they keep waiting for 10 years or never!

I know London, know Londoners and have met pp like her and her situation

Enough with the London nonsense.