One family’s rapid fall, and the lessons learned
This is how fast it can happen: One day Patrick Robbins was a sportswear buyer at Mark Shale earning $110,000 a year. The next day he was laid off, with no severance.
Within a week, the family was on Medicaid and had applied for food stamps. Soon his mother-in-law was bringing over toilet paper and paper towels. “From middle-class to poor,” Robbins summed it up. “Immediately.”
Robbins, 41, his wife, Kimberly, 42, and their four children lived in a nice house on a nice block in the nice Chicago suburb of Westmont. But there’s nothing nice about what has happened to them, and is happening to many other middle-class families for whom a layoff spells disaster.
The Robbinses are spinning through the recession at warp speed. They hurtled into financial straits. Now, just as quickly, they have begun to scramble out. They are emerging shaken at life’s unpredictability and devoted to a budget, but also convinced of their strength and determined to change the way they live.
On March 23, Robbins and seven other buyers were laid off. The high-end business of the Al Baskin Co., the operator of Mark Shale stores, was battered by the worst retail environment in decades and had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company was dissolving its buying staff, and with it Robbins’ 22-year career. Under the bankruptcy terms, Mark Shale was not allowed to pay severance.
Robbins made the requisite phone calls to say he had been laid off. Then he spent the rest of the day at the store packing his belongings and saying his goodbyes. He bore the company no ill will and was touched that Baskin, grandson of the company’s founder, shook each buyer’s hand and said he was sorry it had come to this.
But Robbins was scared.
His income was the engine that kept the family going. The $20,000 his wife earned working part time as a personal trainer paid for their four children’s Catholic school tuition. All of the other bills depended on his paycheck.
At home, he and his wife gathered their 13-year-old son and their daughters, ages 11, 10 and 6, and told them what had happened. Things were going to be different now, they said, though they weren’t sure exactly how.
“We told them we might move. They might go to a different school,” Kim Robbins recalled. “The only certain thing is that we’re going to stay together.” It was very quiet. It was the first time Pat Robbins’ children had seen him cry.
He applied for unemployment, but the math became painfully clear. Unemployment would cover the mortgage. For everything else, they would have to use -- they had nothing to use.
“That three-month emergency fund -- we should have done it, but we didn’t,” Kim said.
It was hard enough to keep up with living expenses, Pat said. Plus, they were carrying credit card debt. There was no extra money to set aside for a rainy day. And now it was pouring.
They slashed their budget. They bought groceries at a cut-rate store. They pulled their children out of sports leagues. They negotiated with their credit card companies. They ended their regular contributions to their church. They stopped 13-year-old Danny’s guitar lessons.
Pat kept his membership at an inexpensive fitness club. If he missed working out one day, he spent that night lying awake worrying.
He threw himself into job hunting, calling professional contacts, meeting with people, flying to Little Rock, Ark., for an interview at Dillard’s, a department store company based there.
Danny works as a caddy. He recently gave his mother $20. “Mom, you need this more than I do,” he said.
What does it feel like to lose your middle-class life?
“You feel like throwing up,” Kim said. But the closest analogy, for her, is drowning.
“The uncertainty is the worst. It makes you feel like you’re suffocating,” she said. “The anger, the sadness -- you just get to the point where you can’t breathe.”
They were not too proud to ask for government help. They just didn’t know how.
A friend told Kim to go to the Illinois Department of Human Services website and apply for a Link card for electronic cash and food stamp benefits and, because they couldn’t afford COBRA, free healthcare.
The world of public aid was so foreign to the Robbinses that Kim couldn’t remember the name of the healthcare program for the poor. “I always forget. Medicaid? Medicare?”
It is Medicaid, and she and her family went on it.
They were touched by the kindness of friends and family. A neighbor organized a pizza night for them, bringing over dinner and wine. One of Kim’s friends gave her a gift of a massage appointment, and handed her an envelope with $1,500 inside. She was not offended, but grateful. “We’re beyond the point where we’re offended,” Kim said.
“We’re humbled,” her husband said.
Their rescue came as quickly as their fall: Last month, Pat Robbins was hired by Dillard’s. As a brand manager for its private-label men’s sportswear line, he works on product development. He got the new job in six weeks. In this economy, it was a blink of an eye.
It meant the family would have to relocate to Little Rock. Pat and Kim didn’t hesitate. They were thrilled.
Pat’s new job pays almost as much as he was making at Mark Shale. Because the cost of living is lower in Arkansas, it will be as if he got a raise.
It will be a different life, one in which they plan to apply the lessons they have learned:
Credit cards are dangerous. Budgets are freeing. What you want is not the same as what you need. An emergency fund is crucial. The Robbinses are so determined to build one that they plan to buy a less expensive house.
And there are no guarantees that they are out of the woods. If their house doesn’t sell soon, things could get ugly again.
The experience has strengthened her faith, Kim said: “I prayed a lot more than I ever did in my life.”
It was a trip to an unfamiliar world of uncertainty and fear, crowded with people who never imagined themselves ending up there.
“If someone breaks a leg, you can sympathize,” Kim said. “But you don’t know how it feels until it happens to you.” Now they know.
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