Financial crisis - Has it affected you? How?

We've been affected - but not too badly. I lost my job last year when the Firm I worked for went Bankrupt. Since then I haven't been able to find permenant work, however I was fortunate to get a temp role. I hate it, it pays bad, but at least it is bringing in a few ?'s. I currently live in the UK and it is awful over here - everyone is being made redundant! The candidate market is real tough.

Also the exchange rate has dropped - once you could transfer ?10,000 back to Australia and get $25,000 - if I transferred today I would get $21,000.

Our financial goals have been put on hold - but really we could be so much worse off!

On an upside, we asked our landlord to reduce our rent, because rental market property prices has decreased in the UK. She said yes and we know pay ?80 less month. All helps!

I feel bad in saying but its done us great favours, all our savings went into our house 18months ago so now we have a mortgage and with interest rates dropping we are paying well above our minimum repayments.
Plus we are both in jobs that we don't need to worry about.
I feel selfish saying this when people are doing it really tough. We just been lucky it happened when it did in our stage of life.

We got our mortgage last june and fixed our interest for 3 years so are paying heaps more interest. DH and I both work in govt jobs so are secure but DH's pay is pretty low and he has been getting less overtime which is what makes his pay a lot less than we need.
Despite having a lot less to live on than other people who qualified we got none of the children bonus monies (the joys of a mortgage) but we will get the Rudd tax money as we earn under 80K each.
My friend's DH has a mowing business and they are being hit hard.

DP and I were saying only the other night how lucky we are. His job is secure - he's a train driver on passenger trains. It would be a bit of a different story if he drove freight trains - those jobs are being affected because they're carrying less stuff because of the financial crisis. My job is a semi-government one and is pretty safe too and the organisation is heavily unionised.

So for us it's meant that we can do our renovations and be paying the same in repayments as before interest rates started going down.

The only negative is that DP's XW is American. Will try not to write a novel at this point but her financially precarious position because of her own silliness with money and the situation economically in the US, may make it more likely that she will chase DP for money. He didn't represent himself at court for the divorce hearing (would have had to fly back to the US) and she was awarded a high sum in alimony for the rest of her life. We've been told by lawyers since that this was highly unusual and DP was basically penalised for not bothering to turn up to court. So she could chase that backpayment and we could end up fighting an international legal case which could leave us $50K down the tubes. Silly DP - this has caused a lot of tension between us as you can probably tell!

well I am also one who has benifited from it ... All the Krudd money has helped me get way infront of my bills and moving to another bigger house is now not just a wish but it's beginning to happen! I have been able to save money where I never would have before!

The financial crisis has not impacted our family at this stage.
Both of us are in industries where our jobs can be affected on the economy - I work for a major bank and dh is in the agricultural industry. At this stage we are both safe.
We will benefit from the government bonus as we both earn less than $80k p.a. and we fortunately sold our second house earlier this year, so we have no mortgage.
The downside is our savings are not earning very much interest due to the lower mortgage rates and our share portfolio was affected, but overall this makes very little difference to our overall financial position.

Our finanicial position has actually improved dramatically in the last year....but I know we are very blessed and don't take it for granted thats for sure.

DH was promoted, and also the company he works for was bought out by another company that are moving all their operations to the site he works on. This is great for dh because the new company pays much, much, much better than the old company, but it meant that about 400 people that worked at the old site lost their jobs, unless they were prepared to move from the city to the country. On the upside, once full opertions have moved here, there should be about 500 extra jobs eventually.

I work for myself part time in the hair and beauty industry, and suprisingly in any finanicial crisis, our industry seems to boom, people spend money on looking good to make themselves feel better when they can't afford a holiday etc. Go figure!

Our mortgage is fixed, but this unfixes next year, so I think it was a good move, because we rode out all the interest rate increases, and the savings of being fixed out weigh the savings on the reduced rates now.

when it comes to employment that's where we have been effected several job interviews a week and nothing this has been this way for 7 months