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New strategies for a new economy
By
Dec 31, 2009 - 9:24:50 AM

 By Penny Fletcher
penny@observernews.net

RIVERVIEW — After doing news stories about the shortfall in the county, state and federal budget, and finding that Florida’s unemployment rate is at an all-time high, I wanted to find out how people were coping.
There are definitely some trends.

House sharing
Several people I know who asked that I not use their names are sharing houses with relatives.

One Riverview grandmother tapped herself out trying to keep her daughter and three grandchildren in their rented home. It didn’t work. They lost it, and three months ago, moved in with her in her Summerfield home.

“The problem here is that the child support office won’t help her find the children’s father to get what’s owed her. If she was getting that, she’d be all right. They say she has to track him down, that they have too many cases to do it.”

Another family in the same neighborhood has two “other” whole families of relatives under one roof and still another, farther North, just above the Alafia River, has three generations — a total of five people from 5-to-58 in a rental house they can’t afford. “We can’t fit in anything with fewer bedrooms,” the unemployed mother of three said.

Landlords often do not approve of these situations in rental houses so names are not being used. Most of those I spoke to were afraid they would be asked to leave or their rents raised and would end up on the street if their landlords found they had added family since signing their leases.

Another person — who also asked to remain nameless — rents out a spare bedroom in her rental house.

All of the renters I spoke with have previously owned their own homes.

Changing businesses
Moira Sandoval started a part-time business in 2008 while still working at Colonial Bank in Apollo Beach. Colonial has since been bought by BB&T and Moria has taken her business full time.

Penny Fletcher Photo Moria Sandoval started her own business selling gifts and is targeting businesses who might buy for employees in bulk. But she hasn’t stopped there. She is also a mobile Notary Public, chasing signatures for banks and mortgage closings, often at the last minute. “You have to change with the times,” she said during our interview about entrepreneurial changes people are making to adjust to the new economy.

“When you work for somebody else, you never know what will happen,” she said when I interviewed her at Denny’s two weeks ago. “This way I get to spend more time with my 4-year-old daughter Isabella, and I get to set my own hours.”
She agreed that working for herself she works many more hours than when she was employed by a company, but it’s a trade off.

“I get to do what I need to do when I can,” she said. “And if my daughter needs me, I can be there.”

Paperwork at midnight after the child is asleep is normal now. Thinking of new ways to make money from her business, called Gift Cards Hut, is constant.
“I network, network, network,” she said. If there’s an open event, or a chamber event, or any place where a lot of people will be together, she’s there with her cards and samples.

“I’m specifically targeting companies that will buy gifts for their employees at various times of the year, like Secretary’s Day or Christmas.”

She hopes to land several companies with 1,000-or-more employees by this time next year, she said, and is working on a plan to accomplish it.

“Even in a slowdown, businesses want to give their employees something, but they may be looking for less expensive gifts,” she explained. One woman she knows who sells things from her home — like makeup and kitchenware — is making from $150 to $200 for each “party” and is having several a week.

But Moria doesn’t stop with her gift business. She is also a mobile Notary Public and will go just about anywhere without much notice. “I get phone calls from mortgage companies and banks, saying they need to close on a certain deadline and I run around obtaining signatures. I drove to Wauchula the day before Thanksgiving because nobody else wanted to do it but I was the one who made the money.”

Being flexible is the key to her success, she said.
Moria may be contacted at 813-650-6085; sandoval3415@verizon.net and via her Web site, wwwgiftcardhut.com.

Affects on seniors    
Several things are changing for seniors.
One big thing is that the department of Aging Services says more people are choosing to “age in place” and that the next generation — Baby Boomers — turning 65 are not rushing to retirement communities like the previous generation did.
The Agency on Aging, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., has collected figures that the scales of the retirement-based industry are tipping toward the phenomena of “aging in place” as maturing baby boomers continue to reject the lifestyles of their parents.
Coupled with this, new scientific studies are beginning to show that a lifestyle touting  “fun” isn’t as fulfilling as one of tradition and familiarity to the Boomers, even if they have the money to make the move.

“We’re doing studies we hope will generate a tangible prescription for growing old in a healthy way,” said Doctor James Mortimer, director of the Institute on Aging at the University of South Florida in Tampa. “At the same time we’re watching a national trend to provide some retirement facilities in places where they’ve not been before so people can age near their lifetime homes even if they can no longer live alone or unassisted.”

Much of this trend lies in the fact that people no longer have the retirement savings — or project they will not have it — to afford a move.

And many who are already in Florida, especially those on pensions dating from the 1960s and 1970s cannot keep up with inflation now; let alone next year when there will be no  Social Security COLA (Cost of Living raise) as there has been in other years.

Penny Fletcher Photo Bob Black, the director on the Sun City Center Community Association Board of Directors who oversees applications for the Hardship Fund, says more people are asking for help to pay their association dues this year than in previous years.

“We’re getting more and more people applying for the Hardship Fund to pay their annual (homeowner’s association) dues,” said Bob Black, a director with the Sun City Center Community Association Board of Directors. “Some of the people who have been here the longest are living on very, very little. People think everyone in Sun City Center is wealthy but that just isn’t the case.”

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