Oh sweet, you graduated! Or maybe you didn’t, but you’re moving on anyway. Moving out (and moving up) may seem like the natural progression from here, but more and more grads (and non-grads) are deciding to return to the nest for a while. According to a survey conducted on CollegeGrad.com, 77% of college grad job seekers moved back home in 2008, up from 73% in 2007, and 67% in 2006. Pair that with the National Association of Colleges and Employers annual student survey, which found that only 20% of 2009 college graduates who applied for a job actually had one by the end of April, down from half in 2007.

Basically, we new grads don’t have jobs, and trend of moving back home is growing. So should we? Or is it time to leave the nest, job or no job?

Personal Factors

Some people don’t have a great relationship with their parents, for whatever reason. Moving back in might not be smart, or safe. Or maybe you’ve just got crazy helicopter parents that will want you back home by 11pm each night. Maybe you’ve got a lot of younger siblings and your parents just don’t have the space for you to come back home. There could be a lot of reasons why moving home just isn’t right for your situation.

Or perhaps it has nothing to do with your parents at all — you might just have a gut feeling that it’s time to fly the coup for good. Go with your gut on this one. Sure, you could write out a long list of pros and cons, spend a lot of time researching areas you might want to move to, etc. etc., but I honestly don’t think it will help you in this decision. You will be swamped with more information than you can reasonably juggle, and your decision-making skill won’t improve any for your trouble (that is, if chapter four of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink is to be believed).

Your life, so far, has been building up to this moment. You have in the back of your mind all of the information you need to decide what to do at this crossroads. Listen to your heart — it knows the way right now.

Financial Decisions

However, coming up with the money to support the decision to move out may be another matter entirely. It’s one thing to know if moving out on your own is the right thing to do on a personal level, but can you financially support yourself right now? How do you even figure that out?

During my last term of college, I took a personal finance course. I was pretty cocky about the course — taking it pretty much to get an easy A. I mean, I’m a personal finance blogger! Don’t I know everything there is to know already? (Alright, I didn’t really think that. But I did correctly anticipate that I would be bored during the first few weeks.) But some parts of the class really surprised me, including the final project. We were asked to write up a budget for our first year out of college, and to weigh choices we might have to make, and to run the numbers on different possible scenarios.

I, as you might imagine, went above and beyond on this particular assignment. Partially because I already had a lot of the information I needed on hand (like my exact spending patterns for the past two years, the cost of living in the areas I was considering moving to, etc.), but mostly because I just like this sort of stuff. (Obviously, or this site wouldn’t exist!) I was still genuinely surprised at how much I learned from the act of writing out that budget, and how much more secure I feel in the decisions I will make over the course of this year. So, while my advice is usually the opposite (I don’t budget!), I am actually going to suggest you write a budget for your first year on your own. Even if “on your own” means living at home with your parents!

How to Start a Speculative Budget

You’ll want to figure out what will likely happen in different scenarios. What will your income be if you live at home? If you move to one city, or another? What will you make if you get your dream job? What will you make if there are no jobs available in your field, and you have to take a 20 hour per week minimum wage job? What’s the minimum wage in the cities you’re looking at? This may not paint a pretty picture of the next year, but as I wrote in my budget report, “I use the worst case scenario throughout this report, because it is easier to adjust a budget if things go better than you think than if things go worse.”

My best-worst-case scenario (that is, if I manage to juggle a part-time job, a paid internship, and my freelance work) had me making only $16,542 during my first year out of college. Even this number feels a little ambitious considering the amount of time that’s passed since I wrote that report, four months, and the fact that I haven’t found a job during that time. But that, of course, it’s why it’s the best-worst-case scenario! My worst case had me earning $6,000 for the year, and I had a mid-level scenario where I would earn $9,292.

Taxes: These income numbers I came up with are gross income, so I still had to factor in taxes. In may case, freelance income (like the money I earn from Poorer Than You) is taxed as self employment income, so I have to pay double in social security and Medicare taxes. Just something to keep in mind if your income estimates include any freelancing or self employment. If not, you can just use something like PaycheckCity’s Paycheck Calculator.

Where to go from here? There’s a lot more ground to cover — including fixed expenses, variable expenses, savings, and planning for the unexpected. I don’t want to overwhelm you with a big project, so we’ll take it in chunks. Your homework is to estimate your income in three different scenarios of your choosing. You don’t have to share it in the comments, but please let me know that you did it!

Continue on to Part 2…

Ah, summertime! If you’re relaxing, chilling, or just enjoying the freedom of homework-less-ness while working a cool summer job, I hate you. I managed to graduate, which means I have to start real life stuff now. Like moving out of my parents’ house and getting a job. Pssh — I don’t remember signing up for this!

But life moves on and I am, in fact, moving on. Moving on out of state, that is! And there’s a lot of ground to cover: packing, getting an apartment, (getting a job), re-registering my vehicle, getting off my parent’s insurance and cell phone plans… and a bunch of things that I know I haven’t even thought of yet. Now is a time of change, and you get to come along for the ride. Welcome to the Summer of Moving.

As I work my way through the process of striking out on my own (in more ways than one), you’ll be treated to a summer-long series of posts. I’ll share everything I learn from moving myself and watching my boyfriend and friends get established, too. All posts in the series will be titled “Moving: …” so that you can easily identify them. And I’ll update this page to link to new entries, so you can bookmark this entry if you wish.

But the best way to keep up with the series? Subscribe to Poorer Than You! You can subscribe to the RSS feed or you can subscribe by email.

Making the Decision: (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3)
8 Tips to Avoid Scams on Craigslist
Finding an Apartment: (Part 1) (Part 2)
I’ve Moved, Now What? by Grace Boyle
Maximizing Space When Packing Your Car
Tales from the Trip
Titling, Registering, and Insuring Your Car

Got stories about moving out on your own? Share them in the comments, or contact me about writing a guest post!

The following post is part of a two-week-long series on Graduating From College During a Recession, presented by the members of the College Money Network. You can get all of the posts in this series and more by subscribing to the College Money Network RSS feed.

As an internet savvy job-hunter, you’ve probably already found several articles that tell you to clean up your social-networking act before applying for jobs. It’s true, and it even bears repeating: don’t keep anything on your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. etc. that you wouldn’t want an employer to read, even if you think it’s protected or marked as “private.” Employers can sometimes get around that. Maybe they know one of your friends, and they’ll ask that friend to log in and show them your Facebook profile as it really looks.

You never know, which is why it’s better to be safe than sorry. I’ve always approached the internet with a “Never post anything I don’t want my mother to see!” philosophy — although I’ve done that because my mom is extremely internet-savvy. But I suggest you adopt that policy, as well, less something like this happen in your next job interview:

Don’t freak out too much, though. Although it’s possible for a potential employer to see things you’ve marked as “private,” it’s unlikely. So your first step should be to completely remove the worst material (anything illegal, smutty, or just plain awful), and then mark the questionable stuff as private. This should leave you fairly protected.

But is just being protected enough?

Using social networking tools to get the job

You’d be surprised at the online presence of some companies. Even in my search for theater internships, I’ve found places that run blogs, have Twitter accounts, Facebook fan pages… you name it. If the company you’re looking to work for is already on some of these networks, you can’t just hide from them. You have to make their online presence a part of your application.

Showing interest in a company’s online presence is a sign that you’re truly interested in the job. Employers get stacks of résumés where people didn’t even bother to mold the resume or cover letter to fit the job. People who show a genuine interest and enthusiasm for the job will rise to the top of the résumé pile.

But this is a careful line you must walk. For example, if your Twitter account is primarily used for MTV reality show gossip, you probably don’t want to use it to follow a potential employer. For services like Twitter, where more than one account (for different purposes/entities) is acceptable, it would be wise to start an account to be used for public and professional purposes.

Facebook, on the other hand, is an example of a service where you’re really only supposed to have one account. This is where you should really just clean up your profile as much as possible before following a potential employer via their “Fan Page.”

Should you “friend” a hiring manager or potential boss?

That’s really your call. My general rule would be no, unless you’ve met them in some capacity outside of the application process. The idea here is to look interested, not like a stalker. A quick, friendly message on Linked In could be a good idea… showing up at the hiring manager’s house with roses is not. Where the line between those two exists depends on your particular situation. Tread with care when trying to stand out.

In the end, you never know how much these tools will help you. Here’s one final example: a few years ago, I wrote about Chegg’s new textbook rental service on this blog. I continued to write about it, because I found it a useful tool for saving money on textbooks. Eventually, I was contacted by Chegg, because they wanted to see if I was interested in writing their blog for them. Moral of the story? Don’t just clean up your online act — use it to expand yourself into the fields that truly interest you, and opportunities will present themselves.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this post in the Graduating From College During a Recession series. You can check out all of the posts so far, in case you’ve missed anything. The next post will be up on Thursday at Living Almost Large!

The members of the College Money Network are in the middle of a two-week-long series on Graduating From College During a Recession. You can get all of the posts in this series and more by subscribing to the College Money Network RSS feed. But for your convenience, here are the posts in the series thus far:

Are Employers Having More Trouble in the Recession, Too? (here at PTY)
6 Stupid Ways to Waste Money After College (Broke Grad Student)
Are Internships an Option? (Living Almost Large)
Is Grad School Right for You? (Spilling Buckets)
Start a Side Business While Looking for a Job (Green Panda Treehouse)

Check those posts out, especially if you’re a graduating senior, or if you know a graduating senior who might benefit from this series. And juniors? You should check the series out as well, because you don’t know what the economic climate will be when you graduate next year, but you’ll be in a better place if you start preparing now!

Tomorrow’s post in the series will be right here on Poorer Than You, so come check it out!

The following is the first post in a two-week-long series on Graduating From College During a Recession, presented by the members of the College Money Network. You can get all of the posts in this series and more by subscribing to the College Money Network RSS feed.

With unemployment up and record numbers of employment applications, you would think that employers are sitting awfully pretty these days. Why, they can just lean back and let the qualified applicants roll in, and then have their pick of the litter, right? Well, maybe not, according to this recent post: Why hiring is paradoxically harder in a downturn.

According the post, an increase in job applications doesn’t usually correlate to an increase in outstanding job applicants. In other words, they have to spend a lot more time sorting through the muck to find people worth hiring. And during a recession, finding reliable, productive workers is more important than ever.

Curious about this phenomenon, I sent the article over to Kevin at No Debt Plan. He works as a recruiter for his day job, so I asked him for his thoughts on hiring in the current climate. First he warned me that he doesn’t deal with many new grads in his particular line of work, but what he had to say was helpful nevertheless:

The economy is in bad shape and there is a large supply of qualified individuals to do work. That makes our job easier, except the only problem is, there are not that many jobs to place these candidates into.

Is it harder to sift through and find good candidates? Perhaps, but not much. A good candidate’s resume stands out from the crowd (well, so does a bad one, but you move on quickly).

So, Kevin, what can a fresh college grad do to put themselves on the top of the resume pile?

The absolute best thing a college grad can do is to network. Seriously. You’ve heard it time and time again, but it is so true. It’s something I didn’t do well in college and I paid the price after I graduated. Maybe that’s why I harp on it so much!

Network, get internships, do informational interviews. The more the merrier. You’ve got to make yourself stand out from the ever growing crowd in some shape, form, or fashion.

Networking’s tough – we’re not generally used to massaging people into doing big favors and talking us up to people we don’t know – but it could be key. I applied to an internship last week, only to find out that I was just one of over 240 applicants. Ouch! I’m suddenly wishing that I had a contact on the inside who could intervene on my behalf.

What else can you do? Don’t forget that a sparkling resume doesn’t just come out of thin air. You really have to put some serious work into writing your resume and cover letter. Great writing can’t replace an empty work history, but bad writing can get your application ignored. It’s about putting your best foot forward.

Most of all, be persistent. No matter what’s going on in the larger world, every job I’ve landed so far has been the product of a good amount of persistence, and I don’t think the economy can ever change that rule.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this post in the Graduating From College During a Recession series. The next post will be up tomorrow at Broke Grad Student!