30 People Who Survived The 2008 Recession Share What It Was Really Like

Was just graduating college. The worst part was leaving college knowing the job market was completely f****d and my degree wasn't going to help me at all. I spent years overeducated and underemployed while my student loan interest racked up. I literally could only find jobs working retail and eventually a laboratory technician job that barely paid more than the retail jobs. I didn't get a good paying job until around 2016. By the time I was able to get ahead of my student loans, I owed about 20% more than I originally took out. It was a mess and I'm still digging myself out of it.

The 2008 recession was bad, me and my family worked in building houses at the time, the housing market tanked which was brutal, scary, and created a lot of doubt, anger and uncertainty. It was awful, people lost their jobs, houses, but it was for the most part purely economic.

What we are seeing now is WAY worse. I think comparing it to 2008 really undersells what is happening. Right now we do face economic difficulties but we are seeing a hostile takeover of government and the people in charge have no regard for the law.

I actually compare the current events to 9/11 in the sense that the world is a VERY different place than it was even a month ago.

I was working for about four years professionally at the time and still lived at home with retired parents who owned their own so we made it away most unscathed.

However. My brain is permanent set to it doesn’t matter how stable a job is or how anything “positive” might feel around you: I refuse to spend money unless I absolutely have to. My family has a nice nest egg but it’s hard to look further ahead than six months without going “time to plan for absolute worst: what happened if me both and my wife lose our jobs?”.

Imagine this: people were vying for minimum wage jobs at Walmart. Not just the typical crowd, but professionals needing to supplement their income after it had been cut, too. It was the easiest place to get in, and still turned away 75% of applications.

Things in the economy haven't been right since 9/11. You could tell something was going to pop then. Let me just say it feels way worse now, and the feeling is getting worse, day by day almost. Something not good is coming and I don't know if it's a depression, a coup, a national war, another plague, or a combination or something worse. You can feel it in the bones of the society. A breaking point is coming.

I think a lot of the reasons elder millennials stay in a*****e workplace situations is because of our collective experiences with the recession. I graduated college a few years before, had a good job, got married, bought our first house, had no debt (other than the mortgage), and pretty much had done everything by-the-book of what you are supposed to do as a young adult.

2008 hit, my company laid off 60% of the workforce. No one was hiring so everyone I knew was on unemployment. I kept my job, but was suddenly doing the work of the 4 people who were previously on my team for no increase in pay. The office was a ghost town, but all the work the company did apparently still needed to get done. The office downsized constantly and there were new rounds of layoffs every few months. I didn't get a pay raise for 3 years, but there were literally no job openings, so anyone who had a job, held onto it for dear life and tolerated horrible working situations just because we had bills to pay and no one would risk quitting.

We were able to pay our mortgage, but our home was underwater, meaning there was no way we could sell it or refinance. We were stuck in our "starter home" for 10 years before the value of it came back to around the ballpark of our purchase price, and with ongoing maintenance costs, HOA, etc. it was overall a huge loss and forever stunted our financial growth since we couldn't afford to buy bigger homes. The rental market was stagnant since people moved into their parent's homes because they couldn't afford rent. I knew several people who went bankrupt, several people who lost their homes to foreclosure, and the only other people I know who bought homes at the same time as us and did not walk away or foreclose are all still living in their "starter homes" now with no hope of getting enough momentum to jump into a bigger space with the housing market as crazy as it has been. I had friends who didn't buy homes before 2007 and waited until 2013 who were able to get what we would have dreamed as our "forever home" for less than what we paid on our "starter home" it was really hard to watch that. I learned about the 18 year property cycle around then and have been expecting 2026 to be the next time the economy collapses.

We still lived. We spent time with friends, we travelled within our means, we started a family, life went on... but it was stressful and frustrating and we realized all the "adults" who were telling us how we needed to do things to check all the boxes and live the American Dream were very out of touch with reality.

It was unbelievably scary. I lost my job in 2008 and didn’t work again until 2011. I had hundreds of interviews. Literally hundreds. I am a product manager. I was recommended for a position as a product manager, but the hiring manager said that I didn’t have experience with stationary, and that was the product, so they wouldn’t hire me. The job went unfilled for a year.

I remember going in for the first good job opportunity, and the waiting room had 20-30 people and many of them looked mid-career. It's not a good sign when the recent grads and the grey hairs are applying for the same job. To me, today is nothing like that.

I was a freshman in high school. My parents had to file bankruptcy and we moved into a rental with only my dad's paid-off Jeep Wrangler to transport our family of 6. Needless to say, we didn't go anywhere all together for a while. My dad had this huge jar of spare change he'd collected over the years that we had to count and roll in order to buy groceries. My mom got a job cleaning homes for the elderly. It took years to recover from that time, but my parents busted their a**es and gained back everything they lost and more. Unfortunately, shortly after they got back to a good place, my mom was diagnosed with cancer and passed a year later.

Life has been one kick in the c****h after another and I sincerely pray we don't end up in that position again.

I couldn't find a job, but people kept harping on me about it. I was broke and everyone was telling me get a job or go to college. Like they were both just easy to do at the time. "Take out a loan to go to college then!" yeah, that worked out really well for my generation.

I remember younger people were competing with older people for jobs at fast food places, and you were lucky to have found a job like that back then. I think there was a story about a guy who delivered pizza with a master's degree or a PhD.

It f*****g sucked. Graduated 09. All of the sudden I was competing for entry level jobs with people in their 30s who had experience and families. I couldn’t compete.

I was one of those who got lost and did lose about 10yrs if finances because of it.

I graduated high shool in 2007. We had lived an upper-middle class life (beyond our means and with no savings, it turned out) and my parents could no longer afford to send me to college. I remember us going to the college and my mom begging them to let me start school and they would have the money in a few weeks. The whole time i was there I could only afford a meal a day, lost TONS of weight. I would walk everywhere in the city in my old Chanel flats, from when we used to be "rich", because i couldn't afford the subway. I shoplifted food and clothes and was arrested.

I ended up having to leave college a month in because we couldn't pay- which was mortifying in front of my new friends.

We all moved into a studio apartment, my mom my dad and me. My mom is disabled and my dad lost his job in 2007 and couldn't find one again until maybe three years later. We got food stamps and ate a lot of canned food.

I tried and tried to get an entry level job of any kind but couldn't.

It was traumatizing. Honestly, i'm still traumatized by it.

Bad. Graduated in 08' and it took me 6 months to get a part time job in the field I graduated in. Had to wait tables in a s****y hotel. Ended up going back to school because opportunities looked bleak.

Do not recommend.

I had just gone out on my own as a hairdresser and I quit because it was so slow and stressful trying to make ends meet when not many people were spending money getting their hair done. I got a normal job where I got paid an hourly rate. I ended up staying in that field and going into management (horrible).

What’s going on now feels nothing like the 2008 recession. This is full blown fascism and insanity. At least in 2008 we didn’t have a raving lunatic and his billionaire master in the White House.

I was 21 with an infant. Honestly since we were already poor, we did alright lol. It was very hard to find a job, my husband at the time got laid off a few times. But we didn't have much so there wasn't much to lose. We grocery shopped at the $1 store often.

It's definitely influenced how I handle my finances now. I'm in a much better financial spot but we live below our means just in case it happens again. I'm sure there were signs but I was too wrapped up in my own world to pay attention to it.

This time is much different because there are so many other ways which we are going to be f****d.

We lost our house that we had lived in for years. Had to move into a s****y duplex with black mold in the walls where we were sick all the time. Also I had trouble getting a job that didn't just pay min wage (7.25 at the time). .

I graduated college in December 2007 and it took a while to find a job in 2008. Plus, the pay was terrible and affected how much I was paid for many years. Even though I eventually did get hired we'd have weeks where they would cut down our hours. I ended up moving in with my grandparents and living with them for a few years because even with a job that was the only way I could afford to live especially since I was then paying back my student loans too.

Right now I'm just seeing where the price of goods is continuing to go up so that is putting a strain on folks, but as of right now it doesn't feel the same to me.

I’m a little older than what you’re asking, but yeah. There were a lot of signs.

People working mediocre-at-best jobs were buying McMansions with a boat and trailer parked in the yard.

People who had never held a steady job were getting approved for houses that were on the market at dramatically inflated prices.

People were buying s****y houses, throwing a fresh coat of paint on them, and selling them for double what they had just paid a few months prior.

I worked with guys who pulled all their money out of the market and let it sit in cash for a year or two. They had all been through the ‘90s bubbles and said it felt just like that.

So yeah. Some people knew.

The 2008 recession had a ton of impact on my life. First, my parents bought a new house and van right before the recession, so when it hit and my dad lost his job, there was a lot of panic in the household. I was in high school and it was very obvious how stressful finances were. I tried getting a PT minimum wage job myself to help but applied to hundreds of McDonalds, Walmarts, sit down restaurants etc and would never even hear back. I remember none of my friends could find work either when we were supposed to be getting our first jobs for spending money.

It ended up making me into an entrepreneur- my mom started her own business selling jewelry, and I would help set up at various festivals/ hospitals/ schools/ malls to sell it. I ended up doing that for free essentially because we needed money- after a couple years when I graduated and when people started spending money again, I took over the business entirely and I haven’t been employed by a regular business since. Now I own my own brick and mortar store (in a different industry though, as COVID k****d jewelry sales) with 16 staff and just oversee the larger picture things. Interesting to think how the dominoes all had to fall a certain way to get me here, but I’m happy where I am now.

My husband and I applied for a mortgage in 2008. The bank laughed at us. Actually laughed. We lost most of our retirement fund, which wasn’t a lot, but it was to us at the time. We felt so buried that he joined the military so we could have some sort of future.