Capital Thrift—Finding Clothing Bargains in Washington

One of the first things I gave up when I lost my job was buying clothes. Since I only needed jeans and t-shirts to wear around the house and a few suits for interviews, I didn’t have a valid excuse to shop. But, within a few months, I was itching to refresh my wardrobe. The weather was warmer and I wanted to add some color to my closet. So I decided to bend the rules. I called my friend Frances, who’s also unemployed, and asked her to join me for some shopping—thrift shopping. D.C. isn’t the most obvious place to find cool clothes, and I wasn’t sure if we’d find anything worthwhile, but at least for the afternoon it would be a distraction from the job hunt…

Home Office Organization on a Dime

No matter how small your home office space, there’s room to be organized. Take it from me, a woman whose office is about three feet square.

I’ve already explained how Kacy Paide, founder of The Inspired Office in Washington, D.C., helped me designate and arrange an area in my den. But the next hurdle is building an infrastructure to keep it organized. Many of her go-to solutions are so inexpensive, even the unemployed can afford them…

An Inspired Home Office on the Cheap, Part 1

Last month, I lost my job as chief operating officer at a multimedia startup; because it’s my second bout of unemployment in two years, I have some idea of what works and what doesn’t. And one thing’s for sure: using the kitchen table as an office does not work.

For starters, snacking is a constant temptation. Then, there is all the paper: multiple revisions of resumes (with and without snack stains), fliers from networking events, business cards, letters from the unemployment office. During my last jobless phase, the table would be a mess at the end of each day. I’d shuffle the papers into a pile, but it never really went away, and it was never organized. So this time I consulted an expert, Kacy Paide, founder of The Inspired Office in Washington, D.C…