Nanine Hartzenbusch / for msnbc.com

Jennifer Moss stands in the kitchen of her Boiling Springs, S.C. home on Thursday May 10, 2012. Her unemployment benefits recently expired.

The improving employment situation in South Carolina should be good news for Jennifer Moss, offering hope she can find finally land a job after a year and a half without work.

But in a way, it’s been another blow. The single mother of three kids is one of hundreds of thousands of long-term unemployed Americans who still haven’t found work - and now also find themselves without an unemployment benefit check.

That is because the falling jobless rate in many states has reduced the number of weeks jobseekers can collect unemployment benefits.

So-called extended benefits were eliminated Saturday in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas. The same thing already had happened in April in states including South Carolina, Oregon, Washington and Tennessee.

That leaves a minority of states where workers are eligible for that last round of benefits.

The extended benefits provide an additional 13 to 20 weeks of unemployment payouts on top of other extra payments that were made available as part of federal legislation passed in the aftermath of the worst recession in decades. The full package gave some jobseekers up to 99 weeks of unemployment payments.

The precise benefits depend partly on the unemployment rate by states, and in many states the rate has been moving down.

For example, California has one of the nation's highest jobless rates at 11 percent, but that is down from 11.9 percent in August. South Carolina's rate of 8.9 percent has fallen from 10 percent last October.

Nanine Hartzenbusch / for msnbc.com

Moss stands outside her home with her three children, from left, Jami Moss, 5, Josh Moss, 6, and Jenna Moss, 9. A single mother, she's worked hard to hold onto her home during her long stint of unemployment.

Moss, who lives in Boiling Springs, S.C., lost her job doing clerical work and flight scheduling for a small corporate flight department in October of 2010, the same week her divorce was finalized. She had worked in hospitality and other fields, and she’d never had trouble finding a job before.

The weak economy made everything different. Since losing her job, Moss said she’s applied for countless jobs and had maybe 10 job interviews, but nothing has worked out.

“There are many sleepless nights where at 2 or 3 in the morning I might be on a website … applying for jobs,” said Moss, who is 40.

To support herself and her three kids under age 10, Moss has relied on unemployment benefits and SNAP, also known as food stamps. She’s also enrolled in a government program that is helping her cover her mortgage payments.

But Moss received her last unemployment benefit May 1, after South Carolina became one of the states to lose extended benefits because of a dip in the unemployment rate. Her mortgage benefit also is set to expire this summer.

“I’m hopeful that the job will be forthcoming very soon, with everything that I’ve got out there,” she said. “But I’m not above doing what’s necessary, meaning a yard sale or selling jewelry or things of that nature.”

Beyond South Carolina, other states, including Alaska, Indiana and Oklahoma, have recently cut back unemployment benefits even further because those states’ unemployment rates have improved. In Indiana and Alaska, jobseekers are eligible for a maximum of 47 weeks of unemployment assistance, while in Oklahoma the maximum amount is now 34 weeks. The Oklahoma jobless rate is 5.4 percent according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but Indiana's rate is 8.2 percent, about the same as the 8.1 percent national average, and Alaska's is still elevated at 7 percent as the economy recovers slowly.

Nationwide about 12 million people are out of work and actively seeking a job. About 5.1 million of those are considered “long-term unemployed,” meaning they have been looking for work for 27 weeks or longer.

What’s more, one big reason the unemployment rate has been falling is because many people are giving up on finding a job or not entering the labor force to begin with. People not actively seeking a job are not counted as unemployed by the BLS.

“We’re adding jobs, but just enough to keep up with growth in the normal working-age population, not enough to start really putting the backlog of unemployed workers back to work,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, which focuses its research on low- and middle-income workers.

The labor force participation rate, or the percentage of Americans over age 16 who are either working or looking for work, fell to 63.6 percent on April. That’s the lowest level in more than three decades.

Moss, in South Carolina, has relied on her religious faith and church for emotional support, and said that both her and her ex-husband’s family have helped out with some expenses, such as birthday parties for the kids.

With money so tight, Moss said she and her kids joke about how they’ll get the Polly Pocket toys and other things they want when the family wins the lottery.

Of course, Moss isn’t even buying any lottery tickets these days.

“No, Lord no,” she said. “There’s not even enough pennies to roll together to get a lottery ticket.”

Many are in the same boat. At least 200,000 people will lose their last set of unemployment benefits because of the most recent wave of expirations in May, on top of about 130,000 who lost benefits in April, the National Employment Law Project estimates.

Claire McKenna, a policy analyst with NELP, which advocates for the unemployed, said some who lose eligibility for extended benefits may still qualify for 10 more weeks of payouts if they meet certain criteria.

But many people will find themselves without a job or unemployment check.

Dan Maloney, 41, has a law degree, an MBA and years of experience in the insurance industry, and yet he’s been without a job since June of 2010.

Maloney, who lives in Dover, N.J., said that in his specialized field, he’s found fierce competition for the few available jobs.

He thinks employers may see his degrees and experience and think he’s overqualified.

Some days he regrets getting his advanced education. Other days Maloney admits he just feels worn down. His unemployment benefits will expire at the end of the month.

“You definitely hit a point where it becomes – you feel defeated,” he said. “There are days you want to give up.”

Mary Rojas, 43, also has an advanced education and speaks several languages. She said she lost her job doing customer service for Spanish-speaking customers at a law firm in Fort Lauderdale in late 2010 and hasn’t been able to find a job since.

Her unemployment benefits are set to expire this month.

Rojas, who lives in Pompano Beach, Fla., found out she was pregnant soon after losing her job, and she said that made it hard to land a job.

Her baby is now eight months old, and she still has had no luck finding something that pays enough to cover the cost of child care for her baby and her six-year-old. She estimates she has applied for 200 or 300 jobs.

In April, her family received another blow when her husband, a chef, lost his job.

One day last week, the couple was shopping for groceries and fretting about how they would get enough money together to pay the rent.

“I’m in tears, honestly, just wondering how we’ll get that amount,” she said.

But Rojas said she was still holding out hope that her degrees and work experience will eventually land her a job.

“I don’t want to give up,” she said.

Unemployment benefit extensions are set to expire in several states, including California. Are you losing your unemployment benefits or have you exhausted all the benefits available in your state?

If so, we want to hear from you.

Please send us an e-mail including information about where you live, how long you've been looking for a job and when you will be losing your unemployment benefits. Don't forget to include your contact information so we can get in touch.

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Among young adults, 61 percent said they have friends or family members who have moved back in with their parents because of economic conditions

You would think young adults stuck living at home with their parents would be sending texts of despair to friends about their lot in life.

Think again. Most Gen Yers think it's gr8.

Three out of ten adults, ages 25 to 34, are living with their folks and of those 78 percent said they’re happy with it, according to a Pew Research survey released Thursday and titled “The Boomerang Generation: Feeling OK about Living with Mom and Dad.”

Even more surprising is that 77 percent of those still under their parent’s roof have high hopes for their economic futures.

The Pew survey is based on telephone interviews with about 2,000 young adults around the country in December.

It’s becoming like an episode of “All in the Family” out there.

“The share of Americans living in multi-generational family households is the highest it has been since the 1950s, having increased significantly in the past five years,” according to additional Pew research that looked at U.S. Census data, and the 24 to 35 crowd are among the most likely to be living in such arrangements.

One reason Gen Yers might be happy with the new family order is because so many of them are doing it, the researchers surmised.

• Among young adults, 61 percent said they have friends or family members who have moved back in with their parents over the past few years because of economic conditions.
• And 29 percent of parents of adult children report that a child of theirs has moved back in with them in the past few years because of the economy.

Indeed, the unemployment rate for this group, which on the decline, is still 8.7 percent, above the national average in February of 8.3 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Adults in their late 20s and early 30s have fared somewhat better in the labor market, but they have felt the sting of tough economic times in other areas of their lives,” the report stated. “Many have had to settle for jobs they didn’t really want just to make ends meet. Fully a third have gone back to school, and an equal share (34 percent) have postponed either marriage, parenthood or both.”

The economic turbulence, Pew reported, “appears to be giving rise to a protracted set of economic ties between parents and their adult children.”

Having the kids return home isn’t all bad for the parents either, especially when it comes to finances.

• 48 percent of young adults report that they have paid rent to their parents.
• And 89 percent said they helped with household expenses.

This might be why many young adults reported not feeling footloose and fancy free, even though they’re not burdened by paying their own way. “Nearly eight-in-ten of these 25- to 34-year-olds say they don’t currently have enough money to lead the kind of life they want,” Pew results found, “compared with 55 percent of their same-aged peers who aren’t living with their parents.”

Are you over 20 and still living at home with your parents? Let us know on Facebook.

AP/file

Since her husband was laid off last fall, Julee Schirmacher has found herself in a spot that has become familiar to many families over the past few years. She works full-time for a marketing company and, for now, her husband stays home and takes care of the couple’s two kids, ages 5 and 2.

“Money worries me constantly,” said Schirmacher, 29.

The number of women earning more than their husbands had gradually been rising for years, but the pace appeared to quicken during the Great Recession of 2007-09.

Nearly 38 percent of wives earned more than their husbands in 2009, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up about 3 percentage points from 2008.

As Schirmacher's case shows, in some cases women are earning more than their spouses not because the women are getting ahead, but because their husband has experienced a setback. Schirmacher's husband has been unable to find a job since getting laid off last September.

“Ideally, I would like us just to be working and in stable jobs,” Schirmacher said. “I don’t need to make a $100,000-a-year salary. I just want to be able to make money to be able to pay my bills on time, pay for the school for my kids. I just want to be able to have, like, nice Christmases with them. I want to be able (to say), on Friday when I get home from work, ‘Yeah, we can go to Friendly’s for dinner.’”

The BLS figures include families like Schirmacher's in which the husband may not be working at all. Looking more narrowly at families where both husband and wife are working, 28.9 percent of wives earned more than their husbands in 2009, up from 26.6 percent in 2008.

Mary Gatta, a senior scholar with the advocacy and research organization Wider Opportunities for Women, said it’s hard to say exactly what is behind the trend.

“The recession is a significant factor here in that during the recession we saw higher numbers of men lose their jobs,” Gatta said.

The official period of economic contraction, from December 2007 to June 2009, was so hard on men that some people dubbed it the “mancession” because so many men lost their jobs.

However, in the years of weak economic recovery that followed, women were harder hit while men started to gain jobs again. The trend appears to have started to even out in recent months.

Still, Gatta noted, that there are other, longer-term factors at work. For example, women have been graduating from college at higher rates than men for years. Workers with a college degree generally have higher earnings potential than those without one.

“It’s more than just the recession,” Gatta said.

In general, women’s earnings have become a much more intrinsic part of a family’s financial well-being over the past few decades, said Ellen Galinsky, co-founder of the Families and Work Institute. Her research from 2008 found that in dual-earning households, women were contributing about 45 percent of a family’s income on average.

Even in the families where wives make more than their husbands, she notes, many are struggling to get by – whether they have one or two salaries. In some cases women may be earning more their husbands because he lost a job or endured a pay cut.

“We have an image of (the wives) being the CEO of Xerox or something,” Galinsky said.

In fact, she said, many families in which both spouses work are in lower income brackets.

Galinsky expects that women’s earnings will continue to be key to many family’s financial survival.

“My view about the recession is that … it didn’t shift the course,” she said. “It accelerated the course we were already on.”

Schirmacher, who lives in Pottstown, Pa., always expected that both she and her husband would work.

She was actually the first to get laid off, in 2009. She ended up being out of work for more than two years, during which they had a second child and moved from Rhode Island to the Philadelphia area, where he got a better job.

In February 2011, she landed a job with a marketing company, and it seemed like the couple was getting back on financial track.

But then in September her husband lost his job as a property manager. That’s left him looking for a new job and taking care of the kids so they can save on child care costs.

Schirmacher said the situation is stressful for both of them. She recently took a promotion and has been working long hours, which means she doesn’t always get much time with the kids. Meanwhile, her husband is feeling the frustration of not being able to land a new job.

With just one income, the couple struggles to save money and worries about unexpected expenses. She recently had to borrow money from her parents for a major car repair.

“We can’t really catch a break,” she said. “We’re getting by but definitely not living the way that we were.”

Related:

More women seeking MBAs, but pay gap persists 

Many U.S. consumers are so deep in a financial hole that even as the economy begins to turn around they can’t quite dig themselves out.

A survey by Bankrate.com released Tuesday found that 25 percent of Americans have more credit card debt than they have in emergency savings, and that spells trouble if an emergency situation actually hits.

Consumers are doing better when it comes to living within their means, said Greg McBride, Bankrate.com’s senior financial analyst. But, he added, years of stagnant wage growth, high unemployment, declining home values and escalating household expenses have strained wallets. “Even though there’s been progress things are still out of whack,” he said.

And the economic pictures may get even gloomier for consumers if gas prices continue to escalate, he pointed out. Last year, he said, “60 percent of Americans said they cut back on discretionary spending because of gasoline prices.”

Those hit hardest when it comes to debt versus savings, are individuals on the low end of the economic ladder and those with less education, according to the study that polled more than 1000 adults earlier this month.

Here are some of the findings:

• 70 percent of those earning $75,000-plus have more in savings than credit card debt vs. 40 percent of those earning less than $30,000 per year.
• 64 percent of college grads have more in savings than in credit card debt vs. 46 percent with a high school education or less.
• 27 percent of Americans report a lower level of financial security now versus one year ago and 24 percent report a higher level.
• 38 percent of Americans are less comfortable with their savings now compared with one year ago; only 14 percent are more comfortable.

The overall percentage of consumers who have more emergency savings than credit card debt actually inched up to 54 percent of those polled, compared to 52 percent in the same month last year. But that doesn’t mean people are necessarily more debt adverse.

“They can’t go spend money they don’t have,” McBride explained, because credit is so tight today, particularly when it comes to consumers who don’t have the best credit ratings.

A bad credit rating can also create a double whammy for those people looking for jobs because some employers now use credit reports when evaluating job candidates. That’s even worse news for individuals trying to pay off debt.

High amounts of debt and thin savings have become a fixture in U.S. society. “Over the years, the savings’ needle hasn’t moved,” he said. “From 2007 and 2011, the percentage of Americans with three months worth of expenses in savings, which is not adequate, is unchanged.”

It’s something we may be used to, he maintained, but “it’s not a recipe for people having a warm and fuzzy feeling about their financial situation.”

Pew Research Center

We know the weak economic recovery hasn’t been much of an upturn for anyone who wants a job. But after a recession that was so tough on men it was dubbed a "mancession," it is women who are having by far the hardest time in the recovery.

From June 2009 –- when the recession was officially declared over --  to May 2011, men gained about  768,000 jobs, while women lost 218,000 jobs, according to a report issued Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.

That’s a switch from the recession of December 2007 to June 2009, a period in which men lost more than 5 million jobs, while women lost just over 2 million jobs, according to calculations based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The lopsided trend is something we first reported on in January.

Of course, no one is seeing a jobs bonanza, and the meager gains by men aren’t nearly enough to offset the millions of jobs that were lost. The official unemployment rate of 9.1 percent has fallen only slightly from its peak of 10.1 percent in late 2009. And whle men have done better than women in the recovery, their jobless rate is still higher than the rate for women.

Pew researchers say it’s not entirely clear why men are scoring more jobs than women in the recovery. Women have lost more jobs in certain sectors, such as government jobs. Men have gained more jobs than women in two key fields: professional and business services, and education and health services. 

Are you more nervous about losing your job, or more pessimistic about finding a new one, than you were a few months ago? If so, we want to hear from you for an upcoming story. E-mail us here.

Council on Foreign Relations

The old recession norm went like this: Economy dips, jobs get lost; economy gains, jobs get added.

 In other words, a V shape.

The new normal looks like a U – and an increasingly elongated one at that.

A new graphic from the Council on Foreign Relations shows what many jobseekers are already painfully aware of: Since the 1990s, the U.S. job market has hobbled slowly back to health, struggling along even when the economy was on the mend.

The situation was even worse in the Great Recession. Although the biggest recession since the Depression has officially been over for around two years, millions of Americans remain jobless. The unemployment rate was 9.1 percent in May; the June jobless report is due out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics next Friday.

This CFR’s outlook is not heartening for jobseekers: If the current trends continue, job levels will not be back to where they were prior to the recession until 2016, according to their calculations.

We’ve written about how the recession has caused some to delay having kids and others to put off getting divorced. So it should come as no surprise that unemployment – a major factor in the current economic doldrums - also would play a role in whether people get married.

Two websites, yourtango.com and Forbes Woman, recently polled 625 of their readers and found that 75 percent of them would not marry a man who was unemployed.

The good news for lovelorn guys: Many of these women also appeared to be holding themselves to the same standard. The websites said 65 percent of the women surveyed also wouldn’t get married if they themselves were unemployed.

Although the reader survey may not reflect all women’s attitudes toward marriage, it fits with recent trends toward delaying major life events because of the long recession and weak recovery.

Last fall, U.S. Census researchers speculated that more people may be shacking up because of the high unemployment rate.

In addition, the Centers for Disease Control has reported a decline in the marriage rate between 2004 and 2009, the most recent data available.

Those who are putting off tying the knot may end up waiting a while. The unemployment rate stood at 9.1 percent in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the median duration of unemployment was a hefty 22 weeks. 

Center for Economic and Policy Research

Unemployment rate change by country. The OECD uses a "harmonized" unemployment measure because not all countries measure unemployment in the same way.

We all know what happened in the United States during the Great Recession:  Millions of Americans lost their jobs, the unemployment rate skyrocketed and we’re still suffering the consequences.

Here’s something that’s less well known: In Germany between 2007 and 2009, the opposite happened and the unemployment rate actually fell, according to a report released last week by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal-leaning economic think tank.

Germany’s economy, which is heavily dependent on world trade, did suffer during the recession, said John Schmitt, an economist with the CEPR who prepared the report.  What differed was how the two countries responded to that economic weakness.

In the United States, most employers cut jobs. In Germany, they cut hours.

“There was widespread shift from full-time to fewer hours,” Schmitt said.

Germany has a much more highly unionized workforce than the United States, and some of those cutbacks came from negotiating over things like overtime and work hours, Schmitt said. Strong employee protections also made it more costly for some companies to lay off workers than to reduce hours, the report noted.

But Schmitt said another difference was that when employers cut back on hours, the government provided those employees with partial unemployment benefits. That compensated somewhat for the smaller paychecks, leaving consumers less cash-strapped than in the United States.

In the U.S., some employers reduced their workers’ hours, and there are currently about 8 million Americans who are working part-time but would like to be working full-time.

It was far more typical for employers to cut jobs completely when work slowed, and there are still 14 million unemployed Americans. The employment situation has left many Americans tight on cash and unwilling to spend freely, hampering the economic recovery further.

Schmitt said there are some states that allow workers to collect partial unemployment if their hours are cut back, but few Americans actually use it.

The Great Recession has sometimes been called the “Mancession” for the huge numbers of men who lost their jobs during the economic downturn. That goes double for veterans, especially male veterans, who left the military since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a new report from the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee shows.

The report, released on Memorial Day, says the unemployment rate among veterans who served on active duty since that fateful day almost 10 years ago averaged 11.5 percent in 2010, versus a jobless rate of 8.7 percent for all veterans and a 9.4 percent rate for non-vets. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for April 2011 put the unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans at 10.9 percent, compared with the 7.7 percent rate for all veterans and 8.5 percent for non-veterans.

The congressional report also states that the current unemployment rate for post-9/11 male veterans between 25-54 years old is 9.9 percent. It’s even starker for younger male veterans between 18 to 24 years old: 26.9 percent. Four-fifths, or 81 percent, of recent veterans are male and most leave active duty during their prime working years of 25 to 54.

Why have male veterans been hit so hard by joblessness? Aside from the numbers, the report says the skills these veterans received in the military translate into experience for industries that were hit particularly hard by the Great Recession: mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation, utilities, information and professional and business services. They were less likely to be employed in sectors that added jobs during the recession such as education and health services.

In addition, many went on to work in the public sector because of programs that placed an emphasis on hiring veterans. The report says that 30 percent of recent veterans work in the public sector, versus 14.8 percent for non-veterans. “Although Post‐9/11 veterans are only slightly more likely than nonveterans to work in state or local government, ongoing budget shortfalls and a

slowdown in hiring by state and local governments could adversely affect veterans’ employment in the future,” the report says.

Tip of the hat to the New York Times “At War” blog for highlighting the report.