I sat at my kitchen table. I opened my laptop — my personal laptop, an older machine I’d kept for exactly the reason of it being mine — and I looked at my finances.
Three months of severance. Which, at the salary I’d been earning, covered mortgage, utilities, groceries, and health insurance with about four hundred dollars left over per month. Not nothing. Not a cushion. A precisely calibrated transition window.
I had a modest savings account with slightly under three months of additional living expenses. Victor had been the kind of employer who paid bonuses when the company had a good year and didn’t when it didn’t, and the company had had mixed years. I’d saved what I could.
Total runway: six months, approximately, if I was careful.
Six months to find something.
I wrote that on a notepad. Not a budget. Not a plan. Just the number: six months.
Then I went to bed early, which was the first time in years I’d gone to bed before ten on a weekday without being sick.
Budget, Grief, and the Beginning of the Job Search
The budget exercise came the following morning, because I am someone who processes anxiety by converting it into a spreadsheet.
Mortgage: the largest line. Health insurance: the second largest, now that I was buying it independently, which is a number that clarifies several things about the American healthcare system if you’ve only ever received it as a benefit. Utilities, phone, groceries, car insurance. Subscriptions I canceled. Gym membership I kept because I knew I was going to need the structure.