Almost everything written for this week is about the job search. Very little of it is about the money, and the money is what decides how much time the job search gets. This guide is the second thing, written to be read once, in order, on a day when reading anything is difficult.
Start with months, not the balance
The instinct is to open the banking app and look at the balance. The balance is not the number; the number is months, and the same balance can be eighteen of them or four depending on what leaves the account and what is still coming in.
So the first move is not to economise. It is to write down what genuinely has to be paid each month — housing, food, utilities, insurance, minimum debt payments — and set the balance against it. That figure is your burn, and every other decision this month is measured against it. The worked example is here.
Severance: the shape matters more than the total
Two offers with the same headline total behave completely differently. A lump sum arrives, is taxed, and sits in the account as runway you control. Salary continuation keeps you on payroll for a period — and in many states it also keeps you off unemployment while it runs, and it can stop early if you take another job.
Severance is more negotiable than it looks, particularly the parts that are not cash: additional weeks, a period of employer-paid health cover, treatment of unvested equity, an agreed reference, payout of accrued leave. And it is nearly always attached to a release of claims, which is what you are actually being paid for. What to read before you sign.
Unemployment: file this week, whatever else is happening
State unemployment replaces a portion of your prior wage up to a state maximum, for a number of weeks the state sets — commonly twenty-six, with some states shorter and some indexing the figure to the jobless rate. Both the weekly amount and the number of weeks vary enormously by state, which is why a single national number for this is always wrong.
File the claim the week you are let go, even if severance is being paid, even if you think you are ineligible, and even if you expect to be working again shortly. The date you file is the date your benefit year is measured from, and the determination of eligibility is the state's to make rather than yours to guess. How severance and unemployment interact.
Health cover: usually the largest new line
The employer plan does not end the day you do — it typically runs to the end of that month — and after that COBRA lets you keep exactly the same plan by paying the full unsubsidized premium plus a small administrative charge. That is the same coverage at a startlingly different price, because you were only ever paying part of it.
There are four alternatives worth pricing before you accept: the ACA marketplace, where losing job-based cover opens a special enrollment period and where a fallen income can make the subsidy substantial; a spouse's or partner's plan, whose own special enrollment window is short; a short-term policy, which is a bridge rather than real cover; and Medicaid, which has no enrollment deadline at all. Compare the real quotes, not the assumptions. The full comparison.
Putting the four together
Runway is not savings divided by burn. It is savings, plus severance as it actually arrives, plus unemployment for as long as it actually runs, against a burn that now includes a health premium you were not paying last month. Stack those wrongly — most commonly by adding severance and unemployment together when your state runs them as a relay — and you invent months that are not there.
That is the calculation Glidepath exists to do, in one place, with the timing handled and every figure editable. It returns a month and a schedule, and then it lets you move the levers: what a smaller burn does to the date, what a delayed start does to it, what dropping the old plan for a marketplace policy does to it.
The order to do it in
None of this is advice about your situation, and none of it replaces your state agency, your plan administrator, or an employment attorney. It is the sequence that stops the first fortnight being spent on guesses.
- 1 · File the unemployment claim. This week, regardless of severance.
- 2 · Read the severance paperwork before signing anything, and note any consideration period you are given.
- 3 · Write down the real monthly burn — the must-pay list, not the aspirational budget.
- 4 · Get the actual COBRA quote from the plan administrator, and a marketplace quote to set beside it.
- 5 · Put all four legs into one calculation and get the date.
- 6 · Then decide what to cut, in the order the date says is worth cutting.