Job Loss Navigation

The event with a sequence

Job loss is 15.1's most common event and the one with the clearest navigation sequence — because its costs are front-loaded into decisions made in the first days, under exactly the bandwidth conditions (Scarcity Mindset, The Stress Tax) that make good decisions hardest. This chapter is the sequence, pre-learned.

Week one: claim, cover, cut

File for unemployment insurance immediately — eligibility runs from filing, not from job loss; delay costs weeks that never pay retroactively, and the specific state variations are worth checking immediately; partial replacement is the design (typically 40–50% of prior wages on average — it varies significantly by state — capped at a maximum benefit and a term commonly 26 weeks, though a handful of states run shorter), which the 15.2 gap math already anticipated. Solve health coverage deliberately: COBRA continues the employer plan at full unsubsidized cost — routinely shocking; the marketplace alternative with job-loss as a qualifying event, and income-based subsidies computed on current (now-reduced) income, is frequently the dramatically cheaper path — worth a direct comparison before defaulting to COBRA; the decision has a deadline and deserves the first week's clearest hour. Cut to crisis spending: the 15.2 crisis-coreFLOW floor activates — discretionary suspended (the pre-computed version of this cut is why 15.2 exists), subscriptions swept (Finding Your Recurring Charges's list, executed in an afternoon), and the hardship programs engaged early (lenders' forbearance structures exist for exactly this and respond better to early contact than to missed payments — 15.7's principle, applied everywhere).

The 90-day posture

The runway math (15.2) governs everything: months of survivable gap, recomputed with UI in the stack, reviewed weekly. The sequence discipline: buffer spends first (its whole purpose — Emergency Buffer Sizing), the standby line second and per its written definition (The HELOC as a Buffer — this qualifies), retirement raids last and reluctantly (the tax-and-penalty haircut plus the amputated compounding make early withdrawal the most expensive money available; loans-against where plans allow have their own trap — job loss can accelerate them). And the search itself is a finance decision: the runway number prices the search — a household that knows it has seven months negotiates differently than one guessing at three — which is the quiet, decisive payoff of every visibility habit this curriculum built: the prepared household's crisis is an arithmetic problem; the unprepared one's is a panic.