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Quitting your job isn't a purchase - it's a shift from a steady paycheck to covering your monthly living expenses from savings, a partner's income, freelance work, or some combination of those. Your estimate weighs the monthly expenses you enter against whatever income and savings you'd have left, to show how sustainable that gap would be and how much risk it carries.
These key factors affect whether you can afford to quit
Living expenses and existing debt
Your monthly expenses don't pause when your paycheck does, and neither does any existing debt - we weigh the number you enter against your full financial picture, not against a rough guess of your bills.
Emergency fund and cash runway
The size of your safety net determines how long you can sustain the gap. A common guideline is three to six months of expenses in savings, though a longer runway gives you more room to be selective about what comes next.
Health insurance
Losing employer-sponsored coverage is one of the most overlooked costs of leaving a job - COBRA or a marketplace plan can be a meaningful new monthly expense that's easy to forget when you're focused on the bigger decision.
Other income sources
A partner's income, severance, unemployment benefits, or freelance work can all offset the gap - the math looks very different depending on whether you're covering the full expense number alone or splitting it.
Debt obligations that don't pause
Student loans, a mortgage, and car payments keep coming due regardless of your income situation, so it's worth confirming your expense number already accounts for all of them.
How to use your results
Try a few different scenarios depending on your situation:
- Your full expenses against savings alone, with no other income coming in.
- The same expenses with a partner's income or freelance work factored in.
- With health insurance costs added in if you'd be leaving employer coverage.
- At different runway lengths, to see how long you could sustain the gap.
Ways to make the transition work
- Build your emergency fund before you leave rather than planning to save while you're not earning.
- Line up health insurance - whether COBRA, a marketplace plan, or a partner's plan - before your current coverage ends.
- Cut discretionary expenses in advance so your baseline monthly number is as low as it realistically can be.
- Line up freelance work, a part-time role, or other income before you give notice, if that's an option.
- Pay down high-interest debt beforehand so it isn't compounding while your income is reduced.
Nothing added yet - add something to see your risk.
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