Fourteen Weeks of Runway and a $612 COBRA Bill — What Survived on My Layoff Spreadsheet
Laid off March 6 from a $134,000 product job. Severance covered nine weeks. COBRA ran $612 a month for the same Blue Cross plan. I built a 41-row spreadsheet that first night. It held for twelve weeks and two days. The high-yield savings account did its job.
Fourteen weeks. That was cell B2, calculated at 9:40 on a Tuesday night in March while my laptop ran on 11 percent battery and my coffee sat cold at the kitchen table, one row per bill and no idea yet which rows would still matter by June. The email from HR had arrived eleven minutes earlier. Effective March 6. Nine weeks of severance. Sixty-two hours of PTO paid out at base rate. COBRA, if I wanted the same Blue Cross plan: $612 a month.
The stakes stacked up fast: mortgage $1,847, car loan $389, preschool $720 a month for our younger kid, and a wife whose teaching paycheck covered groceries with maybe $200 left over after that. Postings for my job title on LinkedIn had dropped from approximately 40 a month to 6. Fourteen weeks of runway if nothin' went wrong. I have never lived thru a year where nothing went wrong.
The spreadsheet said we would be fine. It was wrong in two places. I found both in April. The $22,400 sitting in Ally did exactly what I built it to do, and I still slept badly every night that month anyways.
the 41 rows
I began with the bills I could name from memory and ended with 41 rows, cuz memory lies about money. Mortgage: $1,847. Car: $389. Preschool: $720. Groceries: $610. Electric: $148 averaged across the year. Phones: $95 on Mint Mobile. Gas: $130. Term life: $61. My wife's Sallie Mae payment: $164. Column C tagged every row keep, cut, or argue-later, and the keep column totaled $4,306 a month, which became the only number that mattered for the next three months. Every four weeks we had to beat $4,306 or the runway math was fiction.
unemployment, $362 a week
Michigan unemployment paid $362 a week, the maximum, which works out to $1,448 a month before taxes. I left it out of the spreadsheet entirely. A coworker of mine spent five months fighting an appeal in 2023, and I refused to build a survival plan on money that could vanish after one misplaced form. When the deposits did land, every Tuesday, they went straight into the Ally account untouched. Consider it margin for error. It was the only row I never had to think about twice.
the Ally account doing nothing
The emergency fund was $22,400 in Ally at 3.8 percent, earning about $70 a month for the crime of existing, and it took us eighteen months of $900 automatic transfers to fill it, back when $900 a month felt like a punishment with no payoff. That account is the entire reason the spreadsheet worked. High-yield savings paid for our lives between April and June, quietly, without one bounced payment. I opened the app more frequently than I needed to. The number moved anyway.
COBRA, billed quarterly, $612
The COBRA packet arrived April 2 in a manila envelope thick enough to hold a birthday card. $612 a month, billed quarterly, $1,836 due upfront, with 60 days to elect and retroactive coverage if I said yeah late. Marketplace quotes for a similar Blue Cross plan came back at $509 a month with a $9,100 deductible instead of our $2,500 one. We elected COBRA. My wife's asthma inhalers alone ran about $340 a quarter even with coverage, and a $9,100 deductible was a bet I refused to place against her lungs. Expensive. Kept anyway.
day one cuts: $188
Day one cuts felt heroic: the gym at $49, a streaming bundle at $34, the meal kit at $71 a week, three subscription things I'd forgotten I owned for another $27 combined. Total: $188 a month. Against a keep column of $4,306 that is noise, and pretending otherwise would have been the only dishonest hour I spent on that whole spreadsheet. Modest cuts feel like control. Control was not the problem.
week nine, the phone interview
I applied to 61 jobs between March 9 and April 30, and I tracked every single one in a second tab of the same spreadsheet, because tab two was where I kept the proof that I was still tryin'. Seven screens. Two second rounds. One offer, in week nine, at $118,000, which is $16,000 under my old number, with a 401(k) match at 4 percent and a start date of June 1. I asked the recruiter to repeat the salary twice. She did, kindly. I signed May 8.
two line items died in April
The spreadsheet lied twice, both times in April. Preschool raised rates on May 1, $720 to $775. And the row labeled miscellaneous, budgeted at a confident $150 a month, turned out to be fiction: April actuals ran $312 once I added up kid shoes, a co-pay at Spectrum Health, and a birthday party gift. I rebuilt the keep column at $4,612. Runway dropped from fourteen weeks to about twelve and a half without us spending one extra dollar. The plan survived. It just got thinner.
the number on May 26
On May 26 I opened cell B2, changed fourteen weeks to twelve weeks two days, and closed the laptop. The severance covered nine of those weeks. The Ally account covered the rest: $2,890 out, zero payments missed, balance sitting at $19,212 before the interest posted. First paycheck from the new job lands June 12. The transfer habit stops that day.
The file still sits on the desktop, unlabeled, B2 and all. Twelve weeks, two days. That is what it said after April, and that is what happened. That is it. That is the whole method.