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Ask HN: How do you think about financial runway before quitting?
3 points by Rooksoni 2 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
I have been thinking about changing jobs.

What surprised me is that I was not afraid of the change itself. I was unsure how long I could realistically sustain myself if my income dropped.

Most tools I found were full budgeting systems or complex financial software. I did not need tracking. I needed clarity about how many months my current situation could hold under different scenarios.

How do you approach this?

Do you run detailed spreadsheets? Do you assume a conservative burn rate? Do you factor in best and worst case?

I am exploring this problem and building something simple around scenario based runway calculations, but I am mainly interested in how others here think about it.

If anyone is curious about what I am working on, it is here: https://tryeaseful.com

 help



If you have some time to prepare, put your spending on a single credit card. After a few years you’ll have a very good estimate of your expenditures.

I have an Excel (actually, a Google Sheet) with that data. Each credit card, and the total, each month.

[My university changed their official bank a few times, so I have a few free credit cards, and each one has different discounts.]


I’m bootstrapping my company and my investments income/compounding basically paid me to do my own thing. Soul crushing work at tech company playing office bullshit (performative shit to get promotions and salary bumps) or just focus on doing something interesting I actually care about? I cared about the mission at my previous employers but day to day sucked the later stage the company went.

I’ll take funding if/when I need capital boost because it’s way more satisfying building from scratch. And my customers think it’s kinda cool and ofc AI helps me a lot for sure.

Imagine if I become the first person to do a solo billion dollar company lol. Me of all people, I would think that would be pretty hilarious.

That’s how I thought about it at least.




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