The job market is not what it was two or three years ago. Hiring has slowed, layoffs have picked up, and a lot of people are sitting with a low-grade anxiety about what’s coming. If you’ve been watching the news, watching your company, and quietly running the numbers in your head — this post is for you.

I’m going to cover the near-term moves first, because if you might be out of work soon, some things need to happen fast. Then I want to talk about the bigger picture, because there’s a reason this feels so destabilizing — and it’s not just about the job.

Figure Out How Much Time You Have

Look at your savings. In a faster job market, three months felt like a reasonable cushion. Right now, it isn’t. Positions are taking longer to fill, and competition for them has gone up. If you have less than three to six months of expenses saved, the urgency is real. Everything else you decide in the coming weeks should be shaped by that number.

The Near-Term Moves (Do These Now)

File for unemployment immediately. The process takes time — often several weeks before your first payment comes through. File on day one. This is money you paid into the system. There’s no reason to delay it out of pride or because you think you’ll find something quickly. File first, hope for the best.

Cut expenses, and don’t stop at the easy stuff. Yes, cancel the subscriptions. But also look at the bigger line items. A roommate, a move to a smaller place, or even a temporary move back in with family can extend your runway by months. Those are uncomfortable options, but they’re worth putting on the table before you’re truly desperate. A short-term hit to your pride is a much better trade than making decisions from a place of financial panic. The goal is to lower your monthly expenses enough that your savings lasts as long as possible. Every extra month you buy yourself is another month to find something good rather than something urgent.

Bring your grocery bill down. Groceries are one of the most flexible expenses in most households, and most people don’t realize it until they’re forced to. Learn a few high-volume, low-cost meals you can rotate. Rice and beans, soups, stews — mastering even three or four of these can cut your grocery spending significantly without feeling like deprivation.

Work your network as hard as you work job boards. Most jobs come through people, not postings. For every application you submit, reach out to someone personally — let them know you’re looking, ask if they know of anything, keep the conversation going. You don’t need a massive network for this to work. You need consistency and the willingness to reach out.

The Bigger Problem Under the Surface

There’s a framing I see constantly in financial advice that I think gets this wrong. The idea is that if you just earn enough, the cost of what you depend on stops mattering. Get your income high enough and you’re insulated. But that’s not what I’ve seen, and it’s not what I’ve lived, as a former executive in public tech surrounded by every day millionaires.

In 2020, I was pregnant with my first child when the world shut down. I didn’t lose my job — I survived the furloughs — but I was being pressured to comply with a mandate I didn’t agree with. And I realized I couldn’t make a decision I actually believed in because I was afraid of what would happen to my paycheck.

My income hadn’t stopped. But the threat of it stopping was running the show. I was standing there with a newborn baby and I could see it clearly for the first time: the problem wasn’t the job. The problem was how much I needed the job. Years since, I’ve successfully released that dependency on our income for my family and secured what I am so passionate about today: independence.

That vulnerability — dependency — is not a class issue. You can be a Wall Street banker or someone earning $30,000 a year and face the exact same fragility. If everything in your life requires your income to keep coming in, the risk is the same. It’s structural, not financial.

What Actually Changes Things: Owning Instead of Renting

Write down everything you spend money on in a month. Not just bills — groceries, electricity, water, all of it. Now look at the list. Most of it exists because a company owns something you depend on, and you pay them monthly for access to it.

Your electricity bill exists because an energy company owns power generation. Your grocery bill exists because a supply chain owns your food. Your water bill exists because a utility owns the infrastructure. You’re renting all of it.

One of the reasons we chose our house was because it had solar panels. I produce my own electricity now. That bill is gone. That’s what ownership looks like in practice.

I’m not saying go buy a house right now — the market is a mess and that’s a big move. I’m saying this is the direction to think. And you can start much smaller. Switching to cloth towels instead of paper is a small act of ownership. Buying in bulk and learning to preserve food is ownership. Growing anything — even herbs, even tomatoes on a balcony — is ownership. These things add up. Our grocery bill is a fraction of what most families spend because we’ve spent years slowly moving from renting our food supply to owning it. We grow food, we buy in bulk, we preserve it, and we share harvests with family and friends who do the same. The dependency shrinks a little at a time.

Six Months From Now

If you work through the near-term cuts and start chipping away at the dependencies underneath them, your monthly expenses drop. The gap between what your life costs and what you need to earn shrinks. And at some point, a job loss stops being a crisis and starts being an inconvenience. Not because you’re wealthy, but because your life doesn’t require as much to keep running.

That’s the goal. Not just surviving the next layoff, but building something that doesn’t depend on one income stream, one company, one job market.

Where to Start

If you want a practical starting point, grab my free Self-Sufficiency Checklist. It walks through the main areas of your life — food, water, energy — so you can see exactly where your dependencies are and where you have room to build.

And if you’re ready to go further, the Sovereignty Blueprint is a step-by-step course built for suburban families who want to work through this — no homestead required, no extreme lifestyle change. Just a practical path toward a life that doesn’t depend on everything going right.

Start with one thing. Look at your expense list and find one thing you’re renting from a company that you could eventually own. That’s it for now.