The past 2–3 years have brought some of the most volatile job markets we’ve seen in recent times. This is especially true in the tech domain, where there have been multiple instances of job optimization and redundancies. With AI adoption accelerating across enterprises, there seems to be no slowdown in this trend.
Having witnessed these job cuts up close, I can say it’s one of the most stressful periods in anyone’s life. Many of my mentees who have gone through this painful process often ask the same questions:
“I have commitments. How do I meet them without a job? How do I survive this period?”
Questions like these can shake your mental peace. When I found myself battling similar negative thoughts, I started building a FIRE calculator for my own use. I wanted to understand how much of a corpus I needed to survive. About three years ago, I created a very simple file to calculate my retirement corpus based on my yearly expenses. What started as a basic exercise slowly evolved into a framework. Over time, I kept refining it to figure out how much I would need to retire, track my net asset value, and plan systematic withdrawals if I lost my income.
This process also gave me important insights into my income sources and the need to diversify them. Once I had a concrete number and clarity on how far I was from my target, things started to settle down. As a family, we have always tried to keep our expenses in check, so our target corpus was reasonable. This calculator gave us a clear idea of how long it would take to reach that number.
Having this clarity took a truckload of pressure off the fear of losing our jobs—at least now, we had a plan.
In the past couple of months, a few of you have reached out asking for this calculator. I’m leaving the link to the calculator in this post. Hope this helps you!
I sincerely wish none of you have to go through such tough situations, but it’s never a bad idea to plan for your overall financial health.
Vignesh Kumar 