Pop the Champagne, Getting Laid Off Made Me FI!!!!

Just about two months ago now, in January, I got laid off from my job. Since telling my friends and acquaintances about being laid off, I have learned to lead with “This is good news”. That’s important to start with, since a layoff is, for practically everyone else, an awful setback. In my case – for once, in this miserable hell of late-stage capitalism – it’s truly not.

For the last ten years, I have been adding to my investment portfolio to, one day, become financially independent. Last year, I determined my minimum net worth number for happiness is $700k. As of New Years Day, I was at almost $670k.

Then, I got laid off. On a Monday, first thing in the morning. I spent the rest of the week snatching whatever appointments my dentist’s office and PCP office could offer so I could get checkups; that was all to be done before my insurance went the way of the dodo. I put my company laptop in a corner of my apartment, eventually sending it back to IT after getting a mailing label and box.

The same day that package was marked “Delivered” online, I logged in to my bank account to see a new number. I guess they wanted their company property back before sending me my severance pay, because there it was. My bank balance now had five figures in it, and not a low five figures. That, combined with the (at the time) higher stock market returns, put me at exactly that $700k amount.

To sum up: my getting laid off got me over the finish line to financial independence. What a FIRE speedrun, huh?

How the Layoff Happened

This section is for the voyeurs. I knew layoff meetings usually happened on a Friday, or should be. Because of that, I wasn’t completely sure this meeting my boss scheduled at 9am Monday was going to be that. But gosh, did I want it to be.

I had been sort of manifesting a layoff for myself for ages. As proof, here’s what I sent to All Options Considered about what I wanted to text my boss last June:

Fast forward to mid-January 2026. I log onto the meeting’s Zoom link at 9am sharp. Greeting me, awkwardly, is the HR rep… instead of my boss. I already know what this means, and there’s only one thing I plan to accomplish: keep a straight face the entire time. I want them to assume I’m unprepared for being laid off, to feel enough guilt over it that they will ensure I get a higher-than-industry-standard severance and a good bonus for 2025.

When my boss appeared, she didn’t stray from the messaging I expected. The company is restrategizing, which means my position is terminated. This is not a reflection of my performance. I will forever retain my titles of Best Helper and Field Day MVP (joke). All bland, boilerplate stuff. The only words I say are “I see” and “understood”.

Then the HR rep takes over, letting me know more details I did want to know.

I can’t share the amount of money I got as severance due to a severance contract I had to sign to receive it. What I can share is that the amount was equivalent to my working longer than I originally intended. She told me I was still bonus eligible for my work in 2025 (bonuses for the year go out in March of the next year, this time being no different). I said my final “I understand,” aiming for “taking the news gracefully”.

The HR rep logged off. My boss logged off. I made sure to log off and close out of the Zoom app entirely before I let my mask drop. I pumped my arms in the air and bellowed “YES!!!!!” so loudly it’s a miracle my neighbor’s dog didn’t start barking. In the span of five minutes, I went from “reluctantly employed” to “unemployed, and absolutely relishing it”.

Getting laid off works out better than my original plan. In December, I wrote:

If I do leave, I’d reckon it would be sometime in May at the earliest. That gives me time to pad my cash cushion until then.

The universe works in very funny ways sometimes, and I’m not just talking quantum physics. That January meeting let me know I’d get a severance package I consider satisfyingly generous. Last week, I got a five-figure check in the mail for my 2025 performance bonus. And a few days ago, I signed a contract to keep some of the company equity I earned from years worked. My former (former!!!) company is not without its problems, but it has granted me a genuinely pleasant work experience and lovely exit.

Working Through the Emotions of a Layoff, Even a Wanted One

I was elated the day of the layoff. The rest of the day was spent dancing around my apartment and gleefully stuffing blazers and other work-centric clothes into a duffel bag for donation. Two days later, I’m fighting back tears outside a brewery around a bunch of people I just met. It was a dance class (side note, very fun) and I went because I wanted to make friends with a couple folks there.

Instead, I sat on the sidelines to watch and huddle into myself. On top of everything else, I felt embarrassed about my coming all that way and then refusing to participate. They were all great, bless them, and didn’t make a big deal out of the almost-weepy woman in their midst.

As for me, these emotions seemed ridiculous and inconvenient. I wanted to leave! This works out much better than my initial plans to resign! Where is this upset coming from?

To my friends, it was obvious: I was grieving the close of a chapter of my life, and grief didn’t spare me just because I felt joy about it too. It’s still change. And change that I did not have control over. The fact that it benefited me doesn’t detract from me having zero say in the situation. I am allowed to be sad about a reminder of the fickle-yet-ultimately-indifferent nature of fortunes given and taken, I guess.

The Inherent Stock Market Risk

As previously stated, that is the minimum number I’m happy with for FIRE. So, very unexpectedly, a layoff got me to financial independence!

The retirement calculators I’ve used all say my portfolio, given my assumed spend, has a 100% chance of success when put through historical simulations. I have been doing my own spreadsheet simulations on top of that. It’s really exciting to see how much money I could be getting in a few years if the stock market performs as well as it did in, say, 2010-2014, or 1951-1955. Other datasets, not so much.

A lot rides on how the stock market performs in the first few years or so of my not working. In FI circles and other retirement groups, this is the sequence of return risk. If I choose to rely completely on my portfolio for the rest of my life, I’ll have to take this risk into account.

That said, even if the rest of the 2020s is multiple years of negative returns, I’d still eke out okay. The worst 30-year performance for investment portfolios was 1929-1959, which includes The Great Depression for the first four years.

Had I been investing in that time, I would have watched my investment values drop by over 84%.

If that wasn’t enough of a heart-stopper, that period also includes three negative years in the early 1940s due to World War II. Good thing the world isn’t at risk of another huge global war due to fascism, right? Right?!

Should I see this epic of a battering on my portfolio, I will be upset. But I can always figure out a new strategy, whether that means going back to work or not. I’ve got enough in cash to cover my next two years or so to smooth the ride. Plus, I’d still be much better off than most folks financially, while getting to have enjoyed a multi-year travel adventure that is extremely rare.

My New Career Plans

As of the time of this writing, it’s been a little over two months since that layoff meeting. Those two months went by in a blink of an eye. Beforehand, I thought time would slow down a little when I stopped working. What I didn’t consider: the only thing slowing time down was the drudgery of doing something so dispassionate and unfulfilling.

I feel like I have rested so much more. I also feel the strongest I have ever been in my life, both physically and emotionally. Best of all – and in spite of the horrors of concentration camps being built in America without mass protest – I feel more hopeful than ever about my personal future.

This layoff does not, I think, mark the end of my working forever. What is does mark is the end of my marketing career.

Since graduating college, I have worked as a marketer at three different companies. The issue with these jobs wasn’t burnout. It wasn’t even feeling like a fraud. What it was, was that the job made me feel like a leech. I couldn’t justify my salary to myself when people doing a LOT more with interconnected impact are paid outrageously low wages.

The job market in 2026 is abysmal. Past colleagues who I consider incredibly skilled, talented, charming, and focused are struggling hard to find good opportunities.

And I get to just… opt out of that entirely.

No, I don’t want to have to relearn my entire industry thanks to AI tech that isn’t quite ready to dominate with so many bugs and kinks in its digital cogs.

No, I’m not making a bogus LinkedIn status update saying goodbye to my former employer with corporate positivity. My posts will never be written with a hope that a hiring manager may see it and be impressed enough to reach out.

And NO, I am NOT subjecting myself to the hellish fourth circle of job application portals, which only distinguishes itself from the job application portals of 2016 with the introduction of AI chat bots to judge you with extreme prejudice behind the affirming language models. That sucks!!!!!

I’m not gonna do any of that when I don’t have to, and GUESS WHAT? I genuinely do not have to! Learning about finances from the FIRE movement took my life path into the stratosphere with new possibilities!

My New Life Plans

The job market isn’t just awful for marketers. It’s awful across the board. I find myself trotting out the same observation I’ve shared in multiple conversations recently. That is, so many former classmates and coworkers of mine – people who I see as many times more talented, charming, and ambitious than I care to be – have spent several months searching for full-time work with no success. I don’t want or need to compete for jobs when the straits are so dire, so I am simply not going to do that.

For the rest of the year, I am going to travel full time. I’ll round out the rest of March in Los Angeles. I need that time to sell off my furniture and pack the belongings I haven’t already placed in storage. The next two months will see me on a road trip around America. I want to see all the states in the continental US that I haven’t been to before. If either of my two short films get accepted into film festivals, I’ll also attend those! With delight!!

After that, I plan to sell my car and go live in Europe from July to December. My Irish citizenship guarantees I can stay in the EU for as long as I want! And boy, am I wanting now.

That’s all a good plan for 2026 to me. I’ll reevaluate in 2027. Next year will either see me continuing to travel, or see me begin full-time in a TV writers’ room. That all depends on whether I can get hired or not. Guess we’ll see what the future holds, which was all made possible by a New Years layoff.

If anyone needs me, I will be popping more champagne to celebrate. Sláinte!

Cover image credit: Antonio Araujo via Unsplash