Job Loss Financial Decision Modeling

How this engine works

You enter your own figures; the engine models two scenarios side by side and shows the twelve-month difference between them. The outputs are estimates built from your inputs and documented assumptions — not predictions, and not advice. Mood and stress are self-reported context that adjust the wording of the summary, nothing else. Inputs are processed in your browser. The full methodology, including what the engine does not claim, is on the Decision Center.

Step 2: Decision Forge — compare assumptions

Decision scenarios with reflection prompts

Each scenario in the tool above presents two options drawn from this event and models them side by side from the figures you entered. Before the comparison, the page names a cognitive-bias concept as an educational reflection prompt. It is a general prompt attached to the scenario rather than a finding about you: the page does not test whether the concept applies to your situation, and it does not indicate which option you should choose.

Self-reported context at decision time

The page does not create a psychological profile. Mood and stress may tailor wording and general next-step suggestions. They do not change the entered financial values or scenario math. They do not establish decision readiness. The named bias concept is a general reflection prompt; the page does not detect bias, assess decision capacity, diagnose a condition, or predict outcomes.

The deadlines that bind after a layoff

Most of what follows a job loss is reversible. A few things are not, because a statute or a plan document sets the clock rather than you. Those are the ones to handle in the first fortnight, before the scenario modelling above is worth much.

What unemployment insurance actually pays

There is no national benefit. Each state sets its own formula, maximum and duration, and the spread is enormous: as of the Department of Labor’s January 2026 snapshot, maximum weekly benefits ran from $235 to $1,152 — Mississippi lowest, Washington highest, with Massachusetts at $1,105, New Jersey at $905 and New York at $869 (DOL).

Duration varies too. Most states pay up to 26 weeks, but fourteen pay fewer, with Florida capped at 12 weeks and North Carolina at 20. Model your runway against your own state’s determination notice, not against a national average — and note that the figure on the notice, not the estimate above, is the one that governs.

Budget against the long tail rather than the middle. Median unemployment duration is 11.4 weeks, but the mean is 26.3 weeks and 27.0 percent of unemployed people have been looking for 27 weeks or more (BLS, August 2026). The gap between those two numbers is the risk you are financing.

COBRA or the marketplace: the arithmetic

COBRA keeps the plan, the network and the deductible you have already partly met. It costs what the plan actually costs: about $793 a month for single coverage and $2,294 for family, which is 102 percent of the full average employer premium (KFF, 2025). That figure shocks people because the employer share was invisible while they were employed.

A marketplace plan is often cheaper, but the price depends entirely on the income you project for the year — which, after a layoff, is usually much lower than last year’s. Two things change the comparison materially: the enhanced premium tax credits that ran from 2021 through 2025 expired on 31 December 2025, and the cliff at 400 percent of the federal poverty level is back. A 2026 quote can look very different from a 2025 one, so price your own.

If you have already met most of a deductible this plan year, that sunk progress is a real argument for COBRA that a premium comparison alone will miss.

The 401(k) is the last place to look

Cashing out a 401(k) before 59½ generally costs income tax plus a 10 percent penalty, and it removes the balance from decades of compounding at exactly the moment contributions also stop. The order that preserves the most: emergency savings, then unemployment benefits and any severance, then taxable brokerage, then a hardship route only if the alternative is losing housing. A rollover to an IRA keeps the money invested and costs nothing.

If the layoff was large, notice law may already owe you something

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires employers with 100 or more employees to give 60 calendar days’ written notice before a plant closing or a mass layoff. A mass layoff means 500 or more employment losses at a single site during any 30-day period, or between 50 and 499 where those workers make up at least a third of the active workforce at that site. A plant closing means a shutdown of a single site, or of an operating unit within it, that puts 50 or more people out of work in the same window (29 U.S.C. §§ 2101–2102).

Where notice was owed and not given, the remedy is back pay and benefits for each day of the violation, up to 60 days — and up to a maximum of half the number of days the employee actually worked for the employer. There are narrow statutory exceptions for a faltering company seeking capital, genuinely unforeseeable business circumstances and natural disasters, and each of them reduces the notice period rather than removing the duty to give whatever notice is practicable plus a written explanation.

Federal thresholds are not the end of it. A number of states run their own notification statutes with lower headcount triggers, longer notice periods, or both, so a layoff too small to reach the federal Act can still reach a state one. If you were part of a group separation, the question worth asking early is not whether the package is generous but whether notice was legally owed, because that answer is worth a fixed number of weeks of pay and it does not depend on negotiation.

Severance, unemployment, and the interaction people get wrong

Whether severance reduces your unemployment benefit is a state question, and the states genuinely disagree. Some treat a severance payment as wages allocated to the weeks following separation, which delays or offsets benefits for that period. Others treat it as a payment for past service that has no effect on the claim at all. A third group distinguishes by whether the payment was required by contract or offered in exchange for a release. The practical rule is the same in all of them: report the payment when you file, in the terms the agency asks for, and let the agency make the allocation.

Omitting it is the expensive path. State agencies reconcile claims against employer wage reports, and an unreported payment surfaces later as an overpayment determination — repayable, often with a penalty, sometimes with a disqualification period attached. A benefit correctly delayed by six weeks costs you six weeks of timing. A benefit wrongly collected for six weeks costs you the money back plus the penalty, and the agency decides the schedule.

The same logic applies to part-time or gig income during a claim. Nearly every state reduces the weekly benefit by some formula rather than cancelling it, and nearly every state treats unreported earnings as fraud rather than error. Report everything, every week, even when the amount is small enough to feel irrelevant.

The first ninety days, in order

Deadlines tell you what cannot wait. They do not tell you what to do on a Tuesday. This is the sequence that keeps the irreversible items ahead of the reversible ones, and it is the order the engine above assumes when it models a twelve-month gap.

The mistakes that cost the most

1. Waiting to file. The waiting week usually starts at filing. Delay is not deferred benefit, it is forgone benefit.
2. Signing the severance agreement quickly. If you are 40 or older the review period is a right, not a courtesy, and the seven-day revocation cannot be waived for extra money.
3. Defaulting to COBRA without a marketplace quote — or the reverse, switching without checking a deductible you have already paid down.
4. Budgeting for the median job search. Plan for the mean.
5. Letting a credit card go late. The Regulation Z safe harbour is $32 for a first late payment and $43 for a second within six billing cycles, and the reporting damage outlasts the fee.

Where to go deeper

• What to do financially after losing your job — the full sequence, with sources.
• How to negotiate a severance package
• COBRA or marketplace after job loss?
• Unemployment benefits by state
• Emergency fund calculator