How long could you survive if your income stopped tomorrow?

本站添加: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]How long could you survive if your income stopped tomorrow? I was making $270,000 a year and we had 1 month of runway and my spouse at the time asked me a question that almost broke me. If you lost your job tomorrow, how long could we survive?

[00:00:13]I did the math. 2 months, maybe three.

[00:00:16]And I was earning $270,000 a year back then. We had a lake house, we had twin infants that were going through 20 diapers a day, and a life that looked successful from the outside. Behind the curtain though, 1 month of real runway.

[00:00:30]And that's not wealth. That's high income. It's a house of cards. I didn't sleep that night. Not because I thought I'd lose my job, but because I realized something that most people never admit.

[00:00:40]Everything that we had built depended on one fragile system, me showing up. No exceptions. If the income stopped, the illusion collapsed. And that night it changed the way that I thought about money forever.

[00:00:52]I stopped measuring wealth by my salary.

[00:00:54]I started a simple discipline. Live on 70%, invest 20%, keep 10% in cash reserves. And I stopped chasing the appearance of wealth. So, how much do you actually need so you don't have to rely on your income anymore? Let's find out. First, before you use the 70/20/10 rule, you need to figure out your overall expenses. This is what I use on my Google Sheets. Second, use the 4% rule where you multiply your expenses by 25 to figure out how much you actually need for retirement. Here's a quick table to show you how much you need invested depending on how much you need per month. Or you can plug in your exact numbers and it'll tell you right here.

[00:01:26]Third, this is the exact order of where to put your money that my community follows. Pay off debt, high yield checking, high yield savings, 401k, Roth IRA, HSA, and TBA. And these are the brokerages and broad-based low cost index funds that my community invests in. Keep it simple. If you want all of my resources, they're all free in my bio. I hope this video helps.