Can I leave yet?
Almost everyone answers this with a number of months. Months of savings tell you how long you can survive without an answer. They do not make the answer more likely to arrive.
What decides it is whether you can get a customer on purpose and then do it again. Everything below is a test of that. Savings is in the scoring, deliberately, and it is worth four points out of twenty-four — watch what happens to your result when you enter it.
- 1Has anyone who is not your employer paid you for this work?Once counts. Free work and promises do not.
- 2Can you name where that person came from?A referral from a named person, a specific post, a particular search. "Word of mouth" is not a source.
- 3Have you run that same source again and got another customer?This is the whole question. Once is luck; twice on purpose is a system.
- 4Has anyone approached you without being asked?Evidence the work is visible to people who do not know you.
- 5Have you said a price out loud and had it accepted without negotiating down?
- 6Could you take on a third customer next month without quitting first?If leaving is required before you can grow, the leaving is not the bottleneck.
And the two everybody asks about first
Why savings is the wrong unit
Runway is a clock. It starts the day you leave and it runs down whether or not anything is working. Six months of savings buys six months of looking for something you had not found by the time you left, and the looking is harder then — the same work, with less money and a deadline attached.
A source you can run again is different in kind. It does not run down. It answers the question the savings were meant to buy you time to answer, and it can be built entirely while somebody else is still paying you. That is the whole argument, and it is why the sequence matters more than the balance.
Related: when to quit, stop preparing and start, and what you actually earn an hour, which is the number the comparison should be made on.
The Escape Plan — the sequence in order, with the test for each step, what to build while still employed, and what the first ninety days after actually look like. $29.