Dan AE (After Employment) Journal - Day 2: Taking Inventory

I am stranded on Mars.

In 'The Martian', the main character Mark Watney finds himself alone on the red planet, his team having evacuated the habitat due to a severe storm under the assumption that he was dead. Upon regaining consciousness and taking a moment to regain his bearings, the first thing he does is to take stock of his supplies to determine exactly how long he can survive with the existing resources that are available.

In the months leading to my dismissal, covid lockdown was ramping up and mandatory work from home orders were issued. I started trying to hoard more cash and limit expenses in the event that cutbacks due to business slowdown would occur. I was able to stockpile a small amount of cash savings. At our current rate of spending, the time to deplete existing cash reserves is 3 months.

My tenure at the company had been roughly 6 years. Given the general rule of thumb of a month severance for each year of employment, my dismissal package worked out to roughly that, 6 months worth of salary, which extends my survival time to 9 months.

One other slight silver lining of Covid is that most banks (Canadian banks at least) offer mortgage payment deferrals that can be applied for if your income stream is disrupted due to the ongoing pandemic. By my rough calculations, this would reduce our family's monthly cashflow burn rate and extend my survival timeframe to 12 months.

Qualifying for Employment Insurance may increase this further, however my existing severance package may limit the amount of employment benefits I am able to claim. To assume a worst case scenario, I will not include this as a dependable resource in my estimates.

After 12 months give or take, our cash reserves would be depleted and I would then need to start borrowing to meet our demands without a replacement income stream, which is the monetary equivalent to your body beginning to starve, having depleted it's fat reserves and resorting to consuming muscle in a downward spiral inevitably leading to a slow and painful death, cannibalizing one's own body to survive.

The question will be, how can I get innovative and use what I have to plant my proverbial potato crops to increase my food supply in a desolate economic environment where nothing grows.