The six-month runway after redundancy

The first time I sat down with a redundancy payout in front of me, I felt rich. Stupidly, dangerously rich. The number had four commas in places I wasn't used to seeing commas. I drove home from the bank that afternoon thinking, "I've got six months. Easy. I'll take a proper break, then walk into the next thing."

I want to walk you through what actually happens to a six-month runway in Australia, because the gap between how it feels in week one and how it behaves by week sixteen is enormous. Most men I know who handled redundancy badly didn't handle the news badly. They handled the runway badly.

What the runway is actually made of

Let's start with the components, because the word "runway" hides what's really there.

A typical Australian redundancy package for a man in his forties with ten-plus years of service breaks down into four distinct buckets, each with different tax treatment and different cash-flow timing.

• Genuine redundancy payout. Tax-free up to a threshold (currently around $12,500 base plus roughly $6,300 per year of service). The amount above that gets taxed at concessional rates. Lands in your account within the final pay cycle.
• Notice period payout. Usually four to twelve weeks of base salary, taxed at marginal rates. If you're worked through your notice you've already had it. If you're paid in lieu, it lands as a lump.
• Annual leave and long service leave. Taxed concessionally if part of a genuine redundancy. This is often the biggest surprise number for men who haven't taken much leave in recent years.
• Existing savings and offset balance. Whatever you had before the call.

Note what's missing from this list. Super. Your super does not become part of your runway unless you're over preservation age, which for most men reading this means another fifteen years away. Treating super as runway is the most expensive mistake you can make in this period. Don't.

How long six months actually lasts

I want you to do something concrete. Open a spreadsheet. Put your last three months of household spending in it, every line. Not the budget you tell yourself you run on. The actual debits.

For most Australian men in their forties with a mortgage, a partner, and one or two dependent kids, monthly outgoings sit somewhere between $9,000 and $14,000. That's mortgage, groceries, utilities, school fees if you've got them, insurance, transport, and the dribble of subscriptions and minor purchases that add up to a couple of thousand without anyone noticing.

Take the upper end. $14,000 a month. Six months of runway means you need $84,000 of after-tax cash on hand to maintain your current lifestyle without earning a cent. Most redundancy packages, after tax, deliver between $60k and $120k for a long-tenured employee at this career stage. Add savings. You might genuinely have six months. You might have four.

The point is, run the actual number. Don't trust the round figure on the redundancy letter. The runway is shorter than it looks.

The mistake of holding out for the perfect role

Here is the trap that catches most men in this situation, and I've watched it catch good men more than once.

You leave with a strong package. Confidence is high. You decide, reasonably enough, that you'll only consider roles that are a step up from your last one. More money, more seniority, better company, better commute. You set the bar high because you can afford to hold out.

For the first two months, this works. You're rested. The phone is ringing. Recruiters return calls. You take meetings, decline two offers that aren't quite right, feel validated by the market.

Month three is when something subtle shifts. The roles that come across your desk start to look the same. The recruiters who were keenest in week one are slower to respond. Your network has done its first pass of introductions and is now waiting for you to come back with news.

By month four, you're holding out for a role that doesn't exist on the timeline you have. And you don't realise it yet.

The month-four pivot point

This is the one I want you to remember. There is a moment, somewhere around week sixteen or seventeen, where the job market reads your gap differently. Up until that point, you are a recently-redundant senior professional taking your time. After that point, you start to look like someone who has been on the market for a while and hasn't landed. Same person. Same CV. Different reading.

Recruiters notice it. Hiring managers notice it. Your own network notices it. The questions get sharper. "What have you been doing with your time?" stops being conversational and starts being diagnostic.

The men who navigate this well do one of two things before month four hits.

• They take the bridge role. Not the dream role. A role that's adjacent, slightly underpaid, slightly under-titled, but real and signed and starting in three weeks. They take it, work it for twelve to eighteen months, then move from the inside of a job to the next thing. Bridge roles are not failures. They are how most senior careers actually progress.
• They formalise a project. They take a board seat, start a consultancy, write a book, run a community programme, do something visible that explains the gap as a deliberate move rather than a market gap. The label on LinkedIn changes from "Open to opportunities" to "Director, Such-and-Such Advisory" by week ten.

The men who don't do one of those two things by month four are the ones who end up, at month nine, taking a worse role than they were offered in month two, with less standing and more dented confidence.

The structure I'd recommend

Here is how I'd structure six months of runway, working backwards from the month-four pivot point.

• Weeks one to two. Do nothing. Sleep. Walk. Don't sign anything. Don't post anything. The body needs to come down off the cortisol cliff before you make any decisions.
• Weeks three to six. Slowly map. Update the CV but don't send it anywhere yet. Have coffees with three or four trusted contacts to test the market quietly. Get the offer reviewed by an employment lawyer. Set up a proper home workspace.
• Weeks seven to twelve. Active search. Apply for real roles. Take recruiter calls. Have first-round conversations. This is when you have the most standing and the freshest narrative.
• Weeks thirteen to sixteen. Decision window. By the end of week sixteen, you want to be either signed or in late-stage conversations. If neither, move to a bridge role or formalise a project before week eighteen.
• Weeks seventeen onwards. If still searching, the strategy shifts. You're now playing a different game. Lower your salary expectations by ten per cent. Broaden the geography. Take the consulting work that comes through warm introductions. Don't burn the runway waiting for the role you wanted in week one.

A concrete metaphor

Treat the runway like the petrol in a long drive across the Nullarbor. You wouldn't pass the first roadhouse hoping for a better one in three hundred kilometres. You'd top up at every station, even when the tank looks fine, because the cost of running dry in the middle is catastrophic and the cost of stopping early is trivial.

The job market is the same. Top up early. Take the bridge role if it appears. The cost of accepting a slightly imperfect role at month three is small. The cost of running dry at month seven is years of compounding career damage and a hit to confidence that takes longer to repair than the financial gap itself.

A short imperative

PROTECT THE FIRST TWO WEEKS. Do nothing in them. The runway starts in week three. If you spend weeks one and two negotiating, networking, posting, and panicking, you've already burned your most valuable resource, which is the clarity that comes from a properly rested mind making a properly considered plan.

Closing

Top up early. Stay calm. Land before month four.