§ I
§ I — The program
A date, and the levers
attached to it.
What Glidepath computes, the timing it refuses to get wrong, and the promise attached to a price that has not been printed yet.
IThe number is months, not dollars
A balance tells you nothing on its own. Twenty-five thousand dollars is a long time or almost no time depending on what leaves the account each month, and on the day you are let go nobody is in a state to hold four moving figures in their head at once. Glidepath takes savings, severance, unemployment and the new health premium, sets them against your real burn, and returns the month the balance reaches zero.
That is the whole output: a month, and the schedule underneath it showing what came in and what went out to get there. It is an estimate and it says so. But it is an estimate of the entire picture rather than of one leg, which is the difference between a number you can plan against and four numbers you have to reconcile yourself at a kitchen table.
The runwayIIThe relay nobody warns you about
The most expensive mistake in this arithmetic is adding severance and unemployment together. In many states they do not overlap: while salary continuation is still being paid you are generally treated as receiving wages, and the unemployment claim starts when that stops. Stack them and you invent months you do not have — usually the months you were counting on.
Glidepath sequences them instead. Continuation runs, then the benefit picks up, and the schedule shows the join rather than smoothing it over. The rules differ by state and by how your severance was written, so every leg stays editable and the assumption is stated on the page rather than buried in it. File your claim the week you are let go regardless; the date you file is the date your benefit year is measured from.
The relayIIIWhat each cut is actually worth
Once there is a date, every decision in front of you becomes a question about that date. What does dropping the old health plan for a marketplace policy move it to. What does trimming three hundred dollars a month move it to. What does an offer that starts in April rather than February move it to. Those are answerable questions, and almost nobody has the answer on the day it would help.
Change a figure and the month moves while you watch. Some of the levers turn out to be worth weeks and some are worth almost nothing, and knowing which is which is the difference between cutting where it counts and cutting everywhere out of fear. The tool has no opinion about which you should pull.
The leversIVNothing waiting for you at the bottom of the page
A layoff makes you extremely valuable to people selling things. Short-term health plans, résumé services, coaching, credit products, job boards paying per click — the standard business model of a free layoff calculator is to compute your desperation and then sell it onward, which is why the answer so often comes wrapped in a recommendation.
There is no affiliate program here to feed, so there is nothing in the arithmetic bent toward a click. Your figures stay on the device and the maths runs on the page; Glidepath never asks to connect to a bank, never asks for credentials, and could not hand your numbers over if it were asked for them, because it does not have them.
The absenceVThe oath attached to a price nobody has printed yet
Pricing published before launch. There is no figure on this page because there is not yet a figure, and a pre-launch page that invents one is a page that will be wrong later. Whatever it turns out to be, it is printed here first, in public, before anything can be bought — and it will not be a subscription attached to the month you lost your income.
Your finances stay on the device. The calculation runs in front of you and the numbers are not transmitted, which means we cannot read them, cannot restore them, and cannot be compelled to produce them. That is a smaller product and a very much smaller problem.
No ads, no insurance or job-board affiliates. Nobody pays us when you choose a health plan, a short-term policy, a recruiter or a résumé service, which is the entire reason nothing here will ever suggest that you should.
The house's word This is not a tool for feeling better about a layoff, and it will not tell you that the timing was secretly good. It answers one question — how long do I have, and what changes it — because that question has a real answer, and having it is what makes the next few weeks decisions rather than dread.