It's three in the afternoon on a Tuesday. A calendar invite goes out with no agenda. Forty minutes later you're walking out of the building you've worked in for four years, carrying a laptop bag and a question you have never, in your adult life, had to answer: how much time do I actually have?
The first day is mostly fog
You'll spend the first twenty-four hours in a strange version of yourself. The shock has a flatness to it — you make tea, you reply to the group chat, you cancel a dinner. Somewhere in there, almost without thinking, you open your banking app. You weren't checking it for the balance the way you usually do. You were checking it for something else, something you don't yet have a word for.
The number sits there. It's the same number that was there yesterday. It's a different number now.
The balance doesn't tell you what you need to know
Most banking apps stop here. $8,400. ₹4,80,000. £3,200. Whatever it is, it sits in 12-point grey font like a final answer. It isn't.
A balance is a photograph. What you actually need is a film — what that number does over the next twelve weeks, given everything you would normally spend in a month, with nothing landing on payday. Rent doesn't pause because you got let go. The mortgage doesn't. The EMIs don't. Groceries cost what they cost. Your phone bill is patiently ticking toward its due date.
The question keeping you awake at 3am isn't how much do I have. It's how long do I have.
The word for that is runway
Startups use it. It's the right word for a person too. Runway is the number of weeks before the balance hits zero, given everything you'd normally spend, with no income coming in.
Most people calculate it wrong. They divide their savings by their last salary, which doesn't tell them anything — without that salary landing, their spending is what depletes them, and their spending isn't equal to their salary. It's the bills, the groceries, the subscriptions, the small stuff that adds up to a number you've never explicitly written down.
To calculate runway honestly you need to know your real monthly burn — every recurring bill, every reasonable estimate of groceries and fuel, every direct debit. Most people, if you ask them this number cold, are off by 30%.
Marvin Money already shows you this. The moment a salary stops landing on payday, the forecast updates. $8,400 today stops being a balance and becomes 11 weeks until zero, assuming no changes.
The first time you see that number it will hurt. It's also the most useful number you'll see all week.
What changes the runway
Two levers, only one of which is fast.
Income. Finding work, freelancing, contracts, unemployment benefits, a side gig. This is the long lever. It pays off eventually but it doesn't move next week.
Spending. The fast lever. Every recurring bill on your timeline that you can pause, skip, or kill is a week of runway you buy back. Marvin lists every recurring you've got — the obvious ones (Netflix, gym, Spotify) and the easily-forgotten ones (the app you signed up for in 2023, the storage unit, the magazine subscription that auto-renewed last month).
You won't enjoy looking at this list. You will be amazed at how long it is. Almost everyone, asked to guess their recurring spending before they look, underestimates by half.
Cancelling four subscriptions you don't really use buys you a week. Pausing the gym for two months buys you ten days. Skipping the storage unit until you're back on your feet buys you another week. None of these feel like much in the moment. Together they're the difference between fourteen weeks and twenty.
What runway gives you
Time to look. Time to negotiate. Time to take the call you actually want, not the one that came in first because you were running out of money. The whole point of runway is that it's the cushion between panic and a plan.
Friends will tell you "you'll be fine." They mean it. They don't know your runway. You probably didn't either, until you sat down and looked. Now you do.
Marvin doesn't know if you'll be fine — no app does. But it shows you exactly how long you have to find out, and exactly which levers extend that number. That's not a small thing on a Tuesday night when you're pretending to your partner that you're not worried.
If today is your Tuesday
The whole sequence, in five minutes:
- Open Marvin chat and just say what happened — "I've been let go." You don't have to know what to ask. Marvin will meet you where you are. Let it lead for a few turns, or skip ahead whenever you're ready.
- When you want the number, ask "how long do I have if no salary lands?" Marvin reads your timeline and answers in weeks. Somewhere around 11 weeks in this example. That's your runway.
- Ask where to find more weeks. "Show me every subscription on my timeline, ranked by amount." Tell Marvin which ones to cut or pause — it updates the timeline as you go and the runway number rises with each one.
- Pick a target. Sixteen weeks is reasonable for most people. The gap between where you are and where you want to be is what tomorrow morning's first email is built on — and the order of every email after that.
Prefer doing it without chat? Open the timeline directly — every recurring bill has skip / pause / cancel buttons, and the forecast number at the top of the screen is the same runway figure Marvin reads when you ask. The chat is the shortcut, not the only way.
You won't fix this in one evening. You aren't supposed to. What you can do tonight is replace the vague dread with a specific number, and then make that number bigger by Thursday.
That's it. That's the whole thing. Most of the work is on the other side of seeing the number clearly.
The forecast is built from the math we wrote about in the math behind Marvin's forecast. For the moment after the runway becomes a plan, see the forecast that's almost always wrong.