Anita has £14,000 saved and calls it a year of runway. Her fixed costs, £3,100 a month, say four and a half months. The last gap between contracts was seven weeks and cost about £5,000; the careful £1,200 month she divided by never happened once. Two lines, divide, write the months.
Anita, thirty-nine, an IT contractor with her own company. The households in these Shorts are illustrations built from typical UK figures, not real people, and every number below is worked on the household’s sheet.
What happened
Between contracts, nothing comes in. For Anita, a thirty-nine-year-old IT contractor who runs her own company, that is simply part of the work, and the last gap between jobs lasted seven weeks. To cover those stretches she has £14,000 saved, and in her head that sum has always meant about a year of runway. It is a comforting figure, and the one she carries around with her. The question was how far it was from the truth.
The year came from a particular sum. Anita reckoned that a careful month, one where she cut back on everything she could, would cost her £1,200. Divide £14,000 by that and the answer is close to twelve months. The trouble is that a careful month is really only a fortnight you can hold your breath for. It is not how a real month goes. The costs that cannot be switched off, her rent, her bills and her contracts, add up to £3,100 a month on their own. And the last gap proved it: seven weeks without work cost her roughly £5,000. The careful month she had budgeted around never happened once.
Divide the same £14,000 by the £3,100 that cannot be switched off and the answer is four and a half. Not a year, but four and a half months. It is a less comfortable number, but it is the useful one, because fixed costs carry on regardless of whether any money is coming in. The bigger figure had been reassuring precisely because it rested on a month that does not exist.
So Anita changed the way she wrote it down. Her savings stopped being recorded as a sum of money and became a number of months, since months are what a gap between contracts is actually measured in. She then set a target in the same terms. Her goal is six months of runway, and at £3,100 a month that means £18,600. Against what she has now, she is £4,600 short. That is not a comfortable fact either, but for the first time she knows exactly how far away the target is.
Working out a runway like hers takes two lines: what cannot be switched off each month, and what has been saved. Divide the second by the first, and write the answer in months. Anita’s now reads four and a half out of six, alongside the date she will reach six at her current pace.
The working
Every figure the Short says, and where it comes from on the household’s sheet.
| The Short says | Figures | Derivation |
|---|---|---|
| fourteen thousand pounds saved | savings = 14,000 | on the sheet |
| seven weeks | last_gap_weeks = 7 | on the sheet |
| twelve hundred / fourteen thousand / nearly a year | careful_month = 1,200; savings = 14,000; savings / careful_month | on the sheet |
| three thousand one hundred | fixed_costs = 3,100 | fixed_costs = rent + bills + other_fixed |
| about five thousand pounds | round(fixed_costs * last_gap_weeks / 4.33; -3) | on the sheet |
| fourteen thousand / four and a half | savings = 14,000; round(savings / fixed_costs; 1) | on the sheet |
| six months / eighteen thousand six hundred / four thousand six hundred short | 6; fixed_costs * 6; six_months_target - savings | on the sheet |
The turn
She divided by a careful month and got a year; divided by fixed costs it is four and a half, and the smaller number is the useful one.
The Short
Monday
- Fixed costs on one line, savings on the next, divide.
- Write the months, not the pounds.
In Zeroed
Anita’s Runway goal is set in months. The ring shows four and a half of six, and the date it gets there at her current pace.
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