The Contingency Plan I Almost Had To Use
By the start of March, I knew my role no longer existed. The business kept me on until the end of June for handover, documentation, and a proper transition, which gave me something most people in this position don’t get: a known runway rather than an open-ended one. Whatever was going to happen needed to be sorted before the end of June.
That should have been reassuring. It mostly wasn’t. LinkedIn was full of people describing job searches stretching to six, twelve, eighteen months. With two kids, a mortgage, and car payments to keep covering, that wasn’t an abstract worry. It was the maths I found myself doing, more than once, in the weeks that followed.
Somewhere around week six of job hunting, without much traction, I started looking seriously at freelancing. Not as a first choice. As a genuine fallback, in case the job search didn’t come through in time.
The thing nobody tells you going in is that freelancing after redundancy isn’t starting from zero. It’s starting from a negative. Before a single day is billable, there are real costs to clear. Company registration. Business insurance. An accountant, because getting that wrong isn’t worth the risk. Equipment suited to actually doing the work, if what you’ve got isn’t up to it.
I got real numbers rather than guessing. A business insurance quote came in at £267. On the accounting side, there were two routes, each with a genuinely different figure attached: a limited company, drawing a salary and dividends as a director, at £1,740 a year including VAT, or registering as a sole trader and filing a self-assessment return, at £720 a year. The limited company costs more than double, but it comes with proper liability protection and a more official structure. Sole trader is cheaper, but your personal assets sit more exposed if anything goes wrong.
Equipment was the other real cost, though the plan there was more measured than it might sound. The Lenovo ThinkPad would stay as the daily driver for actual development work, that machine was never the problem. What I’d have needed was a light second device purely for client-facing work: demos, notes, the odd Teams call, nothing processor or memory intensive. A 15-inch MacBook Air, 16GB, base configuration, came to around £1,500.
The reasoning behind wanting a Mac at all wasn’t guesswork. A while earlier I’d borrowed a spare M1 MacBook Pro and daily-driven it for a stretch, partly out of curiosity, partly because my ThinkPad’s battery life was genuinely poor for anything mobile: it dropped 35% in two hours of light use. The MacBook, doing similar work over the same two hours, dropped 2%. For a job that would involve travelling to clients and working from wherever I happened to be, that gap was the whole argument.
Alongside the laptop, a proper USB-C dock: the Anker Prime 14-in-1 8K Thunderbolt 5, £400. The peripherals themselves, two monitors, webcam, microphone, keyboard, and mouse, were all things I already owned; the dock’s job was to let either machine plug into all of them through a single cable, rather than re-wiring everything by hand every time I switched devices. That was a fixed cost regardless of which laptop route I went with.
Total realistic equipment spend: around £1,900. If someone’s situation is different, no existing capable daily driver, or a workload that genuinely can’t be split across two machines, the maths changes. A properly specced 16-inch MacBook Pro capable of carrying the full workload alone runs to around £3,749, with Apple’s refurbished store the obvious way to bring that down.
Add it up and the real number was somewhere between £2,900 and £3,900, insurance, accountancy, and equipment, depending on which accountancy route I’d have gone with. That’s not pocket change to find in the middle of a redundancy. The payout was already being mentally divided: how long it needed to cover ordinary living costs, and how much of it this would eat into before a single invoice went out.
Worth being clear about which parts of that are one-off and which aren’t. The equipment is a one-time cost, you’re not buying a new laptop every year. Insurance and accountancy fees are not. Those are annual costs, whether you pay them monthly or in one lump sum, and they come round again every single year you keep freelancing. That’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough: it’s not just that year one starts negative. Every year starts negative, before a single invoice goes out, for as long as you’re doing this.
The real risk sat behind that number rather than in it. If the job search failed and freelancing didn’t work either, this wasn’t a story about a disappointing few months. It was the mortgage, the car payments, and a credit file that would follow me for years afterwards, affecting whether I could rent, finance a car, or get credit on reasonable terms long after the immediate crisis had passed.
One decision was already made if the job search failed: the car was going back at the end of the summer holidays. Before that point, three days out with the kids, so summer still felt normal to them even while I knew what might be coming. It didn’t come to that in the end, the job search worked out, and I kept the car. But the plan was real enough that I’d already worked out exactly when and how I’d unwind it.
Two more worries sat alongside the money, and these were about whether there’d be any work to bill for in the first place, not just what it would cost to get started.
The first was AI. There was a lot of noise at the time about people building products directly through tools like this rather than engaging a developer or an agency at all, vibe-coding something to market on their own. Hard to put a number on, but a real worry: was demand for freelance development work about to shrink just as I needed to rely on it?
The second was the practical reality of platforms like Fiverr. The name gives away the original model. It’s a race to the bottom, and getting started as an unknown means underpricing everyone already established just to be seen at all. I looked into it properly. Most listings were things like “build me a WordPress plugin” for £15, work that would realistically take several hours, not the sub-hour rate the price implied. Not a viable way to build a sustainable income.
Here’s the slightly uncomfortable part: Fiverr would probably still have been where I went for initial visibility, because agency-level rates aren’t realistic for someone with no track record on the platform yet. That’s the actual tension. The platform that makes it hardest to price your time properly is often the only door open when you’re starting from nothing.
What mattered more than either worry, in the end, was something harder to put a number on: clients wanting someone who’d done this before. Established, reliable, able to slot into a team and deliver on time. That’s a much harder problem to solve than an insurance quote or an accountancy fee.
The deadline I gave myself was the end of May, not the end of June. That gap mattered: it gave me June itself to actually get everything in place rather than starting from a standing start, getting an accountant on board, registering the company, spending evenings redesigning the website and value proposition, doing proper market research, and putting feelers out to anyone who might need a contractor. The goal was to walk into July able to hit the ground running, not still setting things up while the clock was already ticking. A few interviews had gone somewhere by the end of May and come to nothing, which is exactly the kind of thing that sharpens a deadline rather than softening it.
In the end, I didn’t need it. A good run of interviews turned into three separate offers on the table before the freelance path ever had to be triggered. Choosing full-time work over freelancing wasn’t really a decision about money. It was about stability: a steady income, being able to plan a normal week, rather than working extra hours to hit deadlines, chasing invoices, negotiating rates, and carrying that low hum of cash flow stress the whole time.
Worth being clear about what this actually was. Not a hypothetical I sketched out to feel prepared. A genuine, costed, nearly-executed contingency, insurance quote, accountancy figures, equipment plan, and a firm date, that I chose not to use. The choice to stay employed was made with full knowledge of what the alternative actually involved, not in ignorance of it.
If you’re reading this in the middle of your own redundancy, weighing up whether freelancing is the fallback, here’s the honest version. It isn’t a zero-cost, zero-risk safety net. There’s a real negative balance to clear before you earn a penny, insurance, an accountant, the right equipment, somewhere in the region of £3,000 in year one, and a genuine recurring cost of £720-£1,740 a year after that, on top of whatever you spend actually running the business.
None of that means it can’t work. People freelance and contract successfully all the time, and there are genuinely good contracts out there for people who can deliver. This isn’t meant as doom and gloom. It’s meant as the version of the maths that doesn’t get talked about enough: freelancing isn’t automatically the easy route to freedom or being your own boss that it can look like from the outside, especially not straight out of a redundancy. Go in with the real number and the real risks in view, not just the appeal of it, and you’re in a much better position to make it work if that’s the path you take.