After a layoff, Brandy Savage lived on nearly two years of savings. When the money ran out, returning to her mother's house lowered her expenses and gave her room to figure out what she wanted to build next.
When I asked Brandy Savage how she kept herself financially afloat after being laid off, she gave me the answer before I finished the question.
Well, move back in with your mom is a good one.
Okay…fair.
People talk about taking time to figure out what comes next, and I immediately want to know what paid for that time. Rent is still due while you're discovering yourself. So are the phone bill, groceries and all the other expenses that do not care that you're in your midlife alignment era.
That is what Brandy calls this chapter of her life. She is 42, living with her mother and documenting online as she works out what she wants to build after corporate life.
This is the version of starting over I want to know about.
The first layoff changed how she handled money
Brandy was 23 or 24 when she was laid off from the American Cheese Society.
Yes, that is a real organization. It is a nonprofit for artisanal and farmstead cheesemakers across North America, and I probably could have spent another 20 minutes asking her about that job alone.
At the time, though, the layoff was scary. Brandy cried, worried about what she would do and found another job a few months later. She also started building what she calls a slush fund. The experience had made one thing very clear: a job could disappear.
Over the years, Brandy has been laid off more than once. She has also quit jobs without another one lined up, moved to Florida to live with a friend while she looked for work and started over in new cities.
Just before her most recent layoff, she was secretly working two full-time jobs at the same time. Neither employer knew. She was juggling laptops and trying to keep meetings from colliding, which sounds like my personal version of hell. She was also making enough money to pay down as much debt as possible and save aggressively.
“Stack these chips for the inevitable,” she remembers telling herself.
About a year later, she was laid off from a real estate tech company.
Her savings gave her time to try things
Brandy had enough saved to live for about a year and a half, almost two years.
That is a lot of time to have between jobs, and she knew it. She did not have a mortgage or children depending on her income. The savings meant she did not have to grab the first job she could find either.
So she tried things.
She took on consulting and other project work. She considered what else she might do with the skills she had built across learning and development, higher education, tech training, HR, change management and marketing. She also interviewed for a few corporate jobs, but she could hear her own lack of interest.
I'm half-assing it. Y'all don't like me. We're fine. Whatever.
That part made me laugh because Brandy knows how to work. She had been doing it for close to 15 years. Work ethic was clearly not the issue.
She was tired of forcing herself to care about work she did not care about.
Before the layoff, she had already reached the point where she felt like she was acting at work, and not particularly well anymore. “I couldn't fake it,” she told me.
The savings gave her space to keep looking. Eventually, they ran out.
She moved home on April Fool's Day
Brandy moved back to the town where she grew up on April 1. For the first two weeks, she cried when she woke up and again before she went to bed.
“I can't believe I screwed up so much that this is what happened,” she remembers thinking.
She had degrees, years of experience and a whole career behind her. Now she was back in her hometown, living with her mother at 42. To Brandy, that meant she had failed.
And she absolutely did not want anyone from home seeing her like this. She didn't want them to know she was back. She didn't want anyone watching while she felt lost and tried to figure out what came next.
So naturally, she started telling strangers on the internet.
Around May, Brandy decided to start posting about moving home and feeling like a failure. People responded by telling her she was lucky to have somewhere safe to go.
Her mother said something similar. Brandy's grandmother died when her mother was 27. Her mother told her there had been many moments in her own life when she would have loved to have the option Brandy had now.
Once Brandy got past what she calls her self-pity mode, she could see what they meant.
If I didn't have this, I would be homeless. That's the reality.
Brandy did not completely retire the word failure. She shrugged at it.
You can be a failure at something you don't actually want to be good at. That's totally okay. So now what are you going to do with it?
Okay, but how is she making money now?
This is always my next question.
When I asked Brandy how she is supporting herself during this transition, she laughed.
Barely, babies.
Right now she takes freelance training work and AI training projects when they are available. Some of the AI projects pay well, she says, and she can do the work when a project comes up. It is nowhere near what she earned before.
Her expenses are much lower now. Housing is covered, her other bills are fairly light and she doesn't need every project to replace her old salary. That gives her more time to work on her own content and see where it leads.
And I need to pause here because “she moved home and started building her brand” sounds way more complete than what is actually happening. The brand isn't paying her YET. She's taking freelance training and AI projects when they come up while figuring out how to make money from the skills she already has.
She keeps calling herself a beginner, but...
Brandy kept calling herself a beginner, and every time she did, I had questions.
Creating content is new. Talking about herself online is even newer. But the woman knows how to teach.
She knows how to engage a room, design a learning experience and help people move through change. The question is how to use those skills in a way that feels like her now...ideally with women who are asking the same kinds of questions she is.
She has started imagining small groups that work together for several weeks, eventually meeting for a retreat somewhere with nice weather and beautiful drinks. She wants to build community around women asking, “Something has to change…so what now?”
She does not know how close she is to making that happen.
In the meantime, she is at YouTube University learning how to edit videos and create content. She will record something, decide she hates it, edit it too much and sometimes never post it. Then she tries again.
She blocked her mother before she started posting
This may have been my favorite detail from our conversation because...girl, I GET IT.
When Brandy decided to document her life online, she blocked her mother, other family members and people from her hometown. Two cousins found early versions of her TikTok, so she blocked them too.
Nobody had even said anything. She just didn't want people who already knew her watching while she felt lost, changed her mind, tried things and figured herself out in public.
Strangers were easier. They didn't have an old job, city or version of Brandy to compare her to. They met her right in the middle of the story.
And I understood exactly why that gave her more room to be messy. The people who have known you the longest can have the clearest idea of who they think you are. Trying something new is already uncomfortable. Doing it while imagining everybody back home watching? Absolutely not!!
Brandy wants someone to find her later and scroll all the way back. She wants the videos she almost didn't post to still be there. If the ideas become offers and the offers eventually make money, people will be able to see what the work looked like before any of that happened.
She still doesn't know what comes next
That is exactly why I wanted to talk to Brandy now.
There is no big reveal at the end of her story. She hasn't replaced her corporate salary with a thriving brand. She's still taking project work, learning how to make content and trying to figure out what she wants to build.
I completely understood why Brandy moved home instead of rushing back into another corporate job.
Some of us would rather tighten up and run our lives lean if it gives us a real chance to figure it out. Because a job doesn't only get your time. It gets your energy, your attention and some of your best ideas too. And the corporation getting all of that still does not care about the life you're trying to build when you log off.
Moving home lowered Brandy's expenses and gave her somewhere safe to keep trying after the savings ran out. Money was tighter. She had more of her own time and energy left to work with. I get that tradeoff completely.
Brandy believes the options available now make it possible to build work around who you are in ways that didn't exist when we first entered the workplace.
You get to actually do you and be you. And if you do it well enough, you can make some good money.
Then she laughed.
I hear. I haven't done that yet.
Watch the full conversation with Brandy on YouTube:
Connect with Brandy
YouTube: @thebrandysavage
Instagram: @thebrandysavage
Threads: @thebrandysavage
TikTok: @brandysavage
Brandy Savage is documenting what starting over at 42 actually looks like while she is still living through it. Follow along as she rebuilds, experiments with new ways of working, and figures out what comes next. Watch her full conversation with Elle Mills on She Chose Again, an Out of Edits interview series about what happens after women decide something needs to change.
