 I just made a $20,697 mistake. If you haven't already watched my video on emergency funds and why they're important, well then I suggest that you watch it now as I am very clearly more than ever putting it to use. When I was let go from Chromatic, I was offered two months severance. Now, severance is kind of an interesting topic because it is nice to get it and it is nice when you receive it, but they're not really given benevolently. They're basically like an insurance settlement to keep you from being able to sue the company for wrongful termination if you should decide to. I'll make another video about that, another time today we're talking about a stupid mistake that cost me a lot of money. When you join a company, you'll probably fill out some kind of W-4 form that's might be integrated into the software that they're using, but basically this is a form that allows the company to withhold taxes for you. In the US, the IRS has a tax estimator that you can use to estimate how much tax you want withheld. It's always on how you plan to file, what deductions that you think you can take. If you plan on making extra money, you might want to withhold more. I usually set mine high because I make little pockets of extra money throughout the year and it's easier for me to not have to think about it that much. However, a time that you're absolutely supposed to be thinking about changing your tax with holding are for life events. Right here, life events on the form and one of them is for a new career or joblessness. Now, clearly I made the mistake of not adjusting it and if I'm doing my math right, that mistake cost me $20,600 and 97 cents. Now, I'm not in the business of making recommendations but I can tell you what I wish I would have done. I wish that first thing I would have contacted my HR representative and asked for the form that allows me to legally change my withholding. I know that in the past, I had control over that in ADP. In gusto, it looks like there wasn't a form for that inside of the UI. So your mileage is gonna change dramatically on this but is your HR representative's job to make sure that you get the right form and that it is tracked and put in the right place before you get money. So take advantage of that. Now, I don't wanna cross into financial advice by telling you what you should set that to. For me, I tried to set that as low as possible, especially since this happened in the first month or so of the year. I have a whole year to figure out what my tax situation is gonna look like and I'd like to have that money now or it can be the most useful to me. Reasonably, you may assume that the percentage of what's withheld will be similar to your paycheck. However, this is not the case. It seems almost like the assumption from whatever underlying system is used is that now for the rest of the year, I'm going to be making five pay periods in one pay period and so we should withdraw however much that would be for the whole year and that's just not the case. Now, I haven't lost this money per se, like it's not gone, but it is locked away from me. I can't just like go to the IRS and ask for some of it back. Anyway, that's it. I just don't want you to get stuck in the same situation that I got stuck in with like a big bucket of money just locked away from me for a year. If you wanna watch my video on emergency funds and how I'm able to not stress out about that too much, it's right here. Hopefully you find yourself better prepared for this situation than me. See ya.