Can I afford to change careers?
Last updated 7 August 2026 · written against career@1.1.0 · by the LEXUN team at CA Capital Limited
The checkable facts: 5,000 simulated paths per run · free, no account or card · your figures stay on this device (the optional Copilot is the one exception, and it sends only what you deliberately type or ask it to summarise) · forecasts frozen before outcomes are known, then Brier-scored in public — misses included.
Whether the move is right is a life question no calculator should pretend to answer. Whether you can afford it is a maths question — and it has four inputs.
The only four numbers that matter financially
- Your buffer — savings you could genuinely spend during the transition (not your ISA-you'd-never-touch).
- Your essential monthly costs — from bank statements, not memory. Most people's true minimum month is 10–20% higher than their guess.
- The income ramp — how many months until the new path pays what you expect. A salaried job ramps in one month; freelancing and founding typically take six or more.
- Income volatility — salaried income barely moves; freelance income routinely swings 20–40% month to month, which drains buffers faster than the average suggests.
The question a simulation can answer honestly: in what fraction of plausible futures does your buffer stay above zero until the new income carries you?
A real worked example
Someone leaving a £2,600/month job to freelance, with £12,000 saved, £2,400/month essential costs, expecting £2,600/month after a 6-month ramp, at 30% monthly volatility:
buffer £12,000 · essentials £2,400/mo · target income £2,600/mo · ramp 6mo · volatility 30% · horizon 12m
On these stated inputs the engine says 90–100% — financially resilient. But the stress scenario (income −30%, ramp 3 months slower) collapses to 7% survival. That gap is the real finding: the plan works if the income estimate is honest, and fails badly if it's hope. The single most valuable thing this person can do before resigning is turn that income assumption into evidence — a written offer, or two or three signed clients.
What people get wrong
- Counting the average, not the ramp. Most failed transitions die in months 2–5, while income is still ramping — not at the average income level.
- Optimistic essential costs. If you've never had a bank-statement month at your claimed minimum, it isn't your minimum.
- Fast ramp + volatile income. Income that arrives immediately at full rate *and* swings 30% a month is a contradiction. Pick one honestly.
- Forgetting the return option. The ability to go back to employment mid-way makes your true downside less bad than any simulation shows — in your favour, and worth stating.
The honest context
Career moves are normal, not reckless: roughly 2.9 million UK workers changed jobs in 2025 (Indeed Hiring Lab, citing ONS).
What we won't tell you: there is no defensible statistic for the probability a career change "succeeds" — definitions vary too much to pool, and anyone quoting one at you is making it up. LEXUN's career model therefore forecasts only the resolvable question — does your buffer survive the transition? — and says so plainly rather than inventing a success rate.
Work out yours
Runs entirely in your browser; your figures stay on this device — the optional Copilot is the one exception, and it sends only what you deliberately type or ask it to summarise. You'll get a survival band, the break-even income where the odds flip, what waiting-and-saving another few months does, and a frozen criterion to come back and score against reality.
Run the career-change analysis →Method note — maths, assumptions, failure modes
The maths. The model simulates your financial buffer through an income transition: essential costs drain the buffer monthly while income ramps linearly from zero (or your current income end-date) to the expected new level over the stated ramp months, with log-normal shocks of mean exactly one scaled by income volatility — so raising volatility widens the spread without moving the average, and a month’s income can be small but never negative. 5,000 seeded paths; a path fails when the buffer hits zero. Output is P(buffer survives the horizon) as a band.
Key assumptions. The ramp is linear — real freelance ramps are lumpy; essential costs are treated as fixed (inflation and lifestyle drift are not modelled); the model deliberately refuses to forecast career "success", which has no defensible base rate — only the resolvable buffer question.
Failure modes. Salaried moves with a signed offer make most inputs facts and the band tight; founder/freelance moves rest on assumed income, and the confidence rating will say so. Partner income or emergency borrowing are not modelled — if they exist, your true downside is better than shown.
References. Labour-mobility context: ~2.9M UK job changers in 2025 (Indeed Hiring Lab / ONS). An independent deterministic heuristic cross-checks every simulation and material disagreement is displayed, not hidden — details on the Accuracy Centre.
Related guides. The same method applied to two other decisions: business or personal runway, and a large purchase or commitment. Terms such as survival band, frozen criterion and Brier score are defined in the decision glossary, and you can re-run a published result yourself before relying on any of it.
Stated weaknesses — what this model cannot see
These are career@1.1.0's blind spots, stated from the recurrence itself:
It scores buffer survival, and only that. Whether the career change succeeds has no defensible base rate, so the model refuses to score it rather than inventing one. What you get is the financial floor under the decision, not the decision.
The ramp is a straight line. Income climbs linearly to full over the ramp months. Real ramps are lumpy — probation, first-invoice delays, commission cliffs — and a lump in the wrong month can matter more than the slope.
Essential costs are frozen for the whole horizon. No rent rise, no cost shock, no life event.
Income shocks are symmetric and independent month to month. A freelancer's feast-and-famine autocorrelation is not represented.
Severance, benefits and side income don't exist unless you fold them into the numbers you give it.
If one of these is the crux of your situation, the model is the wrong tool — the insufficient-evidence state is how it says so when it can tell, and this list is how we say so when it cannot.