Victoria McNally, 28, who works full-time in marketing for a start-up in New York and has been laid off three times ("twice in media and once in publishing"), has been paying into her layoff fund for five years, but only christened it with that name after she lost her job for the first time. "I generally try to put in a little bit per paycheque, depending on how much I'm making and what my expenses are like that month. It's usually at least $100 (£77)," she says. "Every writer I know feels they should probably have [a layoff fund]. Whether they're able to afford to save money is another matter, but it's generally taken as a given now that job loss is inevitable in media and that finding a new position is much more difficult for writers who just lost theirs, because the pool of potential opportunities keeps shrinking and there's more freshly unemployed competition every day."