Hello Manifold! I need help calibrating my earning potential.

Context:

• I'm in the fortunate position of preparing to be a dad (due date July 20)

• I'm in the unfortunate position of recently losing my job at Meta (happened yesterday)

I have a decent amount saved up. But my loved ones (and I) are still anxious. I need help navigating the uncertainty 😬

Currently:

• I have two Master's degrees, one in Journalism, another in Computer Science (through a dual degree program at Columbia University)

• My background is 7 years of building AI tools (chatbots, agents, LLM pipelines), information retrieval systems, and recommender systems for newsrooms (WSJ), nonprofits (Local News Lab at Columbia, Internews Europe), small <8 head count startups (Applied XL, NewsWyze), and most recently Meta (where I worked just over one year). My biggest claim to fame is building aiportrait.wsj.com

• I live in New York. With $4K monthly rent, I'm budgeting a total $7K monthly spend when including living costs. This might give an idea of how much I'm motivated to earn. My goal is to be able to live less frugally than that, and also save about half of what I'm making

• I run a nonprofit (Spherical Harmonics) with about $30K in grants and donations raised so far. I don't intend to pay myself any of this money

• I'm keen to find work ASAP, though I plan not to work (besides light admin and job searching) for the ~3 months between end of July and end of October

• Over the next 4 months, I'm expecting about $110K (+/- 10K) from remaining time-off, severance, and stock vests (my total compensation was around $350K/year), hence the lower bound

• Both my partner's and my health insurance are also covered for another 18 months. I won't be including that in my earnings, but this will help keep cost of living lower, and makes contract work more attractive

I'll answer any further questions in comments. I also promise to be as transparent as possible about developments. This market will resolve to my gross income (pre-tax, not including benefits, and not subtracting any living costs) from now (May 21st, 2026) to end of 2026. If for whatever reason I can't disclose part of my earnings, this market will N/A.

So, without further ado:

How much can I reasonably expect to earn over the next ~7 months?