33-year-old was laid off 10 months ago—how she covers her $4,400 monthly expenses without a full-time job

This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Millennial Money series, which details how people around the world earn, spend and save their money.

In January, Symone Austin was working a pretty typical day in her UX designer job when she got an email that made her stomach drop.

The 11 a.m. email from HR instructed her to clear her schedule for the day and be ready for a meeting in an hour. Austin, 33, says she’d been expecting the message for at least six months since her manager and several colleagues were laid off in mid-2024.

“I felt a wave of emotions: scared, very nervous, very anxious. I cried,” Austin tells CNBC Make It. “I just had a gut feeling that it was going to be the time that I was going to get laid off.”

Austin says she was, in fact, laid off over Zoom that day, along with around 20 of her co-workers. She wouldn’t know it yet, but she’d soon turn her hobby making YouTube videos into a new stream of income.