BuzzFeed, a VC-backed news and entertainment website, recently announced it was laying off 15 percent of its workforce, or roughly 200 people.

BuzzFeed’s head of HR, Lenke Taylor noted that the company is giving all laid-off employees severance packages of a minimum 10 weeks pay.

Unfortunately, those employees who only get 10 weeks of severance pay are getting shortchanged by 20 days minimum. Let me explain.

Whenever there are impending mass layoffs with companies with over 50-100 employees, companies must file a WARN notification with the state.

A company doing a mass layoff must then pay the state’s required Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act pay.

The WARN Act of 1988 is a US labor law which generally provides 60 calendar-day advance notification of plant closings and mass layoffs of employees.

But in New York State, where BuzzFeed is headquartered, the WARN Act applies to private businesses with 50 or more full-time workers and requires companies to pay 90 days of WARN Act pay.

If you are a NYC worker getting 10 weeks of “severance,” that equals 70 days of pay. 90 days – 70 days = 20 missing WARN Act paydays. Yet so far, I’ve heard nobody fight for these missing days because few know the rules.

When an employee is laid off, generally what happens is that he or she doesn’t have to come back to the office again. The employee proceeds to receive his or her WARN Act pay based on a normal payroll schedule for the duration of the WARN Act pay.

Some of you don’t believe me that it’s better to retire in a bear market, when all is in shambles, than in a bull market. I, for one, found it very hard to quit the money when times were good. I was always suffering from the “one more year syndrome.”

Seriously, as soon as my year-end bonus hit my bank account in mid-February, I would tell myself why not stick around for another 10 months to at least hear how much I would get. During the period when I was told (mid-December) and when I got paid, I had the option of just taking it easy if I wanted to do something else.

But after bonuses dried up during the financial crisis and main street really started hating anybody who worked in finance, I found it so much easier to walk away. When you had nothing to do with someone welching on their mortgage, yet still got blamed for the crisis while you continued to pay your own, working in finance started to get real old.

Then there was the issue of getting micromanaged by an insecure and uninspiring colleague out of NYC. Finally, a large part of my compensation was being paid in company stock that was also plunging. Why stick around? It’s not like I was doing something meaningful like helping disabled children with abusive parents find safe homes and loving caretakers.

Despite giving up all my portfolio gains for the year and then some, I’m thankful for the incredible recovery we’ve had since 2009. Without the bull run, I probably wouldn’t have been able to stay unemployed since 2012. The value of money comes nowhere near the value of time.

It’s sad the good times are going away. For so long, it’s been so easy to make easy money. Unless you’re Juggernaut, it’s probably not a good idea to step in front of a bus. The stock market is clearly telegraphing a slowdown in corporate earnings, and the economy by extension. The housing sector usually takes several years to work its way through a funk.

The Fed has also made it clear it will continue to raise rates, no matter how much carnage there is in the short term. You would think they’d slow down their pace of rate increases in 2019, but I wouldn’t count on them being rational. With the yield curve resuming its flattening as investors find safety in longer duration treasuries, we need to seriously be careful about how much risk exposure we really want to take. Flat or inverted yield curves have seldom ever signified good news for the economy. Build your CD step stool folks.

Enough of being a measured voice through times of volatility.

During this Thanksgiving holiday, I wanted to share one extremely lucky event that occurred in my life. During times of difficulty, it’s always good to reflect and be grateful for what we have. I hope you will use the holidays to reflect on some of your fortunate events as well and share.