For veterans
Not a risk to be managed. Not a thing that costs you what you earned. If you want to work, this is built to get you there and to show you the arithmetic before you take the step, not after.
And if work is not where you are right now, that is what the first door is for. Mission comes first. Everything else follows it.
What ends at separation is not a paycheck. It is a structure — identity, unit, tempo, and an answer to what you are for. Risk runs highest in the months right after the uniform comes off, which is exactly when nobody is handing you a plan.
Post-separation risk runs roughly 3× higher than on active duty. VA literature review, cohort of 3,795,823 service members, 2001–2011. The three entrances below are placed where they actually apply — you do not have to take them in order, and none of them expires.
Each one is a single web page. No login, no account, no install. Nothing you type leaves your device.
What am I for now?
Answer what you actually missed when you got out — the team, the tempo, being trusted with something — and how physical the work can be, including not at all. The list reorders into roles that fit. Several of them sit inside this portfolio and can be filled directly rather than referred out.
Plus safe places, what the first year should look like, and the record behind every claim. No discharge-status gate.
Enter →Does treatment cost me my compensation?
The answer turns on one thing almost nobody tells you: how the program is characterized on paper. A conviction plus a penal institution over 60 days cuts compensation from the 61st day. Work release, halfway house, residential reentry and community control do not. Neither does a misdemeanor, and neither does no conviction at all.
Walk your own path through it and see where the exposure actually sits — before you agree to anything in a courtroom.
In preparationWhat happens to them on the day it ends?
The program treats a death more harshly than an improvement. When a veteran’s condition improves, the caregiver gets 60 days’ notice and 90 days of continued benefits. When the veteran dies, the caregiver gets 90 days starting that day — bereaved, unemployed, and losing their health coverage in the same moment.
Holdfast shows every route out, ranked by how much runway it actually leaves, and what to do inside it.
Enter →Two entrances, because two different sets of rules.
This is the one that decides whether going back to work costs you anything. Enter what you get now and what you would earn, and get back the month-by-month projection: the month the check stops, the size of the drop, the total across four years — then what stays protected anyway, and the way back in if it does not work out.
Partly because you went through something the person in the next line did not. But mostly because the arithmetic is genuinely different, and a veteran sent through a general door gets a number that is wrong:
Confirmed against SSA's own rulings, SSR 80-18 and SSR 82-31.
988, then press 1 · Text 838255
Confidential, 24 hours, and you do not need to be enrolled in VA care. This is the one phone number in the entire suite — everywhere else these apps name agencies and programs without contact details on purpose, because a wrong number handed to someone in a crisis is worse than no number at all.