It worked great when I did it, though I'd put an asterisk on the "without anything planned". I decided I wanted to move to NYC, but on my terms, not anybody els

It worked great when I did it, though I'd put an asterisk on the "without anything planned". I decided I wanted to move to NYC, but on my terms, not anybody else's. So I quit my job and kind of treated planning on moving as a job, as well as doing a few other things with the extra free time. But I also was pretty confident in my ability to find a new tech job in a good market. It worked well the last few times, and I changed my Linkedin location before I went just to see how many recruiters popped up. The traffic left me confident I'd be able to get a tech job there when I was ready. I also had a rough idea of how long I planned to stay without a job and how much it would cost and had enough to cover that comfortably, with enough extra buffer to come up with a new plan if getting a new job turned out to be harder than I thought. You don't necessarily need a "plan" like having a job, but you should do that sort of planning. Some people have enough rich family or friends that they'll never really end up on the streets somewhere if something goes wrong. If you don't, you'll just need to plan a little better, and beware of unknowns. There's a lot of ways things can go wrong, it'd be best to account for them. And to have the life experience to know what might go wrong and how.