Since you mention having finances to manage for some time, I can share that in my personal experience, when I lost my job amid a regional financial crisis, I focused my efforts on an open source project (something I built, I didn't join an existing one, though at first I did have former coworkers hack on it with me). I did it to stay busy (I found back then that it's important to stay busy and maintain a routine when you're out of work) and improve my skills, but as a side-effect, it got me a contractor offer from a remote company that found my project useful (it was a set of ha scripts for mysql, this was 2002, before there were proper ha tools for this database) and "hired" me using the project as resume.

I'm not saying it's a sure path to getting income, but at the worst case, you'll be left with something to show and some programming experience too.