honestly even pretty comfortable people would get wiped out by a 5-10k expense in many cases, if it weren’t for the ability to go into debt or borrow against their home equity. If you don’t have great credit or were already using quite a bit of credit just to get by, and you don’t own any big assets like a house, you’re pretty screwed.
And then the same people who will say how irresponsible these people are for not saving money they don’t even have, will call you a fool if you don’t invest your savings (risking taking big losses if you have to pull it out in a hurry). If you press them on it maybe they’ll say you should have a buffer of 6 months of expenses saved before you start investing savings but for most people that’s gonna take ages to accrue if they can even save at all, and could be wiped out by an unexpected expense in the blink of an eye. you can’t just take $10-20/hr money and turn it into the savings of someone making $70-80k/yr. There isn’t enough there to start accruing much gains in stonks let alone interest, and they need the liquidity in case of emergency (not if but when)
We’ve been a paycheck to paycheck nation for like as long as I can remember
honestly even pretty comfortable people would get wiped out by a 5-10k expense in many cases, if it weren’t for the ability to go into debt or borrow against their home equity. If you don’t have great credit or were already using quite a bit of credit just to get by, and you don’t own any big assets like a house, you’re pretty screwed.
And then the same people who will say how irresponsible these people are for not saving money they don’t even have, will call you a fool if you don’t invest your savings (risking taking big losses if you have to pull it out in a hurry). If you press them on it maybe they’ll say you should have a buffer of 6 months of expenses saved before you start investing savings but for most people that’s gonna take ages to accrue if they can even save at all, and could be wiped out by an unexpected expense in the blink of an eye. you can’t just take $10-20/hr money and turn it into the savings of someone making $70-80k/yr. There isn’t enough there to start accruing much gains in stonks let alone interest, and they need the liquidity in case of emergency (not if but when)