Living on the Edge

How close are you to life without a home?
 
A friend of mine is running a go-fund-me to pay for medical expenses related to cancer. He has health insurance. He as the same health insurance I have. We have great health insurance. He needs about $1000 per month—probably for a year—to pay for expenses that aren’t covered. What would you do if you had to make an emergency payment?
 
Neal Gabler writes in The Atlantic about the inability of middle-class people in the United States to handle an emergency. The latest Federal Reserve survey monitoring our economic status found that 47% of us do not have enough cash to cover a $400 emergency. $400.
 
Further, a study by Jacob Hacker at Yale shows that each year 20% of us have an unexpected event that costs more than our savings. Edward Wolff, an economist at New York University has found that working families making $50,000 a year have enough cash to carry on for six days if they lost their jobs.
 
Credit card debt, financial illiteracy, and bad choices certainly contribute to this problem. So does what the market looks like when you need to sell property, whether you lose a job (or as Gabler notes, take too long to write a book), whether you can find a new job when you are ready to do so. For lots of people, the problem is simply that income doesn’t grow at the same rate as expenses.
 
Where ever the fault lies, someone who can’t pay for $400 emergency will be in trouble once an emergency happens. Check out Neal Gabler’s article and see what you think. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/