Saturday, April 21, 2007

People Without Emergency Funds

I noticed that page 21 of this month's Money magazine has a nasty statistic at the bottom:

Flirting with Disaster: 49% of respondents in a recent survey conducted by Quicken said they had no emergency fund stashed away...


I looked around for more info regarding this survey, but I came up empty-handed. In any case, I'm left to wonder just who it was that Quicken/Intuit was surveying: Quicken users, or the public at large?

My impression has been that the percentage of Americans without designated emergency funds would be significantly higher than 49%.

Or maybe I'm just imagining our collective broke-ness.

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— Posted by Michael @ 11:18 AM








3 Comments:
 

the credit card has supplanted the emergency fund as a our security blanket. And 99.99% of us have these cards...

Anonymous Anonymous
, at 7:11 PM, April 21, 2007  
 

I agree with you Michael. I would have thought the percentage would be even higher. Anonymous is right. People are not bothering to create a cash emergency fund because they figure they can just use credit as their safety net. Never mind all the stories we've heard of people using credit for emergencies, only to be completely buried by it.

Anonymous Hazzard
, at 10:19 AM, April 22, 2007  
 

Hi, I"m one of those fools who used their credit card as their emergency fund. Looking back, I now see that the only thing one can really use a credit card for is to create debt. When I lost my job I had no choice but to declare bankruptcy. I now have an emergency fund equal to one month's pay and it scares the heck out of me that it's that tiny! ~Learned the hard way

Anonymous Anonymous
, at 5:27 AM, April 29, 2007  
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