I think your emergency fund suggestions are too small. People should have more than a month of money socked away in their emergency fund. – Darwin I agree with you. An ideal situation likely has every American family with at least a year of living expenses stowed away in savings. The problem is that we don’t live in an ideal world. Even before coronavirus, 80% of Americans lived paycheck to paycheck, meaning that missing a single paycheck would lead directly to missing bills and juggling finances. Telling someone in that situation to sock away a year’s worth of living expenses is like telling someone going on their first hike to go climb Mount Everest. [ More: How to Start Building an Emergency Fund ] My usual emergency fund recommendation is to get people to a point where they can rely on that fund for a lot of common emergencies — a month’s worth of living expenses should handle that — and then to perpetually fund it by having a weekly automatic transfer from their checking account to whatever account they store their emergency fund in. That’s because, past a certain point (and that point is admittedly very debatable), it’s better to try to start addressing your monthly cash flow instead of adding a lot more to your emergency fund. You should start trying to permanently reduce your monthly expenses, particularly by repaying debt, but also by cutting and eliminating services. Cutting your expenses is a sure way to reduce the money going out.