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A stat about 40% of US homes being one paycheck from trouble made the rounds at my warehouse, so I ran the numbers myself and got a very different story
Last Tuesday at our morning huddle in the break room, a guy on my crew pulled up a viral chart saying 4 in 10 American homes can't cover a $400 emergency, and everyone nodded like it was gospel. I got curious and pulled the actual Fed survey it came from, and the fine print said it was 4 in 10 adults, not homes, and the question was about covering it with cash or an equal value, which includes selling stuff or borrowing from family. Half my team would pass that test easily if you counted selling a truck or calling a brother in law. I also noticed the sample was around 11,000 people for a country of 260 million adults, so the margin of error was somewhere near a point, fine, but the headline strip mined one number out of a 60 page report. Now I want to know if anyone else has dug into that one, because I think the real story is how people define emergency in the first place.
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young.thomas4h ago
What counts as cash or an equal value, does a credit card limit count?
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