I have no idea how people even sleep at night, knowing they’re just a couple of paychecks away from being out on the street. I’d stroke out, I really think I would. I had a bout of income loss, six months’ worth, finally got a job, late summer of last year. I know some of what this guy’s going through, but I had savings to fall back upon.
I'm the same way. I've always saved enough so that I had enough non-IRA money that I could go 12 to 18 months without income.
This report doesn't give enough info to figure out just how this family came to live paycheck to paycheck, but it's not hard to imagine.
We never had to dip into our 401 k, but it was very tight when my twin daughters were born. We weren’t planning on having twins, and then they both almost died. We spent over $150/mo just on diapers for 3 kids (they had an older brother), and they twins needed this special formula that cost something like $400/mo.
Then when they were 2, they both needed speech therapy and the insurance wouldn’t pay for it. We paid $200/week on 2 hours of speech therapy for each kid.
My husband’s job is iffy right now, but we now have plenty of savings. If he did loose it, the worst that would happen would be that we would have to sell our house. We live in California and have a huge mortgage. If we sold our house, we could move to a much cheaper area and live on our savings for a long time.