IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-137-48237-2_1.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Paying for the Unexpected: Making the Case for a New Generation of Strategies to Boost Emergency Savings, Affording Contingencies, and Liquid Resources for Low-Income Families

In: A Fragile Balance

Author

Listed:
  • J. Michael Collins

Abstract

Low-income households’ accumulation of liquid savings is an important and growing issue, and one that has not yet attracted significant attention in the United States. Financial advisors commonly recommend that people have three to six months of income as liquid savings, stored as cash, demand deposits, or other funds that can be accessed within a few days. This rule of thumb is based at least in part on the fact that it could take three to six months to find a new job in case of unemployment, and liquid funds can provide an emergency safety net for this period (Chang, Hanna, and Fan 1997). However, for lower-income families, a three-month savings cushion is difficult to accumulate. As these households face lower incomes and higher relative costs for housing, transportation, food, and other essentials, just making ends meet is a challenge.

Suggested Citation

  • J. Michael Collins, 2015. "Paying for the Unexpected: Making the Case for a New Generation of Strategies to Boost Emergency Savings, Affording Contingencies, and Liquid Resources for Low-Income Families," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: J. Michael Collins (ed.), A Fragile Balance, chapter 0, pages 1-15, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-48237-2_1
    DOI: 10.1057/9781137482372_1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniela Fernanda Diaz & Sonia Di Giannatale & Irvin Rojas, 2023. "Financial Vulnerability and Financial Instruments: Evidence from Mexico," Sobre México. Revista de Economía, Sobre México. Temas en economía, vol. 1(8), pages 94-134.
    2. Ndlovu, Godfrey & Toerien, Francois, 2020. "The distributional impact of access to finance on poverty: evidence from selected countries in Sub-Saharan Africa," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 52(C).
    3. Dee Warmath & Genevieve E. O'Connor & Casey Newmeyer & Nancy Wong, 2022. "Have I saved enough to social distance? The role of household financial preparedness in public health response," Journal of Consumer Affairs, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 56(1), pages 319-338, March.
    4. Stacy, Christina Plerhoples & Theodos, Brett & Bai, Bing, 2018. "How to prevent mortgage default without skin in the game: Evidence from an integrated homeownership support nonprofit," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 39(C), pages 17-24.
    5. Catarina Midões & Mateo Seré, 2022. "Living with Reduced Income: An Analysis of Household Financial Vulnerability Under COVID-19," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 161(1), pages 125-149, May.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-48237-2_1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.