I can probably cover 2–4 months.
Hasn’t been like that for the biggest part of the previous 20 years, but since one year I managed to.

Edited to write 2–4, instead of 4–6.
Never been my strong suit; accounting…

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: In addition to my ‘real’ job, I am the owner/publisher of published resource that brings in about ¾ of my regular salary. So if I had to, I can survive for a while.

People who have employment worry too much about having things, and not enough about saving for maintenance or disaster.
I fell into the same trap. Now that I am disabled, and my income is below poverty level, and will not improve, I am much better at seeing where cuts could have been made. I do the best I can to have something set aside, but nowadays it is more like $20 a month rather than ten times that. If SS crashes, I am doomed.

I made sure I’d be okay a long time ago, yes.

Yes, I don’t draw a salary any more but I keep enough liquidity to see me through some bad times.

I’m old enough that I would just retire.

Plus-sized male underwear modeling. If that fails I’d probably try to get into Business Intelligence/data analytics.

Oh yes. Underwear modeling. Forgot about that one. I’ll sign up for that too.

Plan A: Collect unemployment until I find a gig or unemployment runs out, then…

Plan B: Start eating through my liquid savings, which is about 8 months salary. I could probably stretch it to a year. Once that runs out…

Plan C: Cobble together multiple part time jobs and make do. I currently have two part time gigs on top of my full time one — so I’d keep those and try to add a couple more. If that fails, then…

Plan D: Ask the wife to pick up some part time work on top of her full time gig. Failing that…

Plan E: Sell my house and furniture, bank any profits, and move into my mother in law’s empty third floor. Live there very cheaply until I eventually get a new full time gig. Barring that…

Plan F: Drive car off road in an accident so wife and kid can collect a ridiculous amount of life insurance money.

@cookieman starting with step F would save a whole lot of tension and suffering.

No! No plan F, ever!

Um…thanks the advice @elbanditoroso (I think).

@Patty_Melt: Yeah, I’d prefer not to get that far down the list. My wife was unemployed for three years once. We only made it to Plan D.

We are D-I-N-K-S and have zero debts, one income can easily carry us until the other finds a job, and in case we lost both incomes we could easily go six months before things got tight.

I’m living off of my back up plan right now. I’ve been saving for a rainy day since I can remember, going back to childhood.

In my early 20’s I wound up using up my savings and going into some debt when I wasn’t making much money. The debt never really registered on anything official, because my dad sent me $1k and in the meantime I got a job that paid more. I started saving again.

I got married in my mid 20’s and we always have had savings, at least $10k between us, which when we were first married would have lasted 2.5 months if both of us lost our jobs at the same time. By age 30 we were living on just my husband’s salary, and everything I made was savings and fun. In our mid 30’s we really looked at how much we needed and wanted for retirement. My husband is from a spending family, so this discussion was very helpful to get him even more in the frame of mind of saving for the future, and actually doing some math for it.

My husband was laid off 4 years ago, and since then he has had no income on and off. He did have some severance and then unemployment for some months when he was laid off. For 2 of the 4 years we owned a business that made money, but less than half of his old salary.

Even fairly recently my husband said to me he never thought he would be in this position of having a hard time getting a job in his field, and I just don’t understand how anyone can say that. Especially my husband considering we have many many friends older than us who went through being laid off in their 40’s and 50’s (back about 10–15 years ago) and at least half of them never made it back to the same positions or salaries.

Right now we could probably live off of our savings for several years, assuming nothing drastic changes regarding expenses, inflation, or emergencies, and assuming just paying to live with practically no spending on entertainment and travel, etc., and I’m very grateful I saved all those years. I wish I had more. Several years does not get me to social security or Medicare, and I don’t count on nothing tragic happening. My healthcare deductible is $15k! One major illness and it’s a huge dent.

My husband is looking for a job now, I currently work part-time.

We managed to make it through 5 months of unemployment (and, incidentally, no insurance) last year, but it wiped out what little we had in the 401K.

I don’t understand why they’re lining up at food banks. If they are that destitute they should qualify for food stamps. We did, during the afore mentioned 5 months and Kansas is one of the most rabidly conservative states in the US. I would think they’d even get special consideration under their circumstances.

@Dutchess_III “If they are that destitute they should qualify for food stamps.”

I think the application process is totally bogged down. More people are trying to apply for benefits and ask questions, and I believe they have fewer employees able to handle those requests—also due to the shutdown.

It didn’t take me 10 minutes to apply. I had to wait a week to actually get them though. Even if I had to wait a few hours and three weeks to get the benefits, I still would.

I talked to a friend of mine who woks for the SRS, and they are funded through a different “pot” than other organizations. They aren’t shut down, at least here in Kansas they aren’t

Something that keeps bugging me is…aren’t flight controllers hired by the airlines, and not the government? I haven’t looked into it yet, but I’m curious.

@Dutchess_III No, air traffic controllers are Federal employees.

They must be, because that’s what I’m hearing. But why? Why aren’t they employees of the airlines? It’s just time to google.

Airspace security.
They are “the wall of the airways. Much more so than the guys who wave metal detector wands.

Well, air traffic controllers are not there to weed out terrorists. They’re there to land terrorists safely if they have a plan full of hostages and want to land.