[Excerpt of article by Faye Griffiths-Smith]:
Have you ever been taken by surprise by an expense such as a car or home repair, a refrigerator that needs to be replaced immediately, or school expenses? Often we need to act quickly so that we can get to work, keep a small problem from getting bigger, or make it possible for a child to participate in school activities. Managing regular bills can be hard enough without shock of additional bills. In one of the professional development workshops I teach, I ask the participants work together in small groups to list examples of unexpected financial events in their lives and those of their clients. As you might guess, once they get started, they have no trouble creating very long lists.
Several recent studies have indicated that many of us are not prepared financially to deal with the unexpected events in our lives. The Federal Reserve Report on the Economic Well-Bing of U.S. Households in 2017 (https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2017-report-economic-w...) pointed out the 40% of households could not cover an unexpected $400 expense. DataHaven’s 2018 Community Wellbeing Survey (www.ctdatahaven.org/reports/datahaven-community-wellbeing-survey) found that 50% of Connecticut adults estimated that their savings would last less than 6 months. As challenging as it can be to deal with unanticipated bills, there are steps we can take to improve our ability to weather such events in the future.
Link:
https://blog.extension.uconn.edu/2019/03/01/saving-for-the-unexpected/
