6 months. Single mom, low salary. I'm always afraid of ending up in a van down by the river so I save and keep expenses low.

We are pretty young high earners with very secure jobs, but we probably only have 4 months of runway and we'd be pulling that from a brokerage account. We have a lot in retirement which I guess we could pull too, if need be. Our biggest issue is the mortgage - we have a large mortgage with a lot of equity in the house, but that wouldn't do us a whole lot of good unless we were to move (which we wouldn't).

I could miss one paycheck but after that I would have to use credit to pay bills and buy groceries. I have about $30,000 in untapped credit because I pay cc in full every month. I don't have enough saved but I only make $45,000 as a single person living inside the beltway.

Forever as long as my spouse's job stayed secure since we don't need my Fed income to cover our expenses. If that job disappeared too, we could last 2-3 years without too much trouble and after that we'd have to start liquidating assets which would probably give us 5-10 years depending on the market before having to tap into retirement funds.

Went 18 mos in NYC a few years ago.

Forever. We are already both retired.

If I lived lean, I could make it at least six years.

If both my wife and I didn't have jobs, probably a year or more without touching retirement savings.

Anonymous wrote:7-9 months. After that I’d be hitting up retirement funds.

This is us too.

Probably 6 months if I tapped my home equity line of credit and used emergency account. Maybe longer if we were really frugal.

We both work and I make about 60% of our income. When my kids were young and in daycare, we had 6 months savings. As a contractor, I was out of work between contracts for about 6 months at one point. Being at home, I did the shopping and adjusted our purchasing, plus coupon'ed and shopped sales and cooked. We went out to eat once or twice during that time (as opposed to 1-2 times a week when working). At the end of 6 months, when I resumed working, we had half of our emergency fund left. Now the kids are in school, so our childcare is lower, but we have a higher mortgage. So, I'd say we could probably go about 9 months or so on one paycheck. Probably about 4 with no paychecks.

My spouse is a fed, but excepted, so has to work. I am a federal contractor and my contract is covered until January 31. So we have one paycheck coming in right now, but that will end January 31.

We've gone 18 months.
Twice.

7-9 months. After that I’d be hitting up retirement funds.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In theory, we could live on one income forever. We don't have much left on our mortgage and we could cover all the bills under one income. And we wouldn't need childcare anymore with only one income.

In the case of federal workers not getting paychecks, they still need childcare, either because they are working without pay or because they know that have to go back to work at a moment's notice when the government reopens.

+1 If we knew the shutdown was going to x number of weeks or months, we could take action accordingly. But no one knows if it will end tomorrow or in April.

I'm a recent college grad who just got laid off after 5 months because of downsizing. I'm trying to get another job but I was not socking away savings because I was aggressively trying to pay off CC debt that I got while in college. So I currently have no savings and no money coming in. Only option is to use those CC that I paid down. Grrr