Kudos to the NYC administration for putting this together so quickly.
Edit: took a look at your source.
>“The survey shows that a very significant minority of American households apparently don’t have the resources to pay for an unexpected expense of around $1,000,” says Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the Consumer Federation of America.
Interesting how this morphed into the claim that a majority of Americans can't afford a $500 expense.
People have learned to be wary I think of nutritional "studies" but it's taking them longer to catch on to the farcical nature of modern psychology. Which really IMO hasn't come that far from psychoanalysis of a few decades ago.
And how could it? All of psychology is based on subjective, non-experimental, non-verifiable, non-reproducable data.
We're watching all of our institutions collapse because it turns out not only are they (and individuals in our society) excessively interdependent, but they're also houses of cards...
Median household savings discluding a house, at retirement age, is just barely $100k (that is, enough to support retirement income above social security of a wopping ~$5k/year).
If you owe 300k on your house that's worth 400k, you might have a liquidity problem but you aren't poor.
There's also a colloquial phrase for it - house poor.
Another chunk of that $100k is probably tied up in a car, which has the same problems.