He shouldn't have been buying a leveraged investment property until he had an emergency fund.
With $100k+/year in income, he should have been finding a way to save $10k+ per year.
$400.00 in the bank (from the article)
To quote Mr. Money Mustache, every dollar you spend stops working for you. If you are a basketball star, a software engineer, or a movie star, let your relatively high income offset your future low income life.
Not to be critical, but to use as an illustrative example from your own life, you started your challenging period owning a Nissan 350z which got 12 mpg. If you had made exactly one different decision, buying a Honda Civic instead of that 350z, and everything else was the same, you would have hit that point with a car that got 35mpg and an additional $15,000 in your bank account.
So from a learning perspective, at the time you made the purchase of the 350z, thinking about value versus cost versus future expense, knowing what you know now do you make the same choice? I am not a fan of dwelling on past decisions, they were made and they are done. But I am a huge fan of learning as much as I can from the lessons life teaches to insure I am getting full value out of that education.
Granted if you're too aggressive with IRA investing or student loan payoff you can get in a situation like this. That's my downfall - I'd rather be in the market, but you really shouldn't expose your emergency fund to that kind of risk, especially given near-perfect correlation between market performance and personal financial security.
We also had to budget for a vacation abroad so that we could see the sun ;-) (I'm only partially joking...)
Its usually recommended to have 3-6 months of expenses in the event of income loss, but its only a rough guideline. In some industries or economic scenarios, you may go almost 12-24 months with a job or significant income (I leave out part time jobs or gig for keeping this simple).
In short, we don't save enough in America (for a variety of reasons), and we don't have a proper social safety net for when that comes back to bite us.
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Have 6-12 months of expenses saved in your emergency fund. This is critical. When possible max out your retirement accounts (a Roth IRA can be used as an emergency fund in a pinch; contributions can be removed at any time penalty fee, but this should be a last resort). Save more. Live below your means.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics
Infographic: https://i.imgur.com/fb7Dtmh.png
This implies setting your mortgage repayment rate at a level which leaves you with sufficient income to overpay it. Having set things up this way, you can then size your emergency fund on the assumption that you won't have to pay your mortgage out of it.
Why do this? Simply put, the savings on interest are massive and this improves your financial stability a great deal over time.
Why not do this? It requires careful and diligent financial planning, and that sort of person probably doesn't need telling how to take advantage of the subtleties of mortgages.
An investment property isn't liquid, and it's also leveraged.
If you're overleveraged, you'll make extra profits during the inflationary boom, but you'll get wiped out during the next recession.
It also depends on rent and your lifestyle.
I'm able to save 25%-50%+, but I live cheaply.
I'm luckier than the author since I have folks to crash with (relatives) and can borrow some of the items needed to get a new job (computers, car, etc). I have also been on the other end by letting a friend have a room while he got back on his feet.
From what I'm reading, you need to be making about 400k (household income) to make it to the 1%.