Last week, I wrote a piece about the strangely contentious topic of how many people are living “paycheck to paycheck” in America. One statistic cited in that debate comes from the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), which asks the following question:

Have you set aside emergency or rainy day funds that would cover your expenses for 3 months in case of sickness, job loss, economic downturn, or other emergencies?

In both 2022 and 2023, 54 percent of adults answered yes to this question, indicating that they have at least three months of emergency savings. In my piece last week, I showed that one-fourth of the respondents who say they have a three-month emergency fund also say they cannot afford an emergency expense over $2,000, which seems to contradict their claims about how much emergency savings they have. When you exclude those people from the emergency-fund figure, the number drops from 54 percent to 41 percent.

In addition to seeing whether these respondents contradict themselves in the same year, we can also see what happens to respondents who say they have three months of emergency savings in the year after they gave that answer. SHED is administered in the fall of each year. So for the calculations below, I grabbed every respondent who had a three-month emergency fund in the fall of 2022 and then looked at how they answered various economic security questions in the fall of 2023.

Nearly half (44%) of adults who said they had three months of emergency savings in 2022 no longer said they had that much savings in 2023. The seemingly stable cross-sectional data that shows that 54 percent of adults had a three-month emergency fund in 2022 and then again in 2023 is obscuring an enormous amount of churn into and out of that category. Only 30 percent of respondents said they had three months of emergency savings in both 2022 and 2023.

That fact that so many people move in and out of having at least three months of savings doesn’t necessarily mean that they are facing economic insecurity or that they are living paycheck to paycheck. One could imagine an economy where income volatility was pretty high and so most people constantly build up and spend down an emergency fund, which successfully buffers them against economic shocks.

But the answers to the other questions are harder to square with the idea that everyone who said they had a three-month emergency fund in fall of 2022 was, in fact, protected from economic insecurity for the next 12 months. One-fourth of these people said they had to skip necessary medical care during this period because they could not afford it. This is an especially astonishing figure when you consider that this can only possibly be true of people who needed significant medical care during this period. The number who would have had to skip necessary medical care due to cost—among those who actually needed care—must be even higher.

Thirteen percent of these people said that in the month prior to being re-surveyed in 2023, they did not pay all of their bills. Another six percent said that, in that month, they often or sometimes did not have enough to eat. Nearly one in ten said that, in the last 12 months, they struggled to pay their bills due to personal income volatility.

Needless to say, these figures significantly undermine the idea that the 54 percent of people who say they have three months of emergency savings are well-protected against “sickness, job loss, economic downturn, or other emergencies.”