Our terrible health insurance situation makes potential spending any given month very bumpy. $10k should be enough to keep a single, frugal person in an OK situation for a good chunk of a year, at least, but could just as well be blown inside 24hrs by one slip on some ice or any number of other ER-worthy problems, and isn't enough to cover a healthcare plan that removes much of that uncertainty for any length of time while also paying rent and buying food.
if you're living in a tent eating rice and beans and getting your wifi from google fi 10k will last a very long time. I'm not being facetious, a friend went this route.
$10k barely covers the premiums + deductible for a health insurance plan on the individual market, or god forbid, COBRA. A safety net should cover expenses if you lose your job, which means losing your health insurance.
Feel free to adjust your numbers if you like. Personally, I have a hard time spending that much in a year.
The idea, though, is to save up enough that you don't need to think about losing your job as an existential threat. That's an easily attainable goal for a software guy, and it puts you in a nice position in a lot of ways.
You are defining a "safety net" that tacitly assumes a privileged middle class life, which makes the problem artificially simple.
For someone that genuinely comes from an impoverished background, creating a safety net can be substantially more complicated because it involves considerably more than just having a bit of money saved. Many poor people have no family whatsoever in any meaningful sense, which makes building a "safety net" more complicated -- there is more to a safety net than money. Most poor people have the social class equivalent of "technical debt" which requires a lot of time and money to eliminate, which is something most people from a middle class background are oblivious to because they've never had to worry about it.
Poor people are not middle class people without money. There is a ton of other baggage correlated with being poor that they have to contend with.
He is referring to people with CS degrees, not lower class people with no life skills. If you made it through college and got a degree, you're basically on track to be middle class.
