Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below. For two years, a 29-year-old woman and her husband had been doing something they knew they were supposed to do: building an emergency fund. They'd managed to put away $4,000 in a joint savings account.
It wasn't enough to cover months of expenses, but it was enough to make an unexpected car repair or medical bill less frightening. Then one afternoon, she logged into the account. Her husband had moved roughly $3,900 to a cryptocurrency exchange three months earlier.
He was convinced a rally would push the investment significantly higher and that they'd be able to put the money back before they needed it. This Jeff Bezos-backed platform lets eligible investors buy fractional shares of rental properties for as little as $100. Earn While You Scroll: The Deloitte-Ranked #1 Software Company Growing 32,481% Is Opening Its $0.52/Share Round to Investors By the time they decided to sell, the position was worth about $2,340, turning the original $3,900 into a loss of roughly $1,560.
The financial loss was painful. Finding out that their emergency fund had been used without her knowledge was worse. Now they're trying to rebuild the savings they spent two years creating, but with one major difference: Both of them can see what's happening with the money.
It's the money sitting there for the transmission that suddenly fails, the medical bill that wasn't in the budget or the paycheck that doesn't arrive when expected. And those relatively small emergencies can be difficult to absorb without savings. The Federal Reserve's 2025 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking found that 63% of adults said they could cover a hypothetical $400 emergency using cash, savings or a credit card they could pay off with their next statement.
The other 37% said they would need to borrow, sell something or couldn't cover it. For this couple, they thought they had already solved that problem. The husband hadn't necessarily intended to lose the money.
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