[illumin8]

I hate to break it to you but you're living beyond your means. A high interest loan is not an emergency fund. Ideally you should have enough money to live for 6-12 months if your income stopped tomorrow.

I know when I was younger I didn't have such things, but then the recession of 2002 hit and I found out really quickly how much it sucks trying to make a house payment with an unemployment check.

[GFischer]

I know I am, but one of the niceties of a socialist system is that if I get fired, I get paid my salary for a year and a half in unemployment :) , plus three months' salary straight away.

I actually wish I was fired :) (though the black mark in the CV here is really bad). The really bad thing about this system is that it's based on seniority, if I switch jobs, I lose all those perks (start back at zero, only get some minor unemployment after 3 months on the job)

I'm also neither a homeowner nor a parent, and could scale back my spending to zero pretty quickly (moving in with my grandfather and selling my car). Not a long term strategy, obviously, and I am thinking of becoming a parent (in 2-3 years) which will force me to be way more conservative with money.