[Terr_]

It doesn't say liquid assets though, it mentions multiple options which vary in how easily you can/should use one to pay an unexpected bill or period of unemployment.

For example, if one is using their life-insurance payouts to pay their rent... well, something has gone very wrong somewhere.

Specifically, this part:

> financial asset—which includes transaction accounts, certificates of deposit, savings bonds, other bonds, stocks, pooled investment funds, retirement accounts, cash value life insurance, and other managed assets

For the highly-liquid "transaction accounts" (checking, savings, money-market) the conditional [0] median is just $8k.

[0] AFAICT "conditional" here means "we don't include $0 data points in the median." That explains why the subcategory of "stocks" has a higher conditional median value than the more-general category of financial assets.

[smegma2]

Sure, I couldn’t find a better data source than that. If you find a better source that includes liquid assets specifically that would be helpful. I am skeptical that of the 39k in assets listed there, there isn’t a substantial amount that can be used to pay the bills (i.e. who has $39k in their 401k but $0 anywhere else?).

[Terr_]

It seems some "Survey Data" files are publicly available [0], but without investing a bit more effort in parsing them (which is definitely not happening on my phone) I'm not sure if they have the kind of household-by-household data that could be used.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm