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SHED: share who would pay a hypothetical $400 emergency expense entirely with cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement.
Latest: 63% answered “Cash or equivalent” in Fed SHED, 2025.
Shares of people whose answer maps onto these categories (non-answers and answers outside the scale are left out), because surveys differ in whether they offer “don’t know.” Each column is one survey wave, evenly spaced rather than to scale in time; hover for exact shares.
Shares of people whose answer maps onto these categories (non-answers and answers outside the scale are left out), because surveys differ in whether they offer “don’t know.” Each point is one survey wave at the middle of its field period. Lines from different surveys are never spliced together.
Groups differ from everyone by 15 points on average across all answers.
| Line | Question | Match | How answers map |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fed SHED | Would cover $400 emergency using only cash or equivalent Derived by opinion-space, not asked directly, following the Federal Reserve's definition: whether the respondent would cover a hypothetical $400 emergency expense exclusively using cash or its equivalent (cash, money in a checking or savings account, or a credit card paid in full at the next statement), from the multiple-response item "Suppose that you have an emergency expense that costs $400. Based on your current financial situation, how would you pay for this expense?" Definition and published series: Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025 (May 2026), p. 3 (PDF p. 7) and figure 24, p. 46 (PDF p. 50). Caveat: Derived from the EF3 battery per the Fed's definition. | identical | Cash or its equivalent → Cash or equivalent; Other means or could not pay → Other means or could not |
Groups differ from everyone by 13 points on average across all answers.
Subgroup charts are picked automatically. Of every breakdown in the data (party, ideology, age, sex, race, education, income, region, religion, and community type), these two put their groups furthest from everyone’s answers: the gap is averaged across all answer categories and waves, with each group weighted by its share of respondents. Party and ideology count as one choice, so the second chart shows a different kind of split. Groups with an effective sample under 50 in a wave are left out of that wave.