That's ridiculous. With that logic, if you're supposed to save X months of cash, then the very first cent you take out of that X months of cash savings, you alr

That's ridiculous. With that logic, if you're supposed to save X months of cash, then the very first cent you take out of that X months of cash savings, you already fucked up, b/c now you have less than X months of savings. Suppose you wanted to overcome this. So then you decide to start working a second job so you never have to touch the emergency savings. Then that defeats the entire point of the emergency savings, which is to be used when there is an emergency. The company could also be said to be fucking itself over if it can't have enough cash to prevent layoffs of necessary employees. If it doesn't have enough cash at hand, it will need to lose talent and be forced to try to rehire when the economy rebounds. A competitor with a good savings account could instead leap past b/c they could simply dip into their savings and continue to build for the rebound, with all their engineers on board.