Suze Orman says 41% of workers delay medical care when emergencies hit — and 1 in 4 raid retirement savings

Suze Orman says 41% of workers delay medical care when emergencies hit — and 1 in 4 raid retirement savings

Laura Boast

Wed, August 26, 2026 at 7:30 PM GMT+3 6 min read

For years, Suze Orman has preached that everyone should have an emergency fund for unexpected expenses — a code-red piggy bank, as it were. She even co-founded SecureSave, an employer-sponsored automated savings plan, to help employees build one.

The assumption is that workers can set aside three to six months' worth of expenses in an emergency fund. But Orman was struck by a recent SecureSave survey that found most workers haven't saved anywhere near that — forcing them to make dire choices in a crisis.

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"No one in this country should have to skip a meal or delay medical care because a car repair came first — yet that's exactly what 41% of workers told us they're doing," Orman said.

SecureSave surveyed over 1,000 working Americans aged 18 to 65 in June. One in four had no emergency fund at all while 67% had less than three months' expenses set aside. Far less.

At least 45% had less than a month's expenses saved up. This is consistent with an 2025 Empower survey that found that Americans' had a median $500 in emergency savings.

That's why many workers are doing without when faced with a crisis — choosing between food and car repairs, for example. Many more are turning to credit cards to stay afloat.

Concerningly, one in four workers dips into retirement savings to cover unexpected expenses. Some report that they don't think they'll be able to retire at all due to the snowball effect of debt.

Moneywise reached out to Craig Copeland, director of Wealth Benefits Research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), to find out what can be done to help American workers build up their emergency savings in the short term to protect their long-term financial security.

Why employers offer emergency-fund savings plans

One of the reasons Orman recommends an emergency fund is to reduce financial anxiety, which not only keeps workers up at night but distracts them at work.

Three in four report that financial worries affect their motivation on the job, according to a 2026 survey by CAPTRUST, a financial advisory firm. It can lead to absenteeism. In fact, 38% of SecureSave survey respondents said they'd skipped work due to financial woes.

There's a price tag for all this lost productivity in the U.S.: $183 billion annually, according to a November 2025 Fidelity report. That's motivation for employers to get involved, with 77% of employers telling EBRI that they had or planned to offer emergency savings plans to employees.

Copeland noted that some firms have set up emergency savings plans tied to workplace retirement savings under the SECURE 2.0 Act. Such plans may:

• Allow employees to take out emergency loans or even withdraw up to $1,000 penalty-free from 401(k) retirement plans.

• Offer pension-linked emergency savings accounts (PLESAs) to workers earning $150,000 or less. Workers can save up to $2,500 in after-tax contributions in these accounts. Any more than that is redirected into their workplace retirement savings plan.

As Copeland said, there are some disadvantages to such plans. PLESAs are complicated. Not only is there the $150,000 income cutoff, but payroll administrators have to track the $2,500 contribution limit for every employee. And $2,500 is not enough to cover a lot of emergencies, he added.

"Let's say you need a roof repair or your engine is kaput," Copeland told Moneywise. "Those repairs can easily go past $2,000 and you don't have anything left over for it."

Moreover, from a personal finance point of view, it's not ideal to associate emergency savings with retirement accounts, he said.

"It's good to think of those things as two separate sources of funds, although there are sometimes catastrophic situations where you may need to dip into retirement savings," he said.

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Delta offers emergency savings incentives

Josh Jessup agrees. He's Delta Air Lines' general manager of global retirement and financial wellness. In 2023, Delta launched an emergency savings program for employees in partnership with Fidelity.

"We want to disconnect people's thoughts of their retirement accounts as the place to go to for emergencies," Jessup said at the time.

The emergency savings plan includes incentives. When Delta employees open an emergency savings account, they get a financial education course and one-on-one coaching — and a $750 employer top-up to their account. Delta also provides up to a $250 match to a worker's contributions to their accounts, for a total $1,000 employer contribution.

While not all firms offer such incentives, many are partnering with companies like BlackRock, Fidelity, SecureSave, SoFi and Sunny Day to offer their employees emergency savings plans, with funds automatically withdrawn from paychecks and deposited into their emergency accounts.

Meanwhile, as CNBC reports, bipartisan lawmakers are doing what they can to improve the PLESA rules with the proposed Emergency Savings Enhancement Act, which would increase the emergency savings limit to $5,000.

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Orman says you don't have to have a workplace-based emergency savings plan to automate deposits into an emergency savings account. You can set up your own, preferably making deposits into a high-yield savings account with 3% interest or more.

This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Suze Orman says 41% of workers delay medical care when emergencies hit — and 1 in 4 raid retirement savings

This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.