The government shutdown ended late last week. It went on for 35 days and meant that nearly 800,000 government employees and contractors missed two paychecks. Furloughed workers took out high-interest loans and second mortgages on their homes, and visited food pantries to get meals on the table. Though workers are still digging out, the worst of the nightmare is over for now due to a temporary spending bill; still, the government could shut down again in a few weeks.

For the rest of the country looking on, the question of what we would do if we missed two paychecks in a row was on many people’s minds. And for many, it was no mystery: They wouldn’t be able to afford it.

I’m a financial educator and adviser. Experts in my field have a wide variety of views and often disagree on specifics. Yet there is near-universal agreement on this: Always have an emergency fund — money set aside for unexpected costs such as medical bills, a broken-down car, or when the government is locked in a legislative battle that leaves you furloughed for a month.  

In my 15 years of doing this job, people rarely are kept up at night because they worry about the specifics of tax-efficient investment or an inability to calculate interest rates. It is much more likely that they worry about having enough resources to weather a storm. It’s why prioritizing an emergency fund is likely to make your nights more restful and your financial life more resilient in the years to come.

An emergency fund is not meant to cover costs like a splurge, a vacation, or home maintenance. It is money set aside to manage unexpected drops in income or increases in expenses. Many experts advise three to six months of earnings.

Early in my career, when I suggested to working families that they put away this amount in an untouched emergency fund, most would look at me with shock. I quickly learned that the idea of moving from living paycheck to paycheck to having six months of earnings saved in the bank was so implausible, it was comical.  

Many people I taught didn’t have adequate savings, and they weren’t alone — most Americans have very little set aside. According to the Federal Reserve, 41 percent of Americans could not cover an unplanned $400 expense without incurring credit card debt they wouldn’t be able to pay off that month. Only about half of Americans have an emergency fund at all, and according to data from the US Financial Health Pulse, more than a third of American are unable to pay their bills on time. And let’s not even start on retirement.

The reason is systemic. Americans are forced to rely on themselves in emergencies way more than people in most other wealthy countries that have much stronger safety nets. Relative to other developed countries — for example, Scandinavian ones — we have thinner unemployment insurance programs. We have a privatized health care system that often requires individuals to make costly personal payments. We are more likely to own cars and homes, which means that individuals are more likely to face large unexpected home or car expenses. All these factors make emergency savings much more important here than in other advanced economies — and much more difficult to have.

Why an emergency fund is important

During the shutdown, workers were forced to cope with their loss of income in many ways. Many turned to the gig economy or looked for temporary jobs like substitute teaching or freelancing. But unpredictable, low-paying side gigs usually can’t produce anything close to the amount workers need to pay their bills.

Others turned to credit cards to cover their expenses. This money is easy to access and might seem convenient, but long-term, it’s an expensive solution. The average interest rate for those with lower credit scores is 25 percent, so debt can very quickly grow out of control.

Another common option is taking payday loans. In this setup, a person agrees to let the lender access their checking account or gives the lender a check that the lender can cash as soon as their next paycheck hits the account. Payday loans are typically due just a week or two later. The average loan size is $350. But payday loan interest rates are usually more than 10 times as severe as credit cards, making it easy to spiral into deepening debt.

Saving for an emergency fund is hard. Here’s how to start:

1) Take baby steps: One piece of advice I always give to someone who is just starting an emergency fund is to ignore the advice of three to six months savings for now. Instead, just try to save $500. If the goal feels achievable, you’ll be much more motivated to get started. The momentum and feeling of success from achieving your goal will help you take the next step. For most people, I find, the second $500 is a lot easier to save than the first. Don’t worry about having a large amount saved on day one; just focus on getting started.

Once you have saved $500, keep going! Financial adviser and writer Bert Whitehead advises that people with dependable jobs keep 10 percent of their salary in a normal emergency fund, with the caveat that self-employed people or people with income volatility such as commissioned sales people or contractors need more.

2) Think of it as giving future you a loan: Imagine sitting at a table with a future version of you. Consider what emergency makes future you need help. Get really specific: Have you wrecked your car and still need to get to work? Is it a medical issue? Do you need to travel for a family emergency? Say yes to future you; drop it in your emergency fund.

3) Automate saving so you don’t forget: It’s very hard to remember to do something every week or every month. It’s harder yet to take action consistently. So don’t try to remember each week or each month — set up an automated solution to do it for you. Some people call this “paying yourself first.” Set up your bank account or paycheck so that it automatically moves money into a sub-account.

4) If you are a spender, make it annoying to access your emergency fund: For those who are disciplined savers and careful spenders, it’s just fine to keep the money in a checking account (it’ll help you keep a higher balance, which often helps reduce or eliminate account fees). For people who have a history of impulsive spending, credit card debt, or trouble setting limits, having the money visible and readily accessible may be too tempting. Consider putting the money into an account at a different institution. That way, if you log in to your checking account, you won’t see the emergency fund money.

5) Have an accountability partner: If you don’t have an emergency fund or you have one and it isn’t adequate, you are not alone. Way more than half of Americans (and many people you know) are in the same boat. Choose a friend or family member and set goals together. Every so often, check back in about how you’re doing with your savings. Knowing you’ll need to report back might offer the extra accountability you need to finally make progress.

6) If you take out money, put it back: I had a friend who was hired as a high-paid corporate lawyer and asked what tips I had for him. Among the things we discussed was the importance of emergency savings. A few years later, during the 2008 crisis, he was laid off. When we talked about it, I told him, “This is why you set up a rainy-day fund — it’s raining.” He got an embarrassed look and said there was nothing significant left, since a year earlier he’d had car troubles. He clarified that I hadn’t said anything about putting money back in if you take it out.

If you take money out, put it back! Bad news often comes in bunches. It’s important to rebuild your stability by replenishing your emergency fund quickly. For instance, federal workers might be wise to reserve a share of their back pay to refill their emergency fund. They may well need it again in three weeks when the continuing resolution expires.

7) If you could use professional help, make sure you get it: Many industry lobbyists work hard to keep the US system hard to navigate. There’s a dizzying range of financial decisions. If you want professional advice, you might find it at no cost through an employee assistance program at work. If you’d like to hire a financial adviser, consider avoiding conflicts by choosing a fiduciary adviser. I recommend making sure they don’t accept commissions. A good way to find a fiduciary adviser is to choose someone from a group like Alliance for Comprehensive Planners, XY Planning Network, NAPFA, or the Garret Network.  

8) Support candidates who want to improve our safety net: Rather than individuals struggling to set aside money to cover health care costs or job loss, it’d be better if the US had an adequate safety net. Americans live in a country where it is usually financially prudent to leave money tied up in low-return emergency funds. That’s a policy failure. Of course, we should do the prudent thing for our households — but we should work toward a future where each family doesn’t have to allocate funds in this wasteful and inefficient way.

Many people read about the government shutdown and got the uneasy feeling that if something like that happened to them, they’d be in trouble. If that was your experience and you don’t have an emergency fund already, take this chance to start one — even if you are only starting with $50, make it happen and you can build from there.

Almost everyone will have an unexpected drop in income or a significant unforeseen expense. Emergency funds can be the difference between a sinkhole of debt that’s hard to escape and financial stability. You can start right now.

Zach Teutsch is a partner at Values Added Financial (VAF), a fee-only, fiduciary firm that helps clients structure their finances to support living prosperous, fulfilling lives. He is a member of the Alliance for Comprehensive Planners. Before launching VAF, he worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the Office of Financial Empowerment. He previously built the first national financial skills education programs for unions. Find him on Twitter @zteutsch.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

Sometimes a clarification of a mistake is even more damning than the mistake itself.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer declared this week, in an attempt to show that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is worse than Hitler, that Hitler “didn’t even sink to the level of using chemical weapons.”

Given the obvious fact that Hitler did in fact use chemical weapons — a large share of Holocaust victims were gassed — Spicer clarified.

“He was not using the gas on his own people,” he said.

This is yet another obviously false statement: Thousands of Germans — Jewish, Communist, LGBTQ+, Romani, people with disabilities, and others — were gassed.

But it’s arguably even worse than the first because of what it implies: that Spicer thinks German Jews weren’t really Germans.

This is personal for me. Many of my father’s family members were gassed by the Nazis, and they were certainly German.

They loved Germany, and were it not for the genocide, their descendants would likely be living happily in Germany to this day. In fact, it was precisely because they so identified as Germans that they stayed until it was too late.

Our story isn’t unusual. Germany’s Jewish population in 1933 was 565,000. Just 37,000 remained in 1950.

It is shameful that Spicer erased their stories with his remarks this week. His erasure is part of two important patterns: a pattern of behavior with this administration and also a very long pattern of anti-Semitism in Western civilization.

My family’s life in Germany

My ancestors lived in Germany for centuries; their presence there was first documented in the 17th century. Though they were Jewish, they chose traditional German names and took great pride in their country. My great-grandfathers were German officers in World War I and successful professionally. Arthur received the German military award the Iron Cross, wrote a dissertation on administrative law in Bavaria, and achieved the title of Justizrat, reserved for prominent attorneys. Alexander served as a department director of Dresdner Bank in Augsburg. They lived happy, unremarkable lives. They worked hard, spent time with their families, and had friends, Christian and Jewish alike.

For a little while after the Nazis came to power, it wasn’t so bad. One branch of our family operated a shoe business (Schwagers of Cham), and they did well in the early years, as the military bought a lot of shoes.

Soon though, the Nazis gained more power and used it, in part, to subjugate minorities. Many in the family thought of this period as a horrible aberration and certain to pass — soon, they thought, reasonable people will run the country again. After all, they were loyal Germans; they thought that things would certainly return to normal.

On November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, an officially coordinated pogrom coupled with large-scale incarceration, shattered their lives. The SS and Gestapo forcibly removed approximately 30,000 Jewish men from their homes, among them were the men of our family. They were detained in Dachau, a concentration camp near Munich. Eventually, many of them were gassed to death with Zyklon B in death camps.

My father’s father survived — after some time in Dachau he was released. He previously applied for a visa to come to the United States, but the wait was long. Because of that status he was permitted to go to a Kitchener transit camp in England where he stayed until he was accepted to the United States in late 1939. He became a citizen and lived a remarkably successful life — notable for someone who was banned from middle school because of his ethnicity. His parents, who were late middle-aged, believed that the trouble would soon pass and didn’t apply for a US visa until much later. They were killed by the Nazis in 1943.

A pattern within the Trump administration

Spicer’s comments this week are not new for this administration: Ever since the campaign, there have been many moments indicating hostility to Jews. In one episode, Donald Trump tweeted a meme focusing on a Jewish star and money, which Matt Yglesias showed originated from white supremacists. In another example, Donald Trump Jr. likened unfavorable media coverage to Holocaust victims’ treatment in gas chambers.

Just a week after his inauguration, President Trump made a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day that omitted reference to Jews as victims — he referred simply to the “innocent people” who died at the hands of the Nazis.

This was a major departure from decades of past practice and was quickly and rightly identified as an act of anti-Semitism. Without context, the statement might seem completely reasonable and benign. In many cases, referring generally to innocent people rather than enumerating them would be fine.

In this particular instance, there is a more problematic context. Many neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and their allies were thrilled with this choice, since they seek to minimize the victimization of Jews when discussing the Holocaust. On the face of it, the change doesn’t appear very major. But when one understands it as putting aside longstanding, bipartisan White House approaches to instead use a neo-Nazi talking point, the episode is deeply disturbing.

Several administration officials, notably Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, have longstanding ties to white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and fascist groups. Add the exceptional support and praise of David Duke, perhaps the US’s most prominent Klansman, anti-Semite, and Holocaust denier, and one can see a clear pattern of anti-Semitic political support, personnel, and speech.  

It’s not only Jews who have been treated with hostility by the Trump administration. Its members routinely vilify Hispanics, Native Americans, immigrants, and Muslims, to name a few of the more recently prominent. Not only has the Trump administration worked to use its bully pulpit to make these communities feel unwelcome and endangered, it has also used its administrative tools to put them at risk.

A pattern throughout history

For millennia, Jews have mostly lived in countries where they were minority groups. Sometimes it went well and sometimes it didn’t. Those opposed to Jews living peacefully as part of their countries have traditionally relied on a few major tropes. Among them, that Jews aren’t really trustworthy and they aren’t really “like us.” A prominent example of this is the Nazi idea of Volksgemeinschaft: that there is a German volk, a people, and that it was defined in a way that kept Jewish-German citizens outside it.

The propaganda approach preceded the legal discrimination. The Nazi regime began by crafting the ideal of Germans (light-skinned, blonde, blue-eyed, etc.) and differentiating them from various groups they described as degenerate (Jews, Romani, people with disabilities, etc.). The Nazis pushed the idea that these degenerate groups would mix with true Germans and spoil Germany. They also blamed many of Germany’s misfortunes on these groups, especially Jews.

As the Nazis worked to narrow the cultural understanding of who really is German, they also passed the Nuremberg laws to institutionalize many of these discriminatory ideas. These laws forced my great-grandfather, and tens thousands of others, out of their professions. It started with pushing the idea that various sub-groups weren’t really German and were the cause of many problems.    

When Spicer implied that German Jews weren’t German, despite people like my family members who lived in Germany for hundreds of years, it hits a very raw nerve. Does he think American Jews are as American as he is or other American Christians are? Does he think that other minority groups are real Americans? The pattern of this administration so far indicates that it doesn’t.

This is especially alarming because of how it fits in with centuries of anti-Semitism. It’s also hard not to see the parallels to the current administration’s treatment of immigrants and Muslims. What’s important isn’t that my ancestors were German, but that we understand the consequences of a narrowing definition of who was a real German then — or a real American now.   

Why I am speaking out

This is the first time in my life I have ever publicly noted someone’s anti-Semitism, and I don’t do so lightly. I do it because America is stronger politically, morally, and practically when we celebrate one of our most important values: diversity. Many people have come to this country to escape oppression, famine, persecution, and war, and others were brought here as slaves. These immigrants and their descendants of all religions and ethnicities have been some of our leading Americans, scientists, politicians, business leaders, generals, entertainers, journalists, and academics.

We became the dominant world power because we have long accepted and integrated those from all places. If we want America to remain a superpower, we’ll need to continue to embrace our diversity — plus, it’s the right thing to do.

My family were loyal Germans for centuries. We’ve lived here in the US since 1939. We are so grateful to be Americans now. We love America and dream to always be Americans. We are no less American than our friends and neighbors whose families have been here since before the Revolutionary War. When Trump and his staff imply otherwise, they degrade America and insult every American citizen.

Zach Teutsch is a values-focused financial adviser helping clients structure their financial lives to support living fulfilling lives. He is also the chairperson of his Advisory Neighborhood Commission in Washington, DC, and active in several Jewish communities. Visit his website, and follow him on Twitter: @zteutsch.   

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.