BY GINA SCALA

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

With an unsteady economy and employment picture, and a debt crisis in Europe that rivals the 2008 U.S. crash, is it any wonder nearly a quarter of the American population couldn’t survive a personal financial crisis?

Still, the statics are frightening for a society where a double-dip recession is more likely to happen than not. Roughly 24 percent of Americans have no emergency savings at all, according to the Financial Security Index poll, conducted for Bankrate.com. Just 22 percent have enough save to cover, in the best of circumstances, three months’ worth of expenses, the study found.

The idea of having enough saved to cover six months of living expenses, as recommended by financial planning experts, seems unrealistic for most Americans. The study found only one in four people has enough money to sustain a six month loss of wages.

Among people aged 65 or older, 39 percent reported at least six months worth of savings, the study found. But 15 percent also said they had nothing saved at all. That number jumps by 20 percent for Americans aged 18-29. And 63 percent of younger Americans said they’d saved enough for only three months of living expenses.

"It still looks like a lot of people are skating on very thin ice," says Frank Armstrong, a certified financial planner and president of Investor Solutions in Miami.

Many Americans have not recovered from the 2008 crash. Other Americans held on to steady employment for as long as they could before they were laid off completely or saw a significant reduction in their employment. As a result, they’ve depleted whatever emergency funds they had; increasing the number of at-risk households having to rely on credit or just not being able to afford the basics.

When the economy is steady and employment is plentiful many people put off saving for the rainy day.

"It's like dieting," says Mark Cortazzo, CFP, and founder of Flat Fee Portfolios of Parsippany, N.J. "People feel as though they're sacrificing and feel like they have less."

The survey was carried out for Bankrate by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, which spoke to 1,006 Americans in its research. The reported margin of error for the research was plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.