Money kept aside gives an unexpected problem fewer other parts of life to damage.

Savings are less about wealth than about containment. A broken boiler with money behind it is an inconvenience, and the same boiler without it becomes a missed payment, a borrowed favour, an argument at the kitchen table. The trouble does not get bigger, it just spreads into rooms it had no business entering. A buffer is the wall that keeps one problem from becoming four.

If there is any room at all, set aside a small fixed amount somewhere slightly awkward to reach. And if there is genuinely no room right now, that is a circumstance worth naming as such rather than a failing.