Presumably because the point of having n years' worth of income is that if you need to, you can live off it for n years; whereas if much of that is tied up in your home then some of those n years are only available if you sell your home, which is a pretty drastic step to have to take. And because if your surviving-for-n-years plan involves selling the place where you live and using all that money, your measure of "income" needs to include any extra rent you'd be having to pay.
No. With decent assent management you can oversee the time delay to access each of the items you own. Cash is good, but not all the reserve needs to be in cash. In a country with a good capital market you can borrow against your house. In severe case where you are unable to acquire income for month that is a decent thing to do. I find it strange to just ignore the biggest asset one owns completely.
Of course this only makes sense if the house/appartment is actually paid for. If you still have a mortgage on it then the house is worth about (house - mortgage - transaction costs) for your reserve.
Related to: People who want to save the world
I have recently been diagnosed with cancer, for which I am currently being treated with good prognosis. I've been reevaluating my life plans and priorities in response. To be clear, I estimate that the cancer is responsible for much less than half the total danger to my life. The universals - X-risks, diseases I don't have yet, traffic accidents, etc. - are worse.
I would like to affirm my desire to Save Myself (and Save The World For Myself). Saving the world is a prerequisite simply because the world is in danger. I believe my values are well aligned with those of the LW community; wanting to Save The World is a good applause light but I believe most people want to do so for selfish reasons.
I would also like to ask LW members: why do you prefer to contribute (in part) towards humankind-wide X-risk problems rather than more narrow but personally important issues? How do you determine the time- and risk- tradeoffs between things like saving money for healthcare, and investing money in preventing an unfriendly AI FOOM?
It is common advice here to focus on earning money and donating it to research, rather than donating in kind. How do you decide what portion of income to donate to SIAI, which to SENS, and which to keep as money for purely personal problems that others won't invest in? There's no conceptual difficulty here, but I have no idea how to quantify the risks involved.