So my company has a really generous 401k match (10% up to IRS limits which is more than I've seen anywhere else) so I've been maxing it out despite the strain on our cash flow. The coming few months however are going to be high expense months (Pesach, camps, etc) and our paychecks alone won't cover it. Our savings haven't fully recovered after a recent layoff (partially due to me putting 10% of each paycheck into the 401k) so now I'm left trying to choose between: 1) skipping 401k contributions for a few months (leaving a significant amount of money on the table), 2) maybe finding a gmach (we BH never had to go in debt before (except mortgage and car loan) and would hate to start now) or 3) borrow from my 401k (feels a little better because we're basically borrowing from ourselves, but at a 7.65% interest rate and feels counterproductive if the problem is cash flow to restrict my cash flow further with loan repayments. There's also a small added risk that if I'm CH"V laid if again I would find myself having to pay back the 401k loan in one shot just at a point in time where cash will become even more important) I guess now that I "rubber-ducked" it I'm leaning towards stopping 401k contributions for a bit despite leaving a few thousand dollars in matching funds on the table, but curious what others think.

Hard to know without understanding the risk profile here but I would lean towards interest free loans as your first option, and if you can’t find someone willing to do the bridge loan (essentially what this is) then I would lower your 401k contirubtions for a few months. Take option 3 off the table.

Why option 1 over option 3?

For all the reasons the OP listed as well as 1. Risk of default with penalties 2. The stock is not invested in the 401k during your loan, so you are losing all the gains, which is an average loss of 10% per year. Which is a significant amount of money if it takes the OP the full 5 years to pay back, which would be very tempting to repay slowly because there are already cash flow issues.

and put targets in YNAB now, so next year you won't have high-spend months, you'll have cash sitting in your yom tov / camp categories ready to be spent!

My sister works at a company with a 25% match and she continues 0 😜 I'm like come on!!

woah

Yeah I’ve tried so many times to have just do something and she isn't motivated to do it

Wow! That basically sounds like the company just agrees to match up to your max contribution (unless you make less than 100k or so)