This paper aims to advance our knowledge about how the personal economic situation impacts political preferences and vote choice. We do this by introducing the economic circumstances in an individual’s social ties as a parameter in the model of economic voting. We argue that previous research has had a too narrow view of personal economy, which may explain the weak and inconclusive results on pocket-book voting found in previous research. An individual is rarely entirely dependent on their income and is likely affected by sizeable or unanticipated changes in the personal finances of social ties. Theoretically, we build on the classic economic voting literature and the emerging literature on the impact of unanticipated economic shocks on political behavior (Alt et al., 2022; Grant et al., 2023; Margalit, 2019; Marten, 2019). We hypothesize that a sizeable negative income change or an unanticipated income shock from unemployment or sick leave within an individual’s social network should be associated with more pro-redistribution attitudes and an increased probability of voting for the left. To test this, we use a novel empirical approach combining high-quality survey panel data from the Swedish National Election Study 2018 and 2022 with administrative data over time from Statistics Sweden, including income-related information about the respondent and the respondent’s social ties. We measure negative income change and economic shocks from unemployment and sick leave among close and extended social ties based on kinship. We use three outcomes: vote choice, general attitudes toward redistribution, and specific attitudes toward social insurances.