Basically, "cash poor" is relative. In the late nineteenth century, male servants' wages could range from £5 to about £120 depending on seniority/level of responsibility, and female servants' from £8 to £60 (typically, female servants earned less than equivalent male ones, but the male range dips lower because it includes ranks with no female equivalent like "hall boy", an actual child who waited on the other servants), while an agricultural worker might make about £33 per year, a skilled artisan £100, and a more middle-class office worker £500; those higher on the social scale typically didn't work but instead had an income based on long-term investments in the government funds as well as rents from tenants, with gentry families having £1,000-£10,000 and the titled nobility anywhere from £10,000 to more than £100,000! Even a supposedly bankrupt noble family would probably have an income that a clerk would envy, but that noble family would be comparing their incomes and living standards with their peers - earls and dukes expected to live like earls and dukes, not clerks.

So as you can see, an individual servant could have been quite a small percentage of an aristocratic income, but of course a larger staff would take a bigger bite. If a family needed to cut expenses, a number of footmen and/or housemaids could find themselves dismissed, and the remaining ones would be lucky if a less-used wing of the house were closed off in order to keep them from having to do an impossible amount of work. On the other hand, it could be just a few of those servants at the top of the hierarchy who could end up unemployed - the French cook who commanded a salary of, say, £200 might be replaced with someone more local who only asked for £100; the horses could be sold off and the coachman and grooms laid off. But bigger bills would be going out for food and wine to stock the larder for the family and guests - and even "simple" family meals for the wealthy were typically elaborate by our standards, with multiple courses.

The cash-strapped family could also be selling off land or heirlooms in order to pay for staff or grounds maintenance. Life tenants of inherited property - people who inherited estates under an entail that denoted who would inherit it after them - were allowed to sell it off in part or in whole under the Settled Land Act of 1882, which opened up a new revenue stream for members of the nobility and gentry who were having cash flow problems. The sale of art also picked up in the last quarter of the century, with British aristocrats who'd inherited collections of Old Masters selling them across the Atlantic to American millionaires. This would give them the money they needed to make payroll or do repairs for the moment, before going back to their relative poverty.

The Spencer-Churchill family is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Charles Spencer-Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough from 1892 to 1938, famously married the unwilling American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt in 1895, supposedly even telling her that he did so to save Blenheim, his family's seat. In the late nineteenth century, the family had sold much of its fine art and furnishings to get by and had to forgo maintenance on the house - Consuelo's dowry and the income promised to the couple by her parents allowed the rooms to be restocked and the building to be restored. According to her autobiography, there weren't even any family jewels left, so she had to bring them with her.