How much in your emergency fund

lkamenko

I keep reading and hearing that ideally you should have 6 to 12 month expenses in your emergency fund. This seems completely unrealistic to me. And a huge amount of money. Plus I feel like every other month there is some kind of emergency - appliances break, cars break, some medical issue arises. Ugh... Even if I put aside 1K one month I most likely will spend it on some kind of emergency next month. So how much do you have in your emergency fund? I will put options relative to our income, not $ amount...
Or another ? is if you spend most of your income - does it mean that emergency fund should be 12 month of your monthly income? How depressing...

Sorry I hit the enter too soon and can not edit the poll options. If you are SS please write. And it you are so rich you don't care - that's another option I had in mind, just butt off JK

breannie

We are at about 3 months of expenses. One of my biggest goals for 2014 is to get in the 9 - 12 months range as an emergency fund. 

adorebella

I would love to have a safety net but right now we just don't have it. Everything we save each month goes to pay off or credit card debt (6k left now) and once that is paid we will build a savings again.

aylafsu88

We have 3 months. That is a reasonable amount for us and with all the other surprise expenses all we will probably ever have in our fund.

StokedWifey

We have between 6 months and 12 months saved, and that's our $0 line.  We don't touch it for car repairs, etc.  We budget surplus in our joint account to cover those things and our extra savings is in a money market account that requires both signatures to withdraw.

apollonia10

StokedWifey said:

We have between 6 months and 12 months saved, and that's our $0 line.  We don't touch it for car repairs, etc.  We budget surplus in our joint account to cover those things and our extra savings is in a money market account that requires both signatures to withdraw.

Same for us, word for word. We budget for savings before anything else.

Pandril19

Hrrrm.  I have 3 months of funds in my "emergency" account, which gets touched only for emergencies.

But then I have between 4-6 months of funds in various targetted savings accounts (car repair/replacement, furniture/new home, travel, IRA holding, baby, escrow/home repair) that would get tapped in the event of a true emergency.  The number fluctuates depending on whether we've just taking a trip, bought a new table, etc. 

And then if things truly deeply went south I have taxable investments I could liquidate and many years of contributions to a Roth IRA. 

 

C&Csmommy

We are SS. We don't have a cash emergency fund we have a gun emergency fund. I know I will probably get a side eye here but we have about $20,000 in guns (never paid retail) so we call that our emergency fund.

If any big expense comes up that we don't have money in the budget for DH will sell or trade a gun. He is a freak and the collection constantly rotates as he is always trading, selling and buying and like I said he has never paid retail for them.

C&Csmommy

mandie727 said:

C&Csmommy said:

We are SS. We don't have a cash emergency fund we have a gun emergency fund. I know I will probably get a side eye here but we have about $20,000 in guns (never paid retail) so we call that our emergency fund.

If any big expense comes up that we don't have money in the budget for DH will sell or trade a gun. He is a freak and the collection constantly rotates as he is always trading, selling and buying and like I said he has never paid retail for them.

@c&csmommy Are we married to the same person!? Ive actually lost count of the ARs in his 'collections!'

@mandie727 he is currently building 3 more AR's! The man has an addiction lol! Cortlandt can tell you the differences between an AR and an AK!

APendola

Yeah, our savings depleted completely within a year of having a baby.  So, our emergency fund is our line of credit.

reinedecajun

Right now zero, were still catching up from when big f got fired. Ideally I like to have at least two months worth in the bank. H gets pension so we have a determined amount for certain no matter what. So I like to have money in savings for car repairs, etc...

reinedecajun

mandie727 said:

We are SS. We don't have a cash emergency fund we have a gun emergency fund. I know I will probably get a side eye here but we have about $20,000 in guns (never paid retail) so we call that our emergency fund. If any big expense comes up that we don't have money in the budget for DH will sell or trade a gun. He is a freak and the collection constantly rotates as he is always trading, selling and buying and like I said he has never paid retail for them.

@c&csmommy Are we married to the same person!? Ive actually lost count of the ARs in his 'collections!'

@mandie727 he is currently building 3 more AR's! The man has an addiction lol! Cortlandt can tell you the differences between an AR and an AK!

@c&csmommy The last one he made, I almost beat him!! He got so crazy about it being perfect! Ha! Oh Im sure Rylan will eventually be all in it! He already has a flashlight obsession like DH!

Can I add my husband to this group? Last spring we had to buy another AR and a Kimber 1911 just for good measure. I was like really? Honestly we've made out better with those stupid guns as insurance than anything!

DeniseRN

We too have the "Redneck 401k" lol. And my BIL has a gun shop so H gets his guns at cost, so that doesn't help