18 Comments

  1. I am choosing to have less than 3 months saved of an emergency fund because I am snowballing my student loan debt. I know it’s the best thing for me because my student loan debt is so high. That said, I’ll be building that emergency fund up to 8 months once my loans are paid off.

  2. I do have an emergency fund, and it’s a lot more than $1,000. I think Dave Ramsey’s emergency fund suggestion is too low because if you need more than $1k you essentially have to take out more debt. But nevertheless, I’m one who thinks 3-6 months is a good thing to shoot for. First shoot for 1 month, then slowly build it up over time.

  3. I am a huge fan of emergency funds. When I didn’t have one, everything happened. I was always struggling to keep up and my debt kept growing. Once I built up my e-fund, I was in a much better financial position.

    • I feel the same way. When I didn’t have an emergency fund, everything seemed to go wrong and I had to use my credit cards; after I have my emergency fund, I haven’t had any emergencies… knock on wood.

  4. I learned the hard way about the importance of the emergency fund and now it a primary focus for me to work on with my clients. Our first step in financial health is building the emergency fund because you have no idea when or where an emergency will come from, but you can be guaranteed that it will happen and there is nothing more stressful than to have a financial emergency put you in financial and emotional distress.

  5. I just sleep better at night knowing we have something set aside. I would like to have more set aside but for now, we are really focused on paying off our student loans. Once we are finished paying those back we will build our cash savings up again to 6 months of expenses or so.

  6. We have an emergency fund, but we dipped into it recently. I like to keep $1,000, at least. I think even when you have debt, it’s good to have that cash cushion, just so you aren’t relying on credit cards if something unexpected comes up.

  7. My emergency fund is the reason I can sleep so well at night! Things go wrong all the time, and I’m happy to have a separate set of funds to take care of them.

    • I also didn’t know the importance of an emergency fund until about a year ago and that’s why I kept getting myself into financial troubles whenever something went wrong. My emergency fund is only about 3-months worth, but I’m slowly growing it as well.

  8. I don’t have a fund earmarked specifically for emergencies, but if something were to come up I would probably just stop contributing for a few months to my investments until it was paid off. But if I were to lose my job or something, I could dip into my investments if needed. I have at least 2 years worth of expenses there if I really needed it for some reason.

    I believe it’s good for people to have emergency funds though, and strangely I’m going to quote Mike Tyson on this one, “Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face.”

    Life will sometimes punch you in the face, so it’s best to be ready for it.

  9. I’ve been running my personal finances for ages without an emergency fund. Looking back, I now realise how stupid that has been!

    This year, I’ve been trying to build a fund, putting away a little bit every month. It’s made me realise that the biggest problem is is that I haven’t been managing my cashflows on big expenses well, hence why I keep dipping into my “rainy day” cash.

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