I have to confess something. We’ve been running with a dangerously low emergency fund balance for quite some time. It all stems from building the lake house and all the costs associated with doing that. We have finally caught up with everything from construction and are working hard to start building our emergency fund back up.
How bad is it? Well, we are currently running with about $13K in our emergency fund. While that might sound like a fair amount to some people, it isn’t enough for us to feel comfortable in case of a job loss. We have decided to set a new goal of $30K and are already under way to reach that goal. With our recent clamping down of spending we anticipate that it will take about 10 months to reach our goal. That target gives us a little bit of wiggle room so my hope is that this will be a case of under promising and over delivering. If we can stay focused, we should be able to do it in about 8 months. I’ll post our progress along the way.
If you don’t hear from me on this subject or we seem to be falling behind in meeting our goal, I’d appreciate some pushing and mocking.
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I used to run on a $1000 EF
Now that I work for myself, $20,000 is my minimum.
My emergency fund needs some brushing up as well. I am currently handling a few debts and will hopefully have my emergency fund up to at least 3 to 6 month worth of emergency assets.
I hope you hit your goal.
I’d originally set my Emergency Fund at $20k but in the current market, I may need to increase it a little (or alot).
Yeah, I’ve traditionally kept around $25K but have let that slide over the last 2 years as we built a second house. With the current market, I’m not going to feel good until I have a full $30K and that won’t stop me from going higher.
We currently have 15 in personal and 17 in business (we work for ourselves so we have 1 year of business expenses in an emergency fund just for the business). We also have several account saving for a nice Alaskan cruise, which will be added to the “sort of emergency fund” until we go on our cruise. I’m thinking of buildling ours up a little more as well. I was going to discontinue my weekly contribution and funnel funds elsewhere, but I think I’ll leave everything as is for a while.
So what does everyone do with their funds? CD ladders, savings accounts? I have mine in savings, but and considering CD laddering, it just seems like a lot of work for not much return.
I have been doing a really poor job of managing where my savings is. I’ve basically left it in a money market account at my credit union which pays reasonable rates (better than commercial banks anyway). I may have to consider laddering some of it as the balance goes up.