Hellobee Boards

Feel okay - 3 months bills. Feel comfortable? 6 months. Feel set? 12+ months.

For me, there is never enough. I am a financial pessimist, basically. I always think of the worst case scenarios.

I'm also self employed, and I'm working on saving 6 months of expenses before we TTC. I won't be able to take that much time off, but I plan on working very part time for the first 6-9 months so I want to have enough set aside to not have to worry about the loss of income.

ETA this money is being saved just for my mat leave; we have savings that we could access fairly easily that could cover probably a year of basic living expenses but that's not money that I'd want to touch unless we absolutely had to.

@Truth Bombs: Yes, that's it for us as well, protecting against potential job loss. I've seen too much to think it's not going to happen to one of us at some point.

I'll give a specific dollar amount of $5k is the minimum easily accessible savings I am comfortable with. My job is pretty well protected and I would have a lot of advance warning if I were somehow going to lose it so I don't really account for that possibility. My husband could lose his but we can pay our bills using my income.

Our emergency fund is greater than that but we're going to have to dip into it soon for dental work I need done but we will still be above the 5k mark so I am ok with that. It would have to be a true emergency for me to be ok going below that number at this point.

I have more of a set figure in my head, which equates to 2.5 months of DH's current take home salary (post taxes etc). It would be enough to pay our monthly bills for 4-5 months, give or take a bit.

We are a single income family (I SAH) but since we live in the UK, where health care is universally provided, regardless of employment status, I'm not as concerned as I would be if we lived in the US where health benefits are tied into your employment. Also, unless there is a grievous offence, notice of termination is usually minimum of four weeks here, so we'd have plenty of time to prepare/find another job.

We have 3 months (a very comfortable 3 months, so probably more like 4-5) earmarked as emergency funds. In a true bind (like the extremely slim chance that both of us lost jobs at the same time), we could take LO out of daycare, and it could last us much longer.

We have additional savings that we will use for future known expenses, like vacations, my next maternity leave, and (the big one) a bigger house in a couple years. We try not to touch the emergency fund for that type of stuff.

We don't really feel the need to have anything totally liquid. It would day 2-3 business days to get our hands on a lot of cash, but I just can't imagine a scenario where I would need cash *immediately*. However we do like to keep about 20k (totally arbitrary number) for things like vacations, big ticket home items, big med bills and other random large cost.

6 months expenses in savings. We just bought a house so we had to dip into that a little bit but we've replenished pretty much within a month and a half so I feel better about it now

6 months of expenses.

In liquid savings, at least 6 months.

@Truth Bombs: Ah, that makes sense. We do have another "emergency" savings fund that I didn't count because we'd been talking about investing it (very conservatively). We're just looking at it as lost potential right now in a savings account rather than invested. Maybe we're just too optimistic with the possible worst case scenarios... I did have a lot invested in 08/09... and you're right, it would have totally sucked to have had to withdrawn at that time.