If I asked people to name a post they could find on all personal finance blogs, I am sure most people would say emergency fund posts.
Many personal finance blogs (such as this one) cover lots of different topics but one that always crops up is the good old emergency fund – because frankly, you would be silly not to have one.
Yet here I am about to make an admission..my emergency fund has the grand total of nothing in it. Up until right now when our money situation has finally slotted into place, we have been getting by on paying any unexpected expenses on either the credit cards, out of our wages or borrowing off family – this is not how we want to continue and hopefully by this time next month, we will have cleared the majority of our debts – most of which are to family! More on that over the next few weeks. All our savings have been depleted whilst we struggle on by. Steve has been paying ££s for fuel as he works so far away. Hopefully now he is moving to a local depot, we are going to see an increase in money coming into the house. I am hoping to save a little more. I also hope to earn a little more from my side hustles and see how we get on.
We are going to be starting a joint account soon. This is purely to add a savings account to it for our emergency fund. We each have our own respective savings accounts which we hope to save some money separately into each month, however we have recently been given a couple of cheques in both of our names which cannot be cashed into either of our own personal accounts. Thus the idea for our shared emergency fund came about – since most of our unexpected bills come from car trouble or medical prescriptions, things can get a little costly and we need to know we have something to lean on should times be tough. Steve was quite lucky recently because he had been saving a little money into a biscuit tin until he had time to go and put it into his savings account – just a fiver here or £1 there. When the tyres blew on the car just before payday with money in the bank reserved purely for fuel, he was lucky enough to have that to fall back on – this was after hundreds of pounds being spent on the car a few weeks previously – which had only partly been budgeted for! Our car is one of our most expensive expenses and we often have problems – but it is probably the possession we require the most.
Emergency funds are there to cover any unexpected expenses – should a tyre blow or should your freezer break (leading you to throw the entire contents away!), even if you need to make a trip somewhere urgently but do not have the money – the emergency fund is there to cover you when you fall short!
Do you have an emergency fund?