Built it to 2000 three separate times over two years. Gone on two new tyres, a flight for a family thing, and a laptop when mine died. All of those were real and I do not regret any of them, but I am now two years in with nothing set aside and it is starting to feel pointless. Same bank as my current account, transfers instantly, and I think that is part of it.
Blunt version: tyres are not an emergency, they are a schedule. You knew roughly when they were coming and so did the car. An emergency fund is for the things you genuinely cannot forecast, which is basically loss of income, an urgent medical or dental bill, a boiler, or an emergency journey. Everything else gets its own line.
The tyre example stings because most of us have done it. My version was a boiler service I had been told about for eleven months.
Automate the transfer for the day after payday, not the end of the month. What is left at the end of the month is never the amount you planned, and the difference is not willpower, it is arithmetic.
If your income is irregular, use a percentage instead of a fixed amount. I move 15 percent of every payment the day it lands, which means good months build the fund and bad months do not break the habit. Fixed amounts are what made me give up twice.
@threefund_dana · 5mo ago · 3 replies
You do not have an emergency fund problem, you have a missing category. Tyres, flights for family events and a laptop that dies at seven years old are all predictable, they are just irregular. Paying for them out of the emergency fund is like paying for groceries out of it.
Write down every irregular expense you can think of over the last two years and what it cost. Tyres, car servicing, dentist, insurance renewals, birthdays and Christmas, one flight home, a device replacement, vet. Total it, divide by twelve, and that number is a monthly transfer into a second pot. Mine came out around 210 a month and it was genuinely shocking the first time I did it, because I had been treating all of it as bad luck.
Then the emergency fund gets a different bank, no debit card attached, and ideally a transfer that takes a day or two to arrive. The friction is the point. Emergencies can wait 24 hours; impulses cannot, which is exactly the filter you want.
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@pandl_paula · 5mo ago
Naming the pots does a surprising amount of work. Money labelled car tyres does not get spent on a weekend away, and the same amount sitting in savings absolutely does.
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@first_dollar_fi · 5mo ago
Added mine up: 2640 a year of things I have been calling emergencies. That is not luck, that is a budget line I never wrote down.
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