S/O fully funded e-fund, tell me about yours?

[vanillahip]

How many months of expenses would be covered by your e-fund? What have you dipped into your fund for? Do you have separate "house reno", "vaca", etc funds?

H and I are butting heads a bit re: our savings. We don't have a separate account just for e-funds, so I consider X% of our savings to be emergency only and I think we should use the rest for our next home's DP. He thinks we should never spend any of it, the end. Obvs we're going to need to open another acct immediately to separate the e-fund from general savings, but I'd live to hear about your funds! (give me ammo! Lol) and ftr, this isn't a "fight", I'm not spending any of it until he (hopefully) becomes ok with it, I'm just a little exasperated with him

[heygrey]

looks like we just posted the same thing :-)

[vanillahip]

May 17, 2012 11:43:15 GMT -5 heygrey said:

looks like we just posted the same thing :-)

did you just post that?! Lol I was just coming back to delete this since I saw your post! Great minds and all that

[anna7602]

We have 1 ING account for different targets with us keeping track of the amounts very carefully. There's a minimum base amount we always want in that account as a true e-fund, with enough to cover 12 months' expenses. The amount is high because everything we have right now is dependent on DH's job living overseas- our housing here is paid for by his job and certain other expenses. If he lost his job tomorrow for whatever reason, 12 months expenses is the minimum we feel comfortable having liquid and easily accesible to pay out the rest of our lease here and/or to move back home, and to basically figure things out. We never touch that minimum amount.

We have added and taken from other savings in that account above the e-fund amount for things like major purchases, investments and vacations. For example, I kept the money I was going to contribute to my self-employed 401K in that account until we filed our taxes and I knew exactly how much I could contribute to the account.

[phunluvin82]

We have ~2 months expenses currently. We would like to have 6 months expenses to consider it 'fully funded'.

We were bad and dipped into it earlier this year for costs associated with a non-essential move (same city, bigger apartment).

ETA: so I guess I'm not the best example for you to follow

[megs193]

We have 2 savings accounts. One of them is our emergency fund. We only plan on touching this if my DH loses his jobs. Once it was fully funded (12 months expenses is what we are comfortable with since I SAH) we stopped contributing to it. The other fund is a general savings account for car repairs, home improvements, vacations etc. We contribute $500 per month to that.