We made it! Emergency Fund Update

Despite the holidays and Christmas shopping, a $1,286.12 car repair bill, an almost $200 Vet bill plus medications and the itch to spend that always follows the holidays... I'm proud to say we were able to increase our emergency fund by the full $2,000 we were planning to do by years end.

For 2015 we will still need to add to it to bring it to about 6 months of expenses for our growing family.... but it feels good to make progress there. 

So what does 6 months of expenses look like for our family? (This assumes we both get laid off at the same time...)


Mortgage: $771.99
HOA: $295.00
Groceries: $300.00
Gasoline: $250.00 (to find a job)
Cell phone: $60.00
Utility Bills (electricity, burner cell, internet): $150.00
Insurance Savings: $ 157.99
Roxy Savings: $50.00
Doctors Savings: $50.00
Car Registration Savings: $25.00
Covered California Family Plan (Cheapest offered): $507.00

(the "savings" listed are our annual bills we pay broken down monthly which depending on when the layoff would occur, would could come due in a 6 month period.)

If we estimate diapers and baby stuff to cost us $100 a month and just round up a little...

We need our emergency fund to be $16,500.00.



If South County Boy were to loose his job tomorrow, we could get by with him being a stay at home dad to watch Eli and I could put the whole family on my work insurance plan, but it would be very tight since they only have fully covered plans. We would have to be VERY careful with not going over our budget and we wouldn't have money set aside for certain categories like we do now... so some purchases would end up coming out of our emergency fund and the only way to replenish that would be with 2 extra paychecks I get twice a year.

If I were to loose my job, after South County Boy adds the family onto his work insurance plan, we are only left with around $750.00 a month coming in, so we would essentially be pulling $1,967 out of our emergency fund each month.. and at that rate it would last us just over 7.3 months before it ran out at current levels. Once we get it up to $16,500 it would last 8.3 months.