by Jackie Beck

An emergency fund is like your own personal insurance plan, except that it’s there when you need it without having to jump through hoops or wait for outside approval.

An emergency fund gives you peace of mind when it’s not being used, and can save your rear when you do need to use it. But how do you build one with all the other pre-existing claims on your money. Read the rest of this entry »

by Jackie Beck

Your transmission goes out. (Or your air conditioning, dishwasher, or some other expensive item that you’d really rather not do without.)

What do you do?

*plays the Jeopardy song while you think about it*
Read the rest of this entry »

by Jackie Beck

Spend any time learning about personal finance and you’ll soon come across the idea of a “fully-funded emergency fund”. But what is that, exactly? The reigning experts all give different answers, stating that a fully-funded emergency fund will cover anywhere from 3 months to a year or more’s worth of expenses. Read the rest of this entry »

by Jackie Beck

Congrats! You’ve followed the suggestions you’ve seen all over the web and built up an emergency fund. But now what do you do with it? Read the rest of this entry »

by Crystal Groves

I had the interesting experience of having to use my emergency fund in a way I had never intended on using it. To supplement a delay in my paycheck for a few days.

Companies nationwide had the unfortunate experience of dealing with Inuit’s direct deposit servers dropping the day of massive payroll processing (first of June) due to some sort of upgrade. This was a -massive- outage with a very large PR nightmare for Intuit considering the amount of paychecks they process as a whole (likely millions?). Read the rest of this entry »

by Jackie Beck

Building up your emergency savings is important, but I want to talk a little bit about why it matters. Too often, we take the “why” for granted. We assume that well, of course having some extra money on hand for emergencies is a good idea. Read the rest of this entry »