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.

And it is. When you have an emergency fund, little things like needing to get some dental work done or having some shingles fly off your roof become minor inconveniences. You get them taken care of, and replenish your fund. There’s no stress. No collapse of the carefully-stacked Jenga blocks of your finances. Even big things, like losing your job for an extended period, become a little less painful if you have a fully-funded emergency fund to fall back on.

But it goes beyond that, because for many people, piling up cash for your emergency fund requires a couple of mindset changes. And that’s the real reason why creating emergency savings matters so much.

Changing your mindset about money changes everything.

You start doing something that you may not have done before: actively planning ahead for things that could come up in the future — and making those plans a priority. It means you’ve stopped assuming that things will always go perfectly. It also often means that you’ve found ways to delay gratification, to earn extra income, or to cut back on things that aren’t all that critical in order to come up with the money for your emergency savings.

And it snowballs from there. Once you improve one aspect of your financial life, you see how much better things are for you, and you want to improve even more. So if you haven’t yet started an emergency savings account, start now. And if you’re already in good shape there, think about the lessons you learned from doing so, and see how you can extend them to other areas of managing your money.