Free tools
How much is an emergency fund?
It is your essential monthly spending multiplied by the number of months you want covered. Put your own numbers in and see what that comes to.
Try it with your own numbers
Those month counts are what people in each situation commonly aim for, not a number anybody has worked out for you. Change it to whatever fits.
These tools do arithmetic on the numbers you type and nothing else. They are here to help you work something out, not to tell you what to do, and what is right varies from one person to the next.
Saving Diary is a personal record keeping app. What it suggests is general guidance, not personal financial advice, and it does not replace a licensed financial adviser.
The whole answer is one multiplication.
An emergency fund is the money that lets a bad month stay a bad month. The size of it is not a secret number somebody has to tell you: it is what your essentials cost each month, times how many months you want to be able to cover. The hard part is not the sum. It is knowing what your essentials actually cost, which is the part most people have never added up.
How the number is worked out.
Four steps, and you can do all of them on paper. Nothing here is compounded, projected, or adjusted for anything.
- Add up what one month costs when nothing unusual happens. Rent, food, transport, bills, the things that arrive whether or not you had a good month.
- Choose how many months you want covered. Three is the figure usually quoted for one person on steady pay, and it climbs from there as more people depend on the money or the money arrives less predictably.
- Multiply the two. That is the size of the fund.
- Take off whatever you have already set aside. What is left is the gap, and dividing it by what you can add each month is roughly how long the rest takes.
A worked example.
The same numbers this page starts with, run through the same steps.
What went in
- Essential spending each month
- 1,800
- Months you want covered
- 6
- Already set aside
- 2,400
- You can add each month
- 300
What comes out
- A fund that size costs
- 10,800
- Already covered
- 22%
- Still to go
- 8,400
- Months at that rate
- 28
Every figure here is calculated by the same code the calculator above runs, so the example and the tool can never disagree.
The fund is one number. Getting there is a habit.
A calculator tells you the size once. What actually closes the gap is knowing where the month went, and having somewhere to watch the total climb.
FAQ
Good to know.
How much emergency fund do I need?
Enough to cover your essential spending for as many months as you want to be able to go without income. Three months is the figure usually quoted for one person on steady pay, six for a couple, and up to a year where income is irregular. Those are starting points people commonly use, not a rule, and the right number is the one you would actually feel steady with.
Should the fund cover all my spending or just the essentials?
Essentials. The fund is there for a month where things have gone wrong, and in that month you are not paying for the things you would cut first. Counting your whole normal spending gives you a target so large that most people give up on it.
Where should the money sit?
Somewhere you can reach it quickly, because the entire point is that it is available on the day something happens. Beyond that, this is not something Saving Diary can answer for you. What the app does is help you see the total and watch it grow.
Other tools
A calculator answers once. An app answers every month.
Know where your money goes.
Free to start, no account, and you can be logging in under a minute.