The $1000 Emergency Fund Plan... As Promised!

Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration... not much, though.
Photo by Bill Longshaw

It’s a miracle!  We have our plan in place!

Gavin and I sat down and worked out our plan.  Just like everything else I tend to dread (I’m looking at YOU housecleaning), it didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would.  It wasn’t too difficult to work out a solid plan.

My friend Erin was kind enough to forward me an interesting blog post this morning that took a slightly different spin on Mr. Ramsey’s plan.  This plan had a different approach to savings, namely just start saving and then figure out how you’re going to continue.  Without intending it, we had actually done just that. 

I had $50 hanging out in my savings account.  I left it there when I cashed a check.  We also have quite a bit of assorted change in the family jar currently, but I’m not going to sit down and count it all out.  It probably has about $5 or $6 in there.  We’ll work that out later.

Here’s the plan we decided on.  

In order to do this, we will have to go a ways out.  Our goal is to have $1000 in our savings account by the end of the year.  Counting the $50 we currently have, we will need to withhold approximately $40 per Gavin’s paycheck.  It would be $20 per paycheck, but my Paypal doesn’t want to link with the savings account, so we are just going to do it this way.  I know to a lot of folks, that doesn’t sound like much, but that figure makes me a little shaky.  We are going to need to trim a few more expenses to come up with that amount.   We’ll discuss that in an upcoming post. 

We are also going to be contributing any amount of change we can gather into the family money jar.  We’ve had that jar for a while.  We usually let it accumulate for a bit and then use it on a grocery run.  From now on, it’s going to be deposited monthly into the savings account.  We debated whether to use that extra bit to lower our biweekly contributions or to reach the goal faster.  We decided to try to reach the goal faster, but like any other plan, we may eventually decide to tweak that.  We’ll see how it goes.

So there it is:  our plan to save $1000 by the end of 2012.  It feels good to have it in place.