Dear Emergency Fund: You saved my butt!

My EF is what’s saved me over the past 2.5 months. Since I clearly couldn’t have relied on the government for EI benefits, I would have been completely screwed without that $3k I had saved. It’s so incredible to me, that personal finance and saving money actually works. I’m still in awe of it all, and it’s insane that just one year ago, I had not one dollar to my name, and a whole whack of debt to get out of. And even though things didn’t exactly go my way this past year, I’m in a much more stable position now – freshly out of 2.5 months of unemployment – than I ever was with a full-time job.

It’s such a simple concept: save money. Why didn’t I get it for so many years?

When I started the EF, I honestly never thought I’d use it – I just thought it’d be a little chunk of money that just sat in a savings account for the rest of my life. Who would have thought that, as soon as I fully funded the EF, I would have had to use almost all of it up.

I haven’t checked Quicken in a few days, but as it last stands, I have about $1k left in the EF. I’ll update the sidebar sometime this week. Once I get my EI payments (provided I do actually get it), I will fully fund the EF back up to $3k, and then bump up my EF savings goal to $5k for the rest of 2008. I think that’s a realistic goal to have.

With my tax refund, I still hope to get around $4,500 back … and with that money, what I really should do is stick the entire thing back into my RRSPs. That would mean I’d only need to save another $2k all year to reach my 2008 goal of having a $22k portfolio. And provided I pass my probation at the FT job, I would also have to count my RPP plan into the mix … so when it’s all said and done, I could have a bigger portfolio at the end of 2008 than I had originally anticipated.