How much money do you have in savings?

[whiterose2011]

Hope nobody minds sharing but I'm wondering about savings. We currently have about £25k in cash savings that we could access quickly (ie in ISAs etc). We are thinking about selling out flat and buying a house so would put all this into the purchase to bring our mortgage payments down. But, I feel quite uncomfortable about having nothing left in reserve. We both have good jobs that are as secure as any job can be but are by no means wealthy. The £25k is as a result of many years of saving. Do you have a minimum amount that you feel comfortable having in reserve just in case? Before I get flamed, I realise that we are very lucky to be in this position so please don't slag me for posing this question.

I understand your question

I would always have a minimum of 3 months salary in savings to cover for the worst

over and above that its investing into what's best for you

I'd say six months of expenses/mortgage/rent.

well done for saving money. But like the rest of us, you are being shafted by years of low interest rates and the 'funding for lending' scheme. Your money is disappearing with 'real' inflation at about 5%.

put the money, less the 'cushion' into the house.

I have bugger all with the aim to rectify this

Nothing at all but we have about £30k equity in our flat and are hoping to use that as a deposit for a house at some point.

We currently have £355! Which is not great, but we were only really able to start saving a few months ago, so that is why it is low. All of our money is tied up in our house. Not sure if that is wise or not, but we figured that a house is (hopefully!) a good investment so we will see more return on it tied up in property than we will in the bank. That said, I do want more accessible savings, as currently if one of us loses our job or anything, then we have currently only got credit cards and our £355 to fall back on!

£7.23

2 years normal expenses ( some in fixed isa, some in notice accounts, some v liquid)

Minimum I'd want is 1 year plus £1k for rainy day ( boiler /car break down etc)

If moving house, I'd consider holding back £5k for unexpected expenses, moving costs etc. Better than scrambling later for cash. If not needed you can pay it off you mortgage.

I agree with others that it's a good idea to have the equivalent of between 6 months to a year's essential expenditure put by, as a safety net.

You need 6 months basic outgoings as a minimum.

To some extent it depends how quickly you can replenish it though.

Nothing at all, but am planning on rectifying that in a few years. Atm we just don't have spare cash for saving but we are paying ridiculously expensive nursery fees so my plan is to eventually put that money into savings once the dcs are at school.

We do have about £80k of equity in the house though so if we had some kind of major disaster we would have to consider selling the house.

We have about £10k in cash which is our emergency fund-it just about covers 6 months worth of outgoings. Other than that, everything's being thrown at the mortgage.

I did post a correct £7-something and am quite tongue in cheek, bit absolutely correct any of you who say you need six months outgoings in savings, pref 12 months. A year ago dh was dx with cancer and had over six months off work and only SSP

hence safety net needed, aka very very rainy day, will have to start all over again. Just very glad we had it.

2 months wages in cash savings, 6 months wages in shares, 3 months worth of overpayments on the mortgage we could draw down if in need.
DH was off sick for 3 months a while back, we found out his company paid full pay for 3 months, then 75% in perpetuity. As it was, they never even put on his file that he was off sick, they just said he was doing as much work as he was able to.

Hope he's better now MrsShrek?

I don't understand the question - what are savings?

About £7k, but most of that is technically DD's. we have about 40% equity in our home though so I'm not overly worried - we've been overpaying rather than saving hard.

5-6k would have had more if we hadnt just bought a new bathroom and car. After 5 frugal years we're having a bit of a blowout but back to penny pinching shortly.

Whiterose we recently sold our flat and bought a house and went from 40k savings to about 4k. V unsettling paticularly as dp already had brush with redundancy and most of my salary goes on childcare. We want to get back to three months living expenses + mortgage but ideally it should be more. But also I think you have to be bold sometimes!

We feel comfortable with a year of mortgage payments in the bank - logic being that a year gives us time to sort out a solution, whether it's finding another job, renting this house and moving to a smaller one, or selling up.

We currently have a bit more than that, we wiped out our savings a few years back when we bought this house (stamp duty, moving costs and some essential work to the house) and have saved hard to get back to where we were. We are also trying to save to do some building and renovation work in a couple of years' time.

antoinette, thanks for asking, he's been in remission since Feb this year

Good news

About 1/3 of our yearly salary is saved for us.

I don't mean that we save 1/3 of our salary, rather that in our savings we have about 1/3 of our yearly income before tax.

I have none but I pay a huge amount per month into a pension and would sooner pay off the mortgage early than have money sitting in the bank. I do have income protection insurance too.