We have a healthy chunk of savings. Several tens of thousands. In my mind, I dont think if it as ‘rainy day’ money, but if it was needed because of a crisis , then it could be for that.
I don’t particularly save for a specific thing. Some people do and then spend the lot. At certain points we have had over £100k. It was too much as ready access money so has been reduced by buying property.
I guess, we always know cars will need replacing periodically and the boiler or some other fairly expensive item will need buying. Fortunately the money we have, means we don’t have to give too much thought to those when they crop up. They aren’t unexpected. Having the chunk of savings has also meant when we wanted to replace a bathroom, we could find the £10k without too much worry.
We don’t have a mortgage now, so can actually live on less than £2k per month if we need to. On that kind of basis, I would d twang tot run my savings down by expenditure on cars, bathrooms etc, below about £25k. Most people have a buffer figure that makes them feel comfortable. I remember discussing it with a mortgage advisor perhaps 20 years ago and said then I wouldn’t likely be left with less than £5k and at the time he said a lot of people had far less than that. I know it’s still true today.
We have been lucky in that we have never lived hand to mouth. And as our income has exceeded our expenditure, and we haven’t had big material wants, our exceess has been used to pay off mortgage and so after that was gone, savings increased fairly rapidly. If you can get o to the upward spiral, it makes a big difference. Not buying things on credit plans makes a huge difference over the long term I think, but I know lots of people find it hard to get behind doing that.