How much should I set aside in an emergency fund?

[trixymalixy]

I'm being made redundant . Assuming my employer doesn't go bust i wil be getting a decent payout.

I want to use most of my redundancy payment to pay off a chunk of the mortgage, but I also want to set aside an emergency fund.

Do you think a year's worth of mortgage payments or 6 month's
worth of all bills? any other measures?

Depends how easy you think it will be to find work I guess.

Sorry to hear you're being made redundant btw

I hope it should be OK for me to find other work (fingers crossed!!!!!), although I am going to be off on mat leave for a year first.

We can survive on Dh's salary alone if it takes me a while, so this would be a real emergency fund if say he lost his job as well. We do have payment protection on his salary though.

I'm sure i read somewhere that you are supposed to have an amount set aside for emergencies.

Don't know if there's an amount you're 'supposed' to set aside, but if you are in the fortunate position to be able to pay a chunk off the mortgage, survive on one salary for a while and put away enough to cover a year's mortgage payments or similar, then do it.

I would measure an 'emergency fund' according to how long you could survive on that alone, so all bills (including food) not just mortgage.

It sounds like you're in a fairly good position despite the redundancy, hope it all works out well for you.

Thanks. I'm pretty upset about the redundancy, but hopefully it shouldn't be an outright disaster for us.

So do you think 6 months would be enough?

just watched Oprah and her financial expert Susie said ideally to have 8 months or so living expenses money in an emergency fund. Sorry about your redundancy and congrats re pregnancy!

standard advice is 6x net salary. we have 6 months mortgage, plus about 3k, which means i sleep at night!

Thanks!!

6 months mortgage plus 3k brings it to a nice round total, so I think I'll go with that.

Hopefully it'll never be needed to be used in an emergency!!