Hello everyone, I just wanna share a personal update about our journey to financial freedom. This is another personal story but I’m hoping you get a bit of inspiration and lesson here.
Yesterday upon receiving our salary, me and my wife have deposited the last ‘chunk’ of cash to complete our emergency fund. And boy we’re done! Wooooh!
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As I shared on previous articles before, our initial goal as a newly wed couple is to build a solid emergency fund which is equal to 3 – 6 months of our monthly expenses. We targeted 4 months equivalent of our expenses. We worked hard on that goal and after almost a year, we’re done! Boom!
Our emergency fund is sitting in our new joint savings account(BDO) via ATM. Why ATM? Because of emergency! That’s where your emergency fund should stay. You can pull it out anytime and anywhere in case emergency situation arises.
Don’t put your emergency fund in passbook or other savings account where you can’t withdraw them immediately. Or worst, don’t put your emergency fund in stock market or other volatile investment instrument that can go down anytime.
What if you need that money and those ‘investment‘ are down? Or you have the emergency on holiday? Weekends? or Midnight? Keep in mind that emergency fund is for emergency! Nothing more, nothing less!
If you just starting out, I suggest you read my previous article entitled ABC of builing an Emergency fund. You can learn valuable lessons on this article about how and why you need to build a solid emergency fund.
Our next step is to save another fund for our future baby. Yap! We’re planning to start a family and we’re working on that fund too. We’re gonna call it baby fund. 🙂 And of course, this is purely for our future baby’s expenses and needs. We’re saving for check-ups, medicines, hospitalization and all other expenses for pregnancy and a new born. This is our new goal and we’re pretty sure we can make it too.
If you’re a newly wed too, or even single or planning to tie the knot soon, I suggest you to do the same. Talk to your hubby about your financial goals and work on them together. You can also check my previous article that share tips on how to setup smart financial goals here.
I’m sure this can provide you some insights and help you make some plans about your personal finance. Plan, dream and work on them together. Start small. Take one step at a time and be consistent.
Thank you for your time. This might be another personal things to share but I feel other persons especially newly wed can relate and be inspired by sharing things like these.
As I mentioned before, I will share valuable personal finance tips on this blog including our own journey to financial freedom.
How about you? Did you achieved any of your financial goals that you set before? If yes, time to celebrate! Please share it to us so we can congratulate you. I’m sure we can also learn some lessons and tips from your experience.
Again, thank you. To our success, cheers!
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I’m still on the process of building mine. Hopefully I can also post an inspiring story similar to this someday. Good luck sir 😀
http://www.investingengineerph.com
Thanks Mark! Let’s take one step at a time. Nice blog too! Let’s spread financial literacy one blog at a time! To our success, cheers!
Hi Billy,
I must admit, I am not good with money, and i think discovering your blog is a sign for me to start learning and seriously saving. I am also a blogger like you but my niche is travel and inspiration.
Emergency fund is interesting. How did you plan setting up your emegency fund? I will still plan to read your other posts, but I’ll greatly appreciate if you could answer my question here.
Thank you so much for your blog. really helpful, eye-opener. Keep writing!
Jon
Hi Jon thanks for coming on this blog. Any blogger or should I say person needs to take charge of their personal finances. For our future and future of our family. To answer your questions, we start by listing and taking notes of ALL of our expenses on the first 2 months when me and my wife got married. From there we’ve identified how much we spend every month and that’s what we set our target or goal to save atleast 4x of that monthly expenses. You cannot guess or make an estimate, it should be based from your actual expenses so in case you lose your job or something happen, you can continue your lifestyle/living before finding new work or source of income again. Hope it helps. Just to add, you may check these previous articles. To our success, cheers!
Setting financial goals
Tracking your expenses
Building emergency fund
Do you not consider putting your emergency fund in a low risk investment like short term funds or money market? I have recently completed mine and I’m wondering where to put it. I’m afraid that having it deposited in my savings account for a year or so will just lose it’s value because of inflation.
So far, it still sitting on our ATM savings account Lezah. We’re also thinking to put portion on low risk investment and those can be pull up immediately. So far, no decision yet. I’ll update the article once we did. Thanks!
Whoa! Glad to come by here!
Let me confess, I actually skipped building an emergency fund and went on investing my son’s tuition fee in Money Market Funds. Reading thru this it slapped me that I REALLY need to start one. I’m tweaking financial goals and I promise to start one, soon!
Hi Billy,
Good thing I found out your blog. I am in my late 20’s and seriously saving for an emergency fund this 2018. Hopefully sana ma’achieve ko sya unlike last year na naging magastos ako. LOL. Anyhow, I will keep on visiting your blog because your story is so inspiring to follow. Added bonus na lang yung mga financial tips na binibigay mo. Hehe.
Thanks Cindy!