I wasn’t able to save very much when I carried a CC debt. Once I paid that off, I could finally see my savings shoot up.
I have enough to get me through nine or ten months at my current standard of livng (same house rental, car note, food budget, etc.). My efforts to make it a nice round 12 months seems to always be thwarted by unexpected expenses, like oral surgery or cat craziness. But I am glad that I have a little bit of a safety net.
I live frugally and put 20% before taxes in my 401K. I haven’t much in savings, but I have no debt besides my mortgage, and I have enough in my 401K to pay that off if I had to, plus live for several years. My house will be paid off in 5 years. I have a small pension coming to me that will cover the taxes and insurance for my home. I feel pretty good about the prospect of retirement in 10 years or so.
StG
I have a nice cash cushion (I could go a year if there were no crisis), but I attribute it to luck rather than wisdom.
I have a good job. Lots of people smarter, wiser, and/or harder working that I might not.
I can be frugal. There are no babies, serious and expensive health problems, or recent catastrophes in my live.
I have a knack for not spending money. I don’t know if it’s a talent or a skill.
I might say I am sensible enough to keep a cushion, but not wise.
Good point … when the power goes out the atm machine doesn’t work anymore :smack:
I have that saved and more. Thank goodness, because, as I say in a thread in MPSIMS, I just got laid off last week.
Thanks to the first installment of my husband’s inheritance, we have the equivalent of about a years worth of my salary set aside. Husband has been on disability since 1998, he gets social security disability. Our house is also fully paid for, also part of his inheritance. I am eternally grateful to my late in-laws for their their generosity.
I have 7 paychecks, more or less in the savings account, and about 2 in the checking account.
I’m not such an awesome budgeter, but I do have direct deposit automatically put a chunk of each check in the savings account, so over time it tends to build up without having to explicitly save money. Smartest thing I ever did as far as saving money goes.
A year and 3/4 saved. Plus mortgage paid off.
I worked two jobs (one part time with retirement benefits) for decades and now I just have the full time job plus the retirement for the part time job. I’m saving to have money to take care of my mother, but I crammed the retirement payment on top of my mortgage for two years and finished it off.
Really, though, like Dangerosa probably is. this is at the end of decades of work and planning. Those just starting out need to plan for the long term.
We’ve lived on my husband’s salary for the last fifteen years and banked nearly all of my earnings in that time frame so we’re doing just fine. We just took a 5k hit on the furnace and it was annoying but that only means we have 20k in the complete emergency fund rather than 25k. We have enough in savings to maintain our present lifestyle without either of us working for at least a decade right now without even touching our 401ks or housing equity.
Not any more - we did, but emigration is hella expensive and since I’m not working and we’re still paying for our UK house we’ve run down the lot. It is temporary - we’re looking at a couple of hundred thousand dollars equity in the house, but cash flow is a huuuge problem at the moment until I start work in January. We’ve just had to borrow to cover my daughter’s school fees, which both sucks and blows. I know it’s not for long, but it’s a real source of anxiety.
So- normally, yes. Currently we’ve just had our ‘emergency’ so it came in handy.
No paychecks here: I’m self-employed, work on a project basis and routinely go three months without a client; it is also not unusual to get clients that pay “90 days” or “120 days”, which often means “at the month’s-end which takes place after N days, assuming we don’t decide to pick you as the supplier who’s not gonna get paid this month because we figure that paying suppliers isn’t as important as taking advantage of investment opportunities”.
People in my situation come in two kinds: those who live hand to mouth and who are always looking for 5€/day more, and those who would rather have a smaller car but move less often. I’m in the second group; currently and despite being on a part-time project I have a 6-month stash. If the project had been full-time at the same rate the stash would be over a year.
I have about 4 months worth of living expenses in my checking account but if I lost my job today I would be fine for quite a while because my rent is paid through December and my student loans could be deferred indefinitely. I could cancel my cell phone and the only other bills I would have would be my credit card payment minimums which aren’t much. My expenses per month are very low compared to my salary, so I could theoretically live off of just one paycheck for 2-3 months if I had to.
Right now if my business crashed and burned I have about 3-4 months worth plus about 2 months worth in credit card available balance. My living situation is very cheap so if things were tight I could get by on about half of what I normally pay myself to keep things afloat for a couple months. For about a year I was living on about $700/month $400/mo rent on small mother in law apartment included internet, power, and cable TV $300 for food and entertainment.
It’s complicated 
We both work on contract, so like Nava there’s not really a “paycheck” as such. Generally speaking we have about a year’s living money saved up. We don’t at the moment, because we just splurged on a once-in-a-decade overseas trip. However, if we stick to budget we should still have about 5k left in the kitty by the time we get home, which is about 2 months worth. And I already have a boatload of work lined up for me in January.
I cannot answer, as I currently do not have a set amount to define as a “paycheck” at this time.
However, right now, based on past history, I believe I do have it, assuming my next job’s pay does not go up substantially. Does that count?
I have insurance to cover my mortgage payments if I lose my income, but hardly any savings. We live very frugally compared to many of my peers, but life is expensive and income only just exceeds expenditure every month.
Unexpected expenses* tip us into overdraft, then we spend the next few months recovering, then something else goes wrong. Teenage children mop up any spare cash quite effectively.
*This month it was the sudden failure of our central heating system; 300 quid expense that wasn’t budgeted for; wiping out the progress we made the previous month by cutting back all unnecessary spending.
Once upon a time I had an entire year’s worth of income saved up.
Then the Great Recession hit. Made that stash last three years, not just one.
Was saving again, then my (now former) employer decided not to pay me for six weeks… had enough to survive, but there went the savings again.
Assuming I can collect on the judgement against that former employer in a reasonable period of time it mostly goes back into savings.
We live ‘paycheck to paycheck’, so to speak - mainly because the company covers our housing, so no rent expense, and a chunk of my monthly salary is paid back home. So we spend most of our monthly ‘paycheck’ while the back-home salary plus annual bonus (approx. 6-7 months worth of salary most years) go straight in to savings.
Two young kids, a dog, and we aren’t frugal when it comes to weekend excursions/travel etc, but we could maintain our current lifestyle almost unchanged for at least two years if we wanted. If we made any number of reasonable lifestyle changes we could probably go at least 5-6 years if not longer. And we have pretty good health /medical insurance so I’m not that worried about any major medical bills. And I have enough life insurance; I shouldn’t need to start cooking crystal meth anytime soon.
I’m unsure what the OP is asking.
If you’re excluding retirement savings, we have about a year’s income in ready LOCs, money-markets, etc. that we could pull from quickly. If you mean just simple savings accounts, maybe 1-2 months.
If you’re including retirement savings, this book could have been written about us.
I suspect this is part of the reason I’m a “super saver”- my Dad worked on commission - he got a very small bi-weekly salary, and quarterly commission checks. So my house was one month of feast, followed by two months of famine growing up. It wasn’t that the feast part was particularly plentiful, just relatively so.
My Dad is an optimist, so if he’d get a particularly large commission check, he did something with it - another would come. Where if I worked like that, a particularly large commission check would go into the bank so that the end of the quarter didn’t contain quite as much elbow macaroni.