Good to know, since I obviously don’t fully know the Ramsey plan. I suppose that’s an OKAY way to see things. I’d submit however, that one is almost always at risk of getting at last some rain, if not a hurricane. You never know, all the more reason that I’m a little more conservative, and like to have a pile of cash on hand. However, as time progresses, I like debt less and less. By the time I’m done, I may very well find that I’ve depleted most of my reserves in favor of paying down debt. I’m just not comfortable doing that all right now.

That assumption is very correct. Not everyone believes in the ramsey program, or at least thinks its the best idea. I’ve had emergencies that I needed more than $1000 to cover. Thus, we started building a 6-ish month e-fund first. Then, when we were comfortable we could live if we lost a job, or got sick, or something like that, we started to aggressively pay down debt. I would be scared to death if I only had an efund of $1000. I generally don’t ever like my everyday checking account to fall below that balance, just in case.

We paid off debt this year with a $1,000 emergency fund which made me nervous. Hardest part of paying down debt was reducing savings and paying off debt. Now I am at peace with that decision as being debt free is wonderful.

One of the first things my wife and I did when we got married was to pool our resources, which initially gave us a few months savings anyway. We then set out work retirement contributions to 10% gross, opened two Roth IRAs and started maxing them out. Then, we put away about 8 months of living expenses. After that, we started aggressively paying down debt. That’s where we are right now, and it has worked well. I’d be very, very, very nervous if I only had $1000 in emergency savings. Our expenses tend to fluctuate enough when emergencies come up, that often we will use the emergency fund as a cushion. If someone needs help, or there is a missions offering at church, we give a lot to things like that, and sometimes it won’t fit in the monthly budget. We always find a way to make it work though. When we bought our car (we had to have it), we did hit our emergency fund for a large down payment ( a couple months expenses). But, we replaced that amount, plus a little bit, then started getting rid of the rest of the car loan. When I take money out of my savings, it’s like a loan to me, I always owe that account how much I took out, plus some. Occasionally, I’ll put some surplus into the savings account, just to offset inflation and increases in cost of living and such.