It’s already April so I’m sharing advice on one of our 2018 goals: saving up an emergency fund!

I’m sharing my April update on our emergency fund savings per Dave Ramsey’s baby step 3. As he teaches in The Total Money Makeover (affiliate link), we are trying to save up a couple months of expenses.

(We don’t follow Dave Ramsey’s advice exactly, but we follow it generally and are super focused this year on saving up our emergency fund this year so that we have more stability and security as we welcome a new baby to the family.)

This month we are officially halfway to the goal!

Since the start of the year we’ve saved up $5,000 in the emergency fund.

We’ve got a set amount we are putting in each paycheck and I’m dumping more blogging side income into the account now too (read How To Make Money Blogging if you’re interested in earning side income from a blog). With those things to help it grow even faster, we should hit our $10,000 mark before the end of the year.

This will most likely be a moving savings target once we reach it in case we want to save more, but we set it for a 3 month emergency fund amount to start as that was the emergency fund we previously had. I think most likely the goal will be a few thousand more than that but $10,000 is a great start that can cover most unexpected expenses.

Emergency funds are so important and they make you feel more secure. Now that we are halfway with our emergency fund savings I’m already feeling much more secure in our finances than I did after I paid off my car.

There is so much power in this baby step item in your personal finances! It’s nice to pay off debt but it’s even nicer to know you have money in the bank to weather life’s potential storms. We are only partially through this baby step and it already feels so much better to have a cushion.