My Emergency Fund Took a Hit, Now What?

Replenishing My Emergency Fund

Life happens. It can all go downhill within moments notice. You can be on track with your goals and be derailed off of them within a month. This is the story of 2025. I had automatic transfers to all of my investments. If I stayed on the right path, I would be maxing out retirement accounts. Setting up accounts for short-term investments like a brokerage. I stupidly made myself extremely leveraged in this account and the value has gone down thousands of dollars. I had enough for my taxes, I had enough for car insurance. But I stupidly bought stocks instead of monitoring my risk. I also paid taxes two months early to get it off my mind. It has left me thin in my emergency savings account. About $3,000 taken from my emergency account for stuff I could have saved for. And the worst part is that the market is so far down, and it hasn’t been over a year since I can’t sell my stocks, so I am going to be a little thin in safety for the next couple of months.

How do I get out of this season? Come back from depleting my savings. Quite simply I need to work more. Find more ways to increase my income. New bank account bonuses, maybe even a gig type work for some time. Do the broke college kid strategy and sell plasma and make some money. I also have a bunch of sports cards I bought to flip and probably should just sell them now. I will probably make $100 profit but add up the money back into my safety net. I haven’t had this low of a balance in some time. I need to make it back quickly.

I can also decrease my living expenses as much as possible. This won’t be long as there is a house on the horizon but for the time being I can lower my expenses. Over the last few months this is a foreign concept but let’s look into more of this and see what our expected savings is. Currently with all of my expenses and income my savings will be $700 but I also have one more boost in income I will be receiving in late March that will boost me up even more! If I hit $700, I will push it into next month.

I could also stop my investments. My HSA is taking about $300 post-tax from my income adding in 401(k) I could add even more to my available to use pile. This is my fault though. I shouldn’t punish my future self as he wouldn’t be making sales without putting some cash away for taxes.

Right now, I am in a spot where I don’t feel financially safe. My expenses are about to increase, my car is about to fall off a cliff in value, and I have paused half of my investments, including my Roth IRA. Which is the account with my largest amount. All I can do is just keep pushing through it, it won’t last forever. Life has seasons and this is a season where I need to do other things to keep up with my rising costs and to counteract those taxes. This month I had a couple random expenses come down on me, pair that with my smaller income and it has made my $700 a month saving goal seem outlandish. With the new income and contributions, I should switch the goals around to make it more attainable, but I want to shoot for higher. I want to be able to max out my Roth IRA. Maybe my investment has gotten out of hand. 6% going to 401(k) of gross income, 8% of my gross income going into my HSA. That’s 14% of my gross income leaving already. The goal of $700 more a month to add to a brokerage and Roth IRA would be adding 20% to that. Perhaps that is unattainable and saving 35% of my gross income is too much. Adding stress to my life. I need to adjust.

What’s the adjustment? 14% of my gross income includes an employer match, so I would like to add 11% of my gross salary in investments. This would put me at 25% with an employer match and 22% without the match. This would be $88 a week leading up to $4576 for the year. Leading to the new savings number being more like $352 a month. If I boost it up to $100 a week that would be 12.5% of my gross income to retirement. This would make my savings numbers be 27.5% of my gross income with match or 24.5% of my gross income without match. This would also lead me to have $5,500 if I started today. Which is funnily enough what I need to max out my Roth IRA after prior investments. I still want to shoot high. So that’s what I want to do. $400 a month going to Roth IRA. Going to make the automatic transfer now. It is all set up. $100 a week until I stop it. Any extra goes into an emergency fund to fill that up. Any extra is wherever I want to take it. My future is secure. I feel better.

I went from worrying about emergency funds to putting in an automatic transfer, I feel good. I swapped my percentages to be able to breathe easier.