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An emergency fund is measured in months of essential costs, not in months of income and not in a round number someone told you. Put in what your life actually costs to keep running, and see the date you reach three months, six, and twelve.
Only what has to be paid to keep the lights on: rent or mortgage, council tax, energy and water, food, getting to work, insurance, and the minimum on every debt. Not subscriptions, not dining out, not holidays. Those stop in an emergency, which is exactly why they do not belong in the target.
Set this to what your account actually pays, and 0 if the money sits in a current account earning nothing. An emergency fund belongs somewhere you can reach it the same day, so this is an easy-access rate, not an investment return.
Time to three months' cover
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If you put away a little more
Save as PDF opens your browser's print dialog. Choose Save as PDF from the destination list in the browser's own dialog, not the system print dialog's PDF menu, which re-renders the page and drops the links. You get a sheet with your targets and a month-by-month tracker, with a box to tick off each month you pay in.
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Read This First
Almost everyone who gives up on an emergency fund gave up on a target that was too big to begin with. Usually because they measured the wrong thing.
Three months of take-home pay ≈ £7,200
Three months of essential costs ≈ £4,950
Same person, same month. Measuring pay instead of costs adds £2,250 to the target and about a year to the wait, for cover you would never need.
The fund exists to pay the bills that keep arriving when the income stops. It does not have to fund the life you lead on a normal month. Take out what genuinely pauses in a crisis, the subscriptions, the takeaways, the holiday fund, and the target usually drops by a quarter to a third. That is not cutting corners. It is measuring the actual job.
Rent or mortgage, council tax, energy and water, a realistic food shop, getting to work, insurance, phone, and the minimum on every debt. That last one matters: missing a minimum is what turns a hard month into a mark on your credit file, so it belongs in the essential column even when nothing else does.
Carrying a card at 24.9% while saving at 4% loses you money every month, so the usual sequence is a starter buffer of one month or so, then clear the expensive debt, then come back and build the full three to six. The compound interest calculator shows what that card costs while you wait.
Easy-access savings, separate from your current account so it is not accidentally spent, and not invested, because the month you need it is exactly the month markets are likely to be down. Boring is the point. The rate matters far less than the fund existing at all.
Start with one month, not three. Three months is the destination, not the first step. One month of essential costs already covers the boiler, the car and the excess on most insurance claims, which is what actually happens to people.
Automate it the day you are paid. A standing order into a separate account the morning after payday removes the decision. Whatever is left in the current account is spendable, and that is the whole trick.
Lower the target before you lower the effort. If the date is years away, look again at the essentials figure. Most people have put something in it that would stop in a real emergency.
Refill it, then forget it. Using the fund is not failure, it is the fund working. The only rule is that the standing order goes back on afterwards.
Next Step
A 1:1 session is an hour on your actual numbers and your actual report, where the money is going, what is costing you most to carry, and how to free up the first hundred a month without it feeling like a punishment.
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