Emergency funds are good

Don't have a huge amount to post but just wanted to have written something after my last post. This blog is very much my personal diary space and I tend to be very open most of the time but I just don't have anything else to write about it at the moment. Maybe that will change but in the meantime I'll just get back to posting random day-to-day stuff.

One thing last week reinforced is how important it is to have an emergency fund in place. I don't but at least I have come far enough along my debt-free path that I had a credit card with a four thousand euro limit and no outstanding balance on it. Between flights, one night in a hotel, car hire, petrol, tolls, mobile phone top-ups, food and whatever random stuff came up I ended up spending about seven hundred on the credit card and withdrawing about another four hundred in cash from my already overdrawn Irish account (again, it was good that I had reduced that overdraft to less than two-thirds of the limit as otherwise I would have been stuck trying to frantically borrow money from somewhere - not easy to organise on a weekend or from a different country). If I had had even a basic thousand euro emergency fund in place, I would have had almost all of that covered.

I do have just over three hundred built up in savings since August but I'm leaving that there and will just pay off the debt the same way I had been planning to with a couple of months tacked on to the other end as well. And by the time I have finished paying it all off, I should also have at least one thousand saved. Now, with a bit of luck my dentist appointment in a couple of weeks time won't reveal anything costly needing to be done!