Rebecca Walser, tax attorney, financial Planner, and wealth strategist, joins this edition of Stretching Your Dollar to offer some tips on how to save for an emergency. 


<div class="block">Rebecca Walser, tax attorney, financial Planner, and wealth strategist, joins this edition of Stretching Your Dollar to offer some tips on how to save for an emergency. </div>
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Wake Up With Cheddar

Stretching Your Dollar: How Much to Save for an Emergency 

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Chatter News. I'm and I'm Shannon. And now for stretching your dollar, we all know that we should have enough savings stashed away in case of an emergency. But, you know, AC NBC survey just found that 40% of people have less than $10,000 in the bank to cover unexpected costs. So for advice about how to save day for a rainy day, we are joined by a financial planner and wealth strategist, Rebecca Walzer. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Shannon. They are an emergency fund is a key. You know, a lot of people they know they're supposed to have it, but it's hard for people to actually get the money to do that. So how much money should we be putting away for an emergency? Realistically, yeah, realistically harder now because I have gone up inflation. But, you know, I think if you don't have at least three months of cash flow in the bank, if you, then you're stuck, whatever job you're in, whatever situation you're in stuck. So let's start with one time, figure out how you can budget maybe for go Starbucks, your $5 coffee for however long, get that three month reserve. And once you have that, you'll start to build a little bit of a nest egg. Then we'll work up to six months. Really? We'd like to have a year. Financial freedom begins when you have a full year of cash flow in your account that you can walk away from whatever situation you're in new job, new career, new friends, new life, whatever. So that takes, that takes at least 12 months of reserve. So what advice you have for people or families who want to have an emergency fund out there? I just don't know where to start, as you mentioned. Maybe just trim some of the other, the coffees and all that other stuff. It's so true. Baker, you know, we spend so much money, we don't even realize we spending people need to do a financial audit. They literally need to pull out their bank statement. So many of these businesses now are subscription based. We forget what we've signed up for. I know I have an expense that I can. I just need to go in and cancel and I haven't done it. It's big monthly, right? I don't use it, need to just don't do it. So do an audit. So we've all heard that tried and true wisdom out there of saving 3 to 6 months. But for a lot of people that is really hard. It's hard. How do you sort of start, how do you sort of get that? And is that really sort of the still the still realistic place to get? We have to have savings because we never know what's going to come. So we must have savings. The answer isn't, we can't do it. So let's not. But what people don't do is look at where they're spending the money. I have so many people that come in and I ask them, what do you spend? Do you know how many people don't even know what they spend monthly? Start with a budget? Literally every single penny for one month that comes out of your account account for it. Hold yourself accountable, then you'll know where you're spending, where we can cut and once we can see this is what we can cut without really changing our lifestyle and not really noticing, that's when we can really start saving. Are there any apps or services resources you know, of that can help people try to figure out some people, they don't even know what they're paying for on a monthly basis. Reoccurring calls. Exactly. Absolutely. Yes. There's a of apps that you can scan your receipts right there. If you even just, you know, knowing that tied to your bank account, there's a lot of apps that can do a lot of customized analysis for you, but you just need to look at the actual charges. People don't even look at what they're spending it's too convenient tap here. Swipe there. It's so easy subscription based pricing. It's all getting us. And so we really have to know what we're spending. Ok. All right. Thanks to certified financial planner, Rebecca Walter for joining us here in studio and helping us stretch our dollar further. Thank you so much, Rebecca.