Savings Strategy Update: The Emergency Fund Goal

I read an article in a free issue of O (the Oprah magazine) in which Suze Orman strongly suggests that your emergency fund should equal eight months of income. It sounds difficult to do, but it would be worth it to have that kind of peace of mind, so I did the calculations. The first step for me is to get the emergency fund started with one paycheck for each of us. Step two, as suggested by Mapgirl, is to allocate 10% of our monthly net income to that savings account. I calculated that it will take 6 ¼ years to fund our emergency account, which isn't too bad when you consider that the average car loan is 5 years.