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@stevenwood
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Absolutely! We exchanged comments recently about the advice of broke financial planners, the ludicrous idea of them telling us exactly how we should handle our finances.

I spoke for the most part about this concept from an obtaining credit standpoint, as it was something I was advised I MUST do as my credit did not not like it would be sufficient for me to be able to obtain a mortgage, which proved to be the case.

For the vast majority of my grown up adult life I had nothing even close to an emergency fund, come to think of it, I never had more than £100 - £200 in savings of any kind. Don't get me wrong, with hindsight I take 100% responsibility for it although I didn't believe it was my fault at the time 🤦‍♂️

My mortgage broker took the saving history for my eventual EF and attached it to my application alongside my holiday pay entitlement from my job (13 weeks) and a statement I had prepared, explaining why I would be able to deal with up to 1 year of unemployment and I am happy to say it swung the decision and as of yesterday, I have my first ever foot on the property ladder as of... Yesterday, even though I turn 50 next year.

My workmates laughed at me when I started saving for an emergency fund as my initial amount I saved was £3 per week, my partner told me that could never work, however I gamified the process and made cuts and savings to get that to £5 then £10 per week. Next step, as I have mentioned here before, I took to eBay and other methods of earning a little extra ensued, despite having no other online skills to speak of.

As for loss of buying power, you are abso-bloody-lutely correct, inflation will prey on that sum like a monster, there is literally no negating this, except to say leave the money in the best possible place to at least offset some of the effects.

A savvier investor than me, may have been able to leave the money in a safe, secure place that gave higher yields but my only aim was to show a solid, dependable saving history with zero weekly savings gaps and it panned out for me in the end.

I guess also the idea of an emergency fund is to have immediate access if the worst should happen, in the past when this happened and we had zero reserves, we always relied on credit for the high risk borrower which cost us a tonne of interest through the years. Oh one final benefit, this enabled us to get a much, much better rate of interest on our mortgage than I could ever have dreamed of.

I empathise massively with, and remember pretty well, the situation you describe, it drove us in to 20K+ of credit debt although as I mentioned earlier, I now realise a lot of those early decisions are on me, but I guess if we were born wise and with all the skills we needed there would be no upside to getting older, right? 😁

Let's do our best and hope that crypto eventually solves the problems we all have financially and repays the loyalty and belief we displayed when many thought us fools!

Thanks ever so much for stopping by and sharing your thoughts and highlighting the biggest elephant in the room. Take good care of you and yours 😎👍

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