Renata Wiles

Merry Christmas.

And so we were very lucky that he was able to get it.

He just went hard with, you know, applying for jobs and interviewing and we were very lucky that he was able to get another job lined up pretty much like straight away.

But it made us really stressed thinking,

How are we going to pay our rent?

How are we going to pay our bills?

We've got two little kids.

Like, do we have enough in our emergency savings?

Like, we just kind of had one generic fund of savings, I guess.

And so from that, we were like, okay, we actually need to consciously build an emergency savings that we don't touch.

And it's three months worth of expenses.

And so even those kind of conversations, you know, we've had to have recently and really just being a lot more aware of money, I guess.

And it's just...

again going back to that fact that my income is not stable anymore it's not the same every month and so we have to talk about it a lot more because if I have like if I know okay well in May I'm going to have this job that's going to bring in extra money we have to you know we account for that or I think oh I've got nothing extra coming in in April so we really need to be aware of that when we're doing our budgeting and stuff and what does our savings look like and trying to track things more closely and we're so not perfect at it I'm still really you know not not great at it but

We definitely have those conversations a lot more now.

The safety net can get ripped away quite quickly with sideways jobs.

Totally.

And I don't know, like I would be keen to know, you probably have a better idea than me, but how many people actually do have that kind of emergency savings fund?

Very few.

And it's probably even, you know, times are so tough at the moment as well.