We can start this topic by defining the emergency reserve as a financial amount that is available for use in contingencies and emergencies. So your money is not a supplement to the budget nor is it used to make a superfluous purchase.
The emergency reserve ends up working as a safety cushion for your budget. After all, unexpected situations can generate costs that affect the entire balance of finances.
How to build your emergency fund?
make a financial plan
Before thinking about making a financial plan, it is necessary to have a dimension of the current situation of your financial life. Putting how much you earn, how much you spend and where you spend your money. So from that moment on, you can set up your financial planning.
You must create a strategy to optimize the use of your resources and set the stage to compose your emergency reserve.
Create a budget and control finances
The budget is one of the main tools to put into practice. It ends up serving as a resource distribution map and helps define the best way to meet all daily needs. However, it is necessary to ensure compliance, which requires good financial control.
Once you've determined how much to spend on each part of your day, you need to track and record every move. It can be controlled with a spreadsheet, which will help to control all movements and compare with what was planned.
Thus, there is a way to know if an expense is exaggerated, which allows decisions to be made to ensure compliance with the budget.
Set goals
When we talk about saving money, it is not usually a task that happens so naturally. To have a direction on what to do to compose your emergency reserve, it is interesting to establish financial goals.
In general, the emergency reserve must correspond to 6 times your monthly expense. Knowing this, you already have a goal of how much you will need to save. It is recommended to create smaller goals, establishing the time needed to set up the reserve and the amounts saved monthly.
In this way, you will have an action plan that will help you achieve your goals.
Avoid impulse purchases
With the change of habits, the construction of the emergency reserve is also important. When you learn to save, it will allow you to save your money and invest and make frequent contributions, for example. So one of the most efficient measures is to avoid impulse purchases.
Instead of using a credit card for everything, prefer to pay in cash and think before each purchase. This reduces the impact of the emotional factor in purchases and reduces unnecessary costs in the routine.
Have discipline
Building your emergency reserve is a task that takes time and requires, above all, discipline. It is useless to have perfect planning, a complete budget and clear objectives if you do not commit to everything.
We can say that it is essential to be disciplined on a day-to-day basis. However, transforming or creating habits is not immediate, constancy is necessary. Don't give up, at the first obstacle or sacrifice you have to make. Focusing on your goals and knowing that having a reserve can help you in many ways.
Invest your reservation
When you have a reserve, it is also important to invest it, so that your money is not affected by inflation. So the ideal is to invest your reserve. We brought some alternatives, such as Selic Treasury and Bank Deposit Certificates (CDB) with daily liquidity, among other possibilities. So, start preparing yourself to better understand and plan your finances.