Saving
The emergency fund question is really a question about your job
Three months, six months, a year — the standard answers ignore the variable that actually decides it.
Sunila Prakash
Contributing writer, Finance Ridge
Sunila covers budgeting and household cashflow, mostly for people whose income is not the same every month.
Contact Sunila through our contact page — mark your message for their attention and it will be passed on.
16 articles
Budgeting
Track spending for one month before you change anything
Budgets fail because they are built on an estimate of your spending. The estimate is almost always wrong.
Budgeting
Percentage budgets and fixed-amount budgets solve different problems
One scales automatically with income and hides lifestyle creep. The other holds spending constant and makes every rise visible.
Budgeting
Automate the transfers, not the decisions
Standing orders on payday do the work of discipline. Automating the choices themselves is where it goes wrong.
Saving
Bonus rates expire, and the account stops being the one you opened
Introductory savings rates are a marketing cost with a defined end date, and the business model depends on you not noticing it.
Saving
Deposit protection is per institution, not per account
The guarantee limit that makes bank savings safe has a boundary, and brands sharing a banking licence share the limit too.
Saving
Round-up saving works because you never decide to do it
Micro-saving tools accumulate small amounts by removing the decision entirely, which is both their strength and their limit.
Saving
Tax on savings interest is the part nobody checks until it arrives
Interest is income in most systems, and how it is taxed varies enough that any general rule is wrong somewhere.
Saving
Money needed in three years is a different problem from money needed in thirty
The horizon decides the account, and almost every mistake in saving comes from mismatching the two.
Saving
Saving for a child means deciding who owns the money at eighteen
The account choice looks like a question about interest rates and is actually a question about control.
Saving
The balance sitting in your current account is money doing nothing
Most households leave a working balance well above what the month requires, and it earns almost nothing while it waits.
Budgeting
A joint account is a plumbing decision before it is a trust one
How a household routes its money determines what each person can see, spend and lose. That is an architecture question.
Budgeting
Budgeting apps sell you a bank feed, and the feed is the hard part
The clever categorisation is not what you are paying for. You are paying for a reliable connection to your accounts.
Saving
Real return is what a savings account pays after prices have moved
The rate on the account is a nominal figure. What it buys depends on what happened to prices over the same period.
Saving
Naming a savings pot is irrational and it works anyway
Money is interchangeable, so labelling it should change nothing. In practice, labelled money behaves differently.
Saving
Interest is credited on a schedule, and the schedule changes the total
Two accounts quoting the same rate can pay different amounts. The difference is when the interest lands.