Hey everybody, hopefully this is working like it should. Welcome to Coffee Chats with Candice. Today, I'm walking on my treadmill while I'm talking to you, so a little bit different, but why don't you grab a cup of coffee or beverage of your choice; no judgement here, and let's talk about Emergency Funds. 
  
I'm Candice, if this is your first time meeting me. I own three businesses, I'm debt free, and I want to share my tips with you about how we became debt free, having an emergency fund, and how to save so that you get extra money in your in your life. 

Have you ever been living your life and your car breaks down, you're stressed out about how to afford it because you're already living paycheck to paycheck, which is the majority of people, or your credit card is maxed out. You need an emergency fund and an emergency fund is truly for emergencies. It's a savings that you put aside, that you don't access until you have an emergency.  
  
For examples, a car repair, an E.R. visit, an unexpected co-pay, your AC goes out in the summer, or death in the family and you have to travel somewhere. 57% of Americans can't cover an emergency of $1,000. I want to help you change that. I want you to have $1,000 and this is just a starter emergency thing, just to get you going. It's not “you'll build it later” but this is where to to get you going so that you don't have to use your credit card and you don't have to freak out. 

What the emergency fund is not, is it's not for you to redo your bedroom, or buy a new outfit, or buy the new iPhone or get a new pair of shoes. It's not that. The goal of emergency fund is you need to save $1,000 as quickly as possible and this will help you to not use your credit card. 

So why $1,000? Like I said, the statistics show that most people can't cover an emergency of $1,000. In most times, an emergency is $1,000 or less that we can make it through. You want to try to have that money set aside so that you can make a quick decision.  

How can you get that money really fast? You can have a garage sale, you can sell things on Facebook marketplace, or Khari, or plato's closet or, or wherever – there's so many things that you can find. If you just take a moment to look, take a moment to think about it and you're not in your emergency state to create this fund.  
 
“What can I do?” “How can I save?” 
If you already have a savings account, what you want to do is you want to try to get that fund to $1,000, then you want to make sure that it's not too easily accessible, so that you're not tempted to use it. 
 
You want to also make sure that you don't have the overdraft protection turned on – you’re going to turn that off because if you overdraft your checking account, you don't want it to pull out of your emergency fund. 

That's my action tip for you guys today! Find some things that you can sell quickly to get rid of (that also falls into the category of minimalism as well, which is one of my favorite categories, or my favorite subjects) and get that emergency fund set up. 

Let me give you an example of what happened to me and my husband. We've been in our home for 25 years And last year, we have a fully funded emergency fund (we’ve had that for a while.) Last year, we had to replaster our pool because there was like a hole or something happening to it. We had to do that and it was like $7,000! Well, because we had our emergency fund, we were able to do it, but it was just an inconvenience. If we wouldn't have been able to do it, then we would have our pool that have been leaking, we would have had major structural issues and all that.  
 
The other thing that happened is when we use that money, we had to pay it back – we had to save back up to our balance of our emergency fund that we feel is good for us. 

The next little emergency pain is that our plumbing, our cold water pipe in our kitchen, broke and it flooded my kitchen and the garage and I completely freaked out! Of course, I don't want to spend the money in the emergency funnel. “Do we have to spend it? Do we have to spend it after you've worked so hard to build it?” But it was there and I was able to just brought out a $3,500 bill (it wasn't a check it was debit card), so I was able to give the plumbing company that the debit card and they were able to repair it immediately. 
 
That is my goal for you, is to teach you how to get to that point, so that you don't have that stress to worry about if an emergency comes up, because now it's just an inconvenience.

So anyway, so thank you for tuning in today. If you're ready to start your emergency fund, download my savings tracker bundle, and find a fun way to save. And then I will see you here next Thursday at 10 o'clock on Facebook, and maybe on YouTube or LinkedIn. I don't know. We'll see what happens. I might get a little crazy. So thank you so much for joining me! I'm so excited for you to get on this journey and go with me and I'm excited to help you along. Have a great day!