Emergency fund… slow going

So, we are now at about 53%* of our emergency fund goal.

While we have only saved 3% since becoming Debt Free in October, we are actually encouraged that we were even able to save that much. While money going out to pay for debt does not happen anymore, we have had significant increases in other bills.

We’ve had a few situations create bills we didn’t plan on. Diapers, along with the price of fresh organic produce for baby food (I’m making Z’s food), have been creating some instability in our budget. I’m still breastfeeding the kiddo and believe it or not, this means I eat way more food than I ever did while pregnant.

However, the biggest item that is currently holding us back is our medical insurance premiums. We estimate that for the three of us, our monthly premiums are just shy of DOUBLE our home mortgage. Yes, you read that right. Granted, our mortgage is not massive (we’ve been wisely living in a home that my hubby purchased 9 years ago and he did not bite off more than he could chew), but still… this is an increase of 1160% since January 2013. (gulp!) Yes, again, you read that correctly.

Some of this increase is quite understandable, I went from being fully covered, to having a very small amount taken out of my check, to being laid off. Tack on an additional family member and we were bound to see increases. We get that. However, this is an absurdly high amount. It did not help that during this time of life change for us, the insurance market went into total meltdown/chaos. Our insurance broker even told us “Sorry – I can’t help you. I have no idea how to answer your questions at this point and I might not even be in business in a few months.”

That being said, we are working on a couple of options and hope to see our monthly premiums decrease significantly in the next couple months as we work to make changes. AND we are so thankful to be out of debt. Again, the margin created by not having debt and not throwing money away on interest, has allowed us to weather this medical insurance storm.

*100% will be 6 months of expenses as suggested by Dave Ramsey’s Baby Step 3. We saving 6 months over because we are a small business family where income is not always the same every month.