Bump up your savings from 3-6 to 8-12 months

My husband has moved on average every 3 years over the last 15 years as his job title changed and relocation was involved.  Since we've been married we've moved 3 times.  I love and embrace change and have lived in MO, GA and now PA during the last 10 years.  Each time we move we seem to move while the economy is strong and buy at the higher end much to our dismay.  It all rinses the same after the wash as we sold our existing home in a strong economy, however, with our savviness on selling a home and my husband's handyman skills we've been able to turn a nice profit on each home.   For our current home we brought at the high end again right before the economy turned.  There's no moving for us right now because house prices have dropped so much, which is fine because my husband has a great position in a good company and we now live close to family and good friends.

We're fortunate to be in a good position financially but I'm sure there are many who are belly up with their mortgage with the economic downturn.  We were able to refinance recently to lower our mortgage rate and now is the best time to find cheap mortgage deals.  We were able to lower our mortgage rate significantly during the refinance which enables us to save more.  With the economy in dire straits it seems that we may need to bump up our savings from 8-12 months instead of the old 3-6 months that used to be the convention.  My parents instilled the importance of saving money when I was a child and both my brother and I held bank accounts and each week we'd deposit our pocket money.  Savings featured even heavily 2 years ago when my husband was out of work for 6 months.  We were prepared and we had the severance, my job and savings to hold us over for more than a year.  While you are saving money on your everyday spending here at The Freebie Junkie consider putting a plan together to save 8-12 months worth to cover unexpected events such as a layoff.

Do you think 8-12 months worth of savings is enough?

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