How to Quickly Rebuild Your Emergency Fund After a Financial Emergency

If you’ve had a financial emergency that forced you to dip into your emergency fund, rebuilding it quickly is crucial to your financial success, even though it might seem like a difficult and unpleasant task. Read the article below to get motivated and to find out how you’ll be able to rebuild your emergency fund very quickly. 

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If you have weathered a financial emergency by tapping into your emergency fund, I want to take a moment to congratulate you. I know things might seem difficult now, and even if the financial emergency is gone, it never feels good to have to tap into your emergency fund. However, I congratulate you anyway because the fact that you even had a rainy day fund in place puts you above so many others who must weather financial emergencies with no rainy day fund – they must either resort to going into debt to pay for the financial emergency or they must liquidate some of their investments. You, however, planned ahead and had a rainy day fund in place to guard you and your household against life’s financial storms – instead of hoping that those storms wouldn’t come, you knew they would one day arrive, and you set out to put an emergency fund in place between you and the harsh realities of the world.

Now, however, it is time to once again buckle down and quickly rebuild your emergency fund. You can’t waste time by slowly rebuilding your emergency fund. We recommend building up your emergency fund very quickly and, in the same light, we recommend rebuilding your emergency fund very quickly after a financial emergency.

First, You Need to Get Motivated

Don’t Have the Energy to Do It Again?

I know how hard it is to weather a financial emergency and to see the emergency fund you built with your sweat, your toil, and your sacrifices be depleted to take care of something that shouldn’t have even happened in the first place. You might not feel that you have the internal energy to build up your emergency fund quickly again – you might feel like you’re not up for it. This is an understandable feeling, but you cannot let it prevent you from putting in the necessary effort into rebuilding your rainy day fund quickly, an integral part of your financial success and well-being.

It’s Not as Hard as It Might Seem

The truth is that even if you feel like it’s too much trouble to rebuild your emergency fund, you’re probably wrong. It’s not as hard as you likely think it is. You built up your rainy day fund once and you can do it again. In fact, it will be easier to do it again because you’ve already done it once before – you have proven yourself capable of achieving the important task of putting a proper emergency fund in place.

Building up your emergency fund won’t take much time, but it will take some concentrated effort. The good news is that the effort you will have to exert isn’t particularly difficult, as you will see below – it might be slightly physically taxing, but it won’t likely be overly mentally or emotionally taxing. You’ll need to buckle down for a bit, but it won’t be long or particularly arduous.

Use the Following Strategies to Quickly Rebuild Your Emergency Fund After a Financial Emergency 

The recommendations below are exactly the same as those given in our article on how to initially build up your emergency fund quickly. They work in this situation just as well.

1. Get a Temporary Second Job

Get a second job doing something on the side. Dave Ramsey’s pizza delivery job has been the classic recommendation, but today many more options are available. You can drive for Uber or Lyft if your car meets the requirements. You can tutor if you have skills that are in demand. If you have the skills, it might be possible to do some freelance consulting. Even a weekend job as a cashier is a decent short-term gig if it helps you supercharge your emergency fund savings.

2. Sell Stuff

Selling Stuff is a tried and true way of getting your hands on some cash quickly. Some people have more to sell than others, but if you have things that you aren’t using anymore, try to put them on eBay or Craigslist.

3. Cut Down Big Time

Most households have some fluff room (that’s not a technical term). What I mean is that most households aren’t just buying the basic necessities but are instead buying extra luxuries. It might be possible to buckle down and cut out a lot of unnecessary (although pleasant) expenses for a short while. It obviously won’t feel great while you’re doing it, but it’s not for long, and once you have your emergency fund in place, you can go back to a normal lifestyle, secure in the knowledge that you have a cushion of cash in place against all of life’s crazy unpredictabilities.

Using the above strategies, you can quickly rebuild your emergency fund after a financial emergency. We highly recommend you rebuild your rainy day fund as quickly as possible so you can sleep easier and so you can return to focusing on your other long-term financial goals, such as investing for the future and building wealth.

Takeaways

1. Even though it might be hard to rebuild your emergency fund after a financial emergency, it is a necessary action, and you must do it in order to maintain your financial house – in order to keep a buffer between your household and the financial storms that might come your way again.

2. Now that you’ve already had a rainy day fund and weathered a financial storm, it will be easier to rebuild it than you think – you’ve just got to start, and you’ll see how quickly you can rebuild your emergency fund using the tried and true tactics above.