What type of accounts do people use to hold their Emergency Funds?

Novice_investor101

Mine is in premium bonds. I got fed up of chasing the odd 0.01% difference in savings accounts.
I now have a sum of £7k in there. I moved away from the 10 months of salary figure & dumped a load into my S/S isa as it felt like an excessive amount of cash to not be working very hard.

£7k is still a lot but it also doubles as my fund for planned house maintenance & I've some jobs planned for the summer. About £5k is what it'll probably end up as & I put the rest of my unneeded money into the ISA & LISA. It'll stay in premium bonds & I'd top it back up to £7k over time to pay for more house stuff.

cattie

As with Novice investor, mine is in premium bonds, though at a higher amount. Wins are reinvested automatically & I probably break even with the rates I could earn if money was invested in an easy access account instead.

Alexland

Zero_Sum wrote: »

Emergency funds arent long term though.

S&S ISA should be used for things like retirement.
For an emergency fund, the best place probably still is Marcus.

My point was that if you have multiple regular savers with offset dates its possible to maintain a rolling balance of emergency money. When the accounts individually mature the money stops being emergency money (which is replenished
from new regular contributions) which is why it's then ok to put towards a longer term S&S objective.

george4064

Instant access savings.

I use Marcus, but there are other instant access saving accounts out there.

Eco_Miser

Zero_Sum wrote: »

Marcus is unlike most easy access accounts in that its pretty much instant access. TSB is limited to £1500, but yes of course put first £1500 in there.

But when people talk of emergency, its for big stuff like redundancy

For some, for others it's having the car break down, or the boiler failing, or needing to visit a dying relative.

Redundancy does not need instant access to your funds, some of those others do.

Having sufficient available credit on your credit card(s) lets you deal with stuff now, and sort out the finances later.

Personally, I have a pool of cash across interest paying current accounts, regular savers, Marcus @5%, Premium Bonds and as a last resort, Index Linked Savings Certificates, which combine emergency fund, planned future spending, fixed interest portion of my portfolio, and day-to-day spending.
I don't count my investments as emergency money though, far too volatile.
That's me though. I don't get urges to spend money just because it's there. I realise some other people need to carefully separate their spending money from their savings, and that's fine.

Ixel

For me it's currently a combination of Lloyds Bank and TSB current accounts (earning some interest), regular monthly savings accounts (again earning some interest, but only paid after one year), and finally if things get desperate I have two credit cards with a credit limit into the few thousands each.

alfabet

Offset against our mortgage. Can be withdrawn again with 1 working day's notice.