Bye Bye Emergency Fund. See You Again Soon.

There are moments in life when it's good to have an emergency fund.  And this is one of those moments.  Thanks to snowstorm Janus, yesterday afternoon, as my wife was making a left turn to come home from work (and she makes this turn everyday but thank God she's OK), the car skid and the front passenger tire hit the curb.  And all this a block away from our house (her round trip commute is about a mile)!  I didn't know to what extent the damage was.  When I went out to inspect the damage, I only saw scrapes on the rim and thought that was it.  But as I started driving to go to the mall with my family today, something wasn't right.  1) In order for the car to drive straight, the steering wheel had to be 90 degrees to the left as if I was making a left turn and 2) whenever I would brake, there would be some grinding in the front suspension.

So, my initial thoughts were 1) take it to the local shop and tried to get a wheel alignment or 2) call my State Farm agent and pay the deductible and get it fully fixed right.  Well, I decided to go with option 2 because as someone who has dealt with a lot of suspension issues with my previous cars, I knew that a simple alignment would not fix this issue.  There was just too much damage to the drive-ability of the car.  And I want to get this fixed right the first time and going through a State Farm approved repair shop, the work would be guaranteed for as long as I owned the vehicle.

So as I started to get the claims process started, it turns out that our deductible was exactly $1,000 which is the same amount as our emergency fund.  To point out, I don't have a specific account that is designated as our emergency fund.  I just transfer money from my Chase checking to my Chase savings account for the purpose of saving up two months worth of my wife's pay since she doesn't get paid over the summer (she's a teacher).  But it may be a good idea to have a separate account specifically for an emergency fund so it's easier to manage the emergency fund.  I do have an Ally account so I may start using that again.  I already have $0.02 in there, woohoo!

The good news is, our tax return is right around the corner.  Our typical time frame for filing our taxes is the end of January to mid February.  We should have our tax return by the end of February, and then we can replenish our $1,000 emergency fund then (Ally account).  I would like to point out that our emergency fund is $1,000 temporarily.  After all our debt is paid off, we'll start to save up for at least 6 months worth of expenses as our emergency fund.  

So with that said, how big is your emergency fund and when was the last time you need to use it?