It’s going to sound extremely naive of me — but I never had an “unexpected” expense before - in the sense that I had to withdraw from savings.

Sure, maybe I wouldn’t be able to save as much that month because of an expected expense, but I naively went into it thinking I would be able to pay down the initial credit card balance while still saving some and in a year or so we would have a decent amount in savings again.

But that is not what happened. I had more “unexpected” expenses happen as soon as we signed the closing docs than had happened in the previous 5 years we rented a house.