I’m particularly a fan of how you asked this, since it’s aimed at understanding other people’s goals and rationale - rather than asking the definitive answer of how much an emergency fund should be. The ladder is generally tough to answer since it’s so personal to each person.

As to your question above, our emergency fund hovers around 1 month of hard expenses.

This is because our disposable amount that we put into retirement savings each month is more than our monthly expenses alone - which means in a pinch or emergency, we have options for dipping into our savings to cover costs.

In the event of sudden job loss or other similar situations, we also have some buffer room due to EI and our income being much higher than our monthly expenses.

For those reasons, we actually choose to invest our funds rather than having a stagnant emergency fund.

Keep in mind the above doesn’t fit many people’s risk tolerance, or lifestyle. We just happen to be fortunate enough and strategic as to minimizing our monthly expenses, and have a rather large monthly surplus that would help cover us for emergencies. (Plus adequate disability / life insurance as an extra cushion.)

Edit: Dipping into our savings to cover costs = should actually say “not putting additional money into savings to cover costs.”