Coping with depleted emergency Savings?

You keep an emergency savings fund and eventually something comes up and you use up your savings to deal with emergency expense. How do you replenish the fund as soon as possible? Do you save at your normal rate and hope things will eventually catch up or do you allocate more money to savings and cut back on most of your expenses?

Saving for a “rainy day” is a key part of any personal financial portfolio. Advice recommends a range of between three to 12 months of expenses. If you use up your emergency funds, it'll take a while to replenish—probably more than a year or so. You might choose to get some extra juice to build up the fund:

Cut back on normal indulgences. If your emergency fund was depleted, you might need to cut your monthly book budget in half or choose to eat out one night a week instead of two.

Take a temporary part-time job. The best way to build savings (or to pay off debt) is to increase your income. Working overtime to earn extra also helps. Every little bit helps until the fund is replenished.

Sell some stuff. Need a quick cash infusion? Look around to see what you can sell on eBay or Craigslist.

In many ways, these are the same methods for tackling debt — just on a smaller scale. To repay debt, you might have to cut back on most of your splurges for several years.

In the short run, you might want to boost your cash flow by either finding extra income or putting a larger portion of your income to replenish the emergency fund. If you successfully do this, you should be able to rebuild your emergency fund in more or less than two years.