When your Emergency Fund is finished... - Page 2

[Poddi]

I voted "other", because fully funded EF is not a priority right now.  We do have about 3-months expenses reserved for EF still, but we're mostly working hard to pay off other stuff.  After we pay off everything we might increase that to 6 months, or we might not.  Our family vacations and major purchases are planned and budgeted for, so they are not really related to saving rates and wouldn't be a splurge.

[mama to B]

I voted big time because I'm planning to take dd on a weekend trip. Two nights in a hotel, amusement park, zoo, shopping, movies etc. The weekend will probably cost about 800 with shopping. I'm kind of saving for it now though. $670 and I will have met my first goal. Then I will go back to saving after our trip.

[Birdie B.]

Er, we are splurging in a major way right now by adding a screen porch onto the house. We looked at our situation (husband with stable job, both of us with excellent credentials and experience, no debt besides mortgage, retirement funds, plus parents who would be willing and able to help in a major crisis, and 12 months salary in the EF) and decided that we had been really good at saving and our house could use some work. In the end it will be a good investment to improve our house, plus we can really enjoy it now.  So we are draining 6-9 months' worth of our EF to pay for it, although we will start paying it back immediately.

I am not sure if this is what you mean by splurge - maybe it's an over-indulgence or just plain old home renovations depending on how you look at it.  It's a little different than going to Dairy Queen or a shopping trip though.

[annethcz]

I've been through the save/splurge cycle enough that I'm simply not a believer in "hard-core" saving FOR ME.  I know it works for other people, but I just end up feeling deprived and doing stupid things.  So instead I have a somewhat liberal budget.  We save, but don't cut back on everything in order to do so.  Rather than splurging when we hit a milestone, we splurge on little things that improve the quality of our life in a continuous manner.  So instead of blowing $500 on a big trip after saving $X, we spend $100-200 on date nights every month.  It keeps us feeling like we're living the good life, while still being able to save a moderate amount of money each month. 

FWIW, we did recently hit a milestone number.  DH's 401k finally hit $100k and stayed there consistently for a month+ (it'll be years before my ROTH gets there, but I digress...).  We did celebrate, but at home.  We put the kids to bed early on a Saturday night, grilled some steaks from the 1/2 beef we recently bought, and pulled out a special bottle of wine we had been saving.  We won't be using that money for another 30 years, so it didn't seem right to go out and spend $$$ to celebrate.  But we had a great night at home anyway.