The Emergency Fund screen answers one question: if your income stopped today, how many months would your liquid savings cover your essential spending?
What this screen shows
The Emergency fund screen shows a single months-of-runway figure, along with the two numbers it's built from: your liquid balance (the sum of your checking and savings accounts) and your average monthly essential spend, calculated from your categorized transactions in housing, utilities, groceries, food, healthcare, fuel, and debt payments over a trailing lookback window.
How to use it
There's nothing to configure here — the figure updates automatically from your existing accounts and transaction history. If NetWorthy doesn't have enough spend history yet to compute a reliable average, it says so plainly instead of showing a number built on too little data.
To change the result, adjust what feeds it:
- Check your liquid balance — make sure every checking and savings account you actually hold is entered on the Accounts screen with an accurate balance. An account missing from that list, or one with a stale balance, understates your runway.
- Categorize essential spending accurately — housing, utilities, groceries, food, healthcare, fuel, and debt payments are the categories counted as essential. A transaction filed under the wrong category, or left uncategorized, shifts the monthly average this figure is built from. See Transactions & Import for how categorization and splitting work.
- Give it time — the average is computed over a trailing lookback window, so a single unusual month (a one-off large medical bill, for instance) is smoothed by the months around it rather than dominating the number on its own.
Notes and limits
This is sized from your own categorized essential spend, not a generic multiple of your income — two people with the same income but different fixed costs will see different numbers here. The result is an educational estimate based on the data currently on file, not personalized financial advice, and it isn't a target NetWorthy is telling you to hit by any particular date.
There's no separate emergency-fund account type or dedicated savings mechanism tied to this screen today — the liquid balance it reads is simply the sum of whatever you've tagged as a checking or savings account. If you want a dated target for building the fund up, that lives on the Goals screen instead, where you can create a goal of kind "Emergency fund" and link it to the account you're actually saving into.