Work out your real safety-net number — months of essential expenses, not salary — and a realistic date for having it.
An emergency fund exists to keep the essential machinery running — housing, food, heat, transport — while income is interrupted or a large surprise lands. In an actual emergency you'd cut the extras immediately, so sizing the fund on your full salary over-shoots the target and makes it feel impossibly far away. Sizing it on essential spend gives you a smaller, honest, reachable number.
If the "you can save per month" box was hard to answer, that's the budget talking — a zero-based budget will find the number, and the subscription audit usually funds the first milestone by itself.
The common guidance is 3–6 months of essential expenses: 3 months if your income is stable and you have a second earner in the household, 6 or more if you are self-employed, on variable income, or the sole earner. Note it is months of essential expenses — rent, food, utilities, transport, insurance, minimum debt payments — not months of salary.
Somewhere boring and instantly reachable: an easy-access savings account, ideally at a different bank from your current account so it is not one tap away. Not investments (they can be down exactly when you need them) and not cash under the mattress. This is general information, not financial advice.
A common approach: build a small starter fund first (around one month of essentials or $1,000) so a surprise doesn’t become new debt, then attack high-interest debt hard, then return and build the full 3–6 months. High-interest credit card debt usually costs more than savings earn.
Unexpected, necessary, urgent — job loss, a boiler failure, an emergency vet bill, essential travel. A sale is never an emergency. Naming the account "Emergencies only" genuinely helps.