Nobody told me that having a small emergency fund would change how my entire nervous system responds to daily life and I think that's undersold
I want to be clear that I am not someone who has their finances figured out. I'm still living pretty close to the edge and I don't have anywhere near what the standard advice says you should have saved. But about seven months ago I managed to scrape together $600 and I made a rule for myself that I was not allowed to touch it unless something genuinely broke or I had a medical situation. It took me almost four months to get there because every time I got close something would come up.
The thing nobody really explains is that the psychological effect kicks in way before you hit any official threshold. I don't wake up at 3am doing the math in my head as often as I used to. When my landlord mentioned they might be raising rent I felt dread but not the specific terror I would have felt six months ago. When a coworker mentioned their car needed brake work I didn't immediately feel it in my chest because I wasn't thinking about my own car and imagining that scenario happening to me with nothing behind it.
Six hundred dollars does not solve anything structurally. I know that. It wouldn't cover a real emergency, it barely covers half of one in most cases. But it changed something about how I move through my days that I wasn't expecting and that I genuinely cannot fully explain. There is a difference between having nothing and having a little and it is not a proportional difference. It is much larger than the number suggests. If you are trying to decide whether it is worth delaying something small to start building even a tiny cushion, I would say yes from experiance, even before it feels like enough to matter.