An emergency fund that starts at $50 a month

Advice about emergency funds tends to start with the destination — three to six months of expenses — and that is a large enough number that a lot of people never set off. Fifty dollars a month is a better place to begin. Not because it is enough, but because it is an amount almost anyone can hide from themselves.

Set it up as a transfer that fires the day after you are paid, into an account you do not otherwise use. A different bank, ideally. The point is friction. Getting the money back should take a deliberate act, and the balance should not appear on the screen you glance at when deciding whether you can afford dinner. A high-yield savings account is the natural home; rates move, but on a small balance the interest is a rounding error either way. The interest is not why you are doing this.

After a year you have $600. That does not cover a month of anything, and it does not need to. What it covers is the tyre, the vet, the parking ticket, the $340 the dentist wanted up front before they would finish the work. Those are the bills that otherwise land on a card at 24 percent and quietly become a second problem. Six hundred dollars stops most of them at the first one.

The harder discipline is not putting money in. It is deciding what counts. A test that works for a lot of people: was the expense both unexpected and unavoidable? A car repair is both. A sale on something you wanted is neither. A friend’s wedding is unavoidable but not unexpected, so it belongs in the ordinary budget, however inconvenient that is to hear.

And when you do raid it — you will — the fix is dull. Leave the transfer running and let it refill. The fund is not a test of character. It is a shock absorber, and shock absorbers are meant to get used.