How to save 6 months of living expenses
How I did it: I worked a higher paying (much higher paying) job for a while. I set up a bank savings account specifically for this goal, and then I set up automatic transfers to transfer money from my regular account to this account every month, and then stopped thinking about it, and now I have six months' living expenses. Hurray.
It actually did not take long. I already had about half the money saved up (I don't know how long that had taken, which is why the "it took me" section is 1 year, but it may not have taken that long, so I put that in the account, and then I had my automatic transfer do the rest for two to three months, and then today I was over-eager so I just had them transfer the rest of my money from my regular account to this account.
The reason this ended up being easy was because of my higher-paying job. I'm now returning to my regular job.
Lessons & tips: If you have flexibility in your life, you can stop doing what you are doing now, and go get a nice job that earns you much more. Don't start spending more, live the same lifestyle (I still lived in the same dinky, tiny studio) and then the money just magically accumulates. Then, after you save up, you can leave.
I had a higher-paying job that I really liked, but if you don't have such a luxury, you could just go and work a soul-sucking Office-Space-esque gig for a while till you save up, and then you can leave and do as you like.
Resources: I just used online banking tools, any bank should have them.
