We have a year's worth of savings in my savings account. I don't touch it. I'm a software engineer and I'm sure one day I'll be laid off. This amount keeps me happy and comfortable with that thought while I get another gig. Yes it is overkill, and yes that is a lot of money that I have not doing any real work for me. That's true. It is a peace of mind issue for me to know that I have a year of buffer before I can't pay bills or pay my mortgage without having to tap into other accounts. I didn't use to be like but then babies came along and I got incredibly risk averse.

Checking account is about 2 months of expenses. There's never a risk of over-drafting this way. This is where all the credit cards pull from to pay bills and to buy coffee.

Everything else is doing work in 401Ks, IRAs or investments. Sometimes we will have our checking account go up significantly higher than 2 months but that is because we need to use it for something: replacing a roof, doing a remodel on a room, etc. Fortunately most of that is done for now.

Ideally we need to get better at investing. My hope was to buy a small property every few years and rent it out but it may have been (definitely was) too optimistic.