Seems like most of the posts in this thread are US-based, so here's a European one for a change.

I'm 28, married, coming from Indonesia but living in the Netherlands. I work as a software engineer, our family just had our first baby last September, and my wife decided to stay at home to raise our daughter, so we're pretty much a single income family.

I made about €50.000/year after income tax, but we have been very undisciplined with our expenses the past year, especially since after the arrival of our firstborn where we spend a lot of "unnecessary" stuffs for her. We started to budget more carefully since this year, and we now have €5000 in our emergency fund.

Fortunately, both me and my wife do not have prior debts. Unfortunately, we do not have much assets in our name either. As expats, it is hard to commit into buying a house if you are not sure whether you will still be in the country in 3-4 years down the road. Right now, we still rent our house and we do not own a car. I do have a house back in Indonesia that I rented out at a very cheap price (like, $75/month) just to have someone take care of the house while we live abroad.

Since we started to plan our budget, every month we were able to shunt about 25% (around €1000, give or take a few dozen) of our income to our savings. Another 25% of the income were taken by our monthly rent, and another 10% went to pay our utilities. The rest are split into groceries, phone bills, health insurance, etc.

For our short term, we are torn between growing our emergency fund (the €5000 would probably only last us for 2 months) or taking a loan to buy a used car. (probably going to cost us around €7000 and increase our monthly expenses by €300) We have lived under the principle that a car is a liability instead of an asset, but now that we have a daughter, a car seem to be mandatory to go around with a one-year old, especially so when winter came.