<prompt> Human: I have read elsewhere that before even beginning to save for retirement I should establish a 3 to 6 month fund of savings. At my current pay rate I have about 1300 after paying for rent, car, insurance etc etc. Thats before food, gas, tolls. If we assume that I save half of that, which is pretty aggressive - it would take me roughly 4 months to save for 1 month of savings, as my monthly expenses are roughly 2100 again, not including food or ANYTHING except rent, student loans, insurance, bills etc. IT would take me an entire year to save for 3 months, or 2 years to pay for 6 months. And thats with virtually no money for vacation or any holidays etc assuming 100week in food and 25tolls or misc expenses, id be breaking even every month putting 500 into savings. I dont forsee myself saving anything for retirement for a long time. Seems counter productive... but also seems dangerous to live without a cushion.I imagine some of you are going to say to reduce expenses... but theres not much I can do about that. I pay 280month in student loans, but have received some raises since the last tme I was quoted, so thats likely to go up even more shortly. In addition to that I made some foolish investments with cars - rolled an underwater lease into a 2013 prius, and pay roughly 400 in finance payments and another 200 in insurance.Right now I dont have any savings other than whats in my account right now. I was thinking of starting modestly and saving 100 to an emergency fund and 100 to a retirement fund a month. But I imagine thats a drop in the bucket?The biggest mistakes ive made are in buying a new car when I should have bought a used one, and in going to college. I cant take back either of those as far as I can tell.Open to thoughts.  <response>: You need to make a budget and decide on a reasonable allocation of your money. Youve told us some of your expenses but it seems that you dont really know what you are spending on food, entertainment, vacations, etc. you need to decide how much you want to spend on these items versus how much you want to devote to other financial goals. With a student loan, a car payment, and no emergency fund I would not place a priority on investing for retirement. Take a few years to clean up the debt then start investing. If I were you Id try to pile up as much cash as I could for 3-6 months for an emergency fund. You should be able to save at least 1000. Then I would start working on paying down the car loan. You can either pay it off early or pay it down to the point that you can sell it and buy a used car with cash. Then youll be in a better position to work on emergency fund, investing, and the student loan. 