<prompt> Human: First off, thanks for reading. Im hoping for some objective opinions on my situation.Im 27 and take home 2100month. My expenses are around 1800month. Ive been throwing everything I can at fixing some mistakes I made while I was a naive and irresponsible student paying off credit cards, collections accounts and back-taxes. But now I have no savings. Ive been contributing 6 to my employers 401k plan and have about 1k in there currently. There is no employer match currently. Given my age, and the state of the world economy right now, I prefer to think that Im buying stocks at a discount.The problem is that I now have almost nothing in any other form of savings. I have no other assets. My emergency fund would currently cover half of a months living expenses. It would take me almost a year and a half to build a 3 month emergency fund at my current rate of saving 300month.Do I temporarily stop my 401k contribution and divert these funds to my emergency savings fund? Again, I get no employer match. All Im missing out on is the speculative gain, and the tax break.Assistant: Eliminate all unnecessary expenditures. If you dont have to spend the money to keep yourself fed, keep a roof over your head, or keep your credit score safe, then stop. That means the 401k, and ANY other non-essential spending. Make minimum payments on all debt. Once youve eliminated all unnecessary expenditures, look at your cash flow again. It ought to be more than 300 a month. If it isnt, post a budget for us in this thread so we can look at it. Take the cash-flow nozzle and point it into your emergency fund. You want three months of expenses, minimum. Otherwise things can snowball out of control and put you in a terrible hurt. Once three months of expenses is taken care of, move on to your smallest debt. It could be a credit card or something else. Whatever it is, eliminate it as quickly as possible. Rinse and repeat, moving up the chain from small debts to large debts until youre done. THEN worry about saving for a homeretirement planwhatever else.Human: Thank you, this is fantastic. Regarding your 2nd, 5th and 6th bullet-points, Ive worked backwards, having spent the last year wiping out all my irresponsible debt responsible debt being my 13k student loan at 2.7. Ive read that Dave Ramsey and other PF gurus advocate saving an emergency fund before tackling debt, but the psychological burden of irresponsible debt and having accounts in collections was too heavy to ignore. Wiping out my irresponsible debt burden was a huge relief.  <response>: Congratulations on having the irresponsible debt out of the way and good luck on getting the rest of it taken care of. Given your situation, Id take care of the emergency fund, then take care of the 13k student loan debt, then worry about doing anything else.For those who are reading along: The reason that the emergency fund comes before the debts is that if you have no emergency fund, you have no financial resilience and are much more likely to accrue additional debt. In short, youre playing Russian roulette with your finances.For example, suppose you are focusing all of your income on debt, but you have no emergency fund.Then your car goes down and needs repairs 600 in repairs plus 50 for the tow and without it, you dont get to work and your income drops to zero and you get sick 150 in medical billscopaysmedicationwhatever in the same month.Now youre throwing your entire months surplus at these expenses and possibly putting some of these expenses on a high interest credit card. Suddenly, youre going the wrong way on your debt paydown plan - and your monthly interest payment climbs as they debt rises.Conversely, if you have your emergency fund, you can pull what you need from those reserves. Even if you spend the next month or two replenishing instead of paying down debt, at least youve added nothing to those high interest loans. 