<prompt> Human: We are not the best nor the worst youve seen around here. Good salaries, put 10 down on a nice house, 10 in 401k a month, under 4k in cc debt, never missed a payment, some school loans. Not all bad, not all great. We were doing a pretty good job building up towards the 25k we wanted to have for our 6 month rainy day fund. We were sitting at around 10k when an exclusion in our health insurance made us pay for a surgery out of pocket and almost back to nothing. In a way, I felt good to just write a check to a hospital instead of scrambling for credit cards or borrowing from retirement accounts, but now I just feel like Ive tumbled all the way down the mountain that weve slowly climbed up for 3 years or so. How do you deal with this? Cut back elsewhere and up how much you put towards your RDF to build it up quicker? Just roll with the punches?Hopefully taxes next year will help if we can deduct extra medical costs if we hit whatever ratio is needed to claim medical costs.  <response>: Knowing how many people live paycheck to paycheck, I feel blessed being able to pay for unexpected expenses. I credit PF and frugal subreddits for that. It might be sad knowing that these expenses drained your reserves, but the alternative was to not have the resources there. I say congrats. It is slightly sad, but better than unexpected debt. Congrats you are doing things correctly. 