The safety net is your precautionary savings: a reserve of money that's immediately available to handle the unexpected (a repair, a loss of income, a health expense…) without touching your investments.
It's the recommended first step in Goals: before planning your projects, cover your bases.
Why Start Here?
A well-built safety net means you won't have to sell investments at the wrong moment when something goes wrong. Once this foundation is in place, you can build your other goals (real estate down payment, retirement, travel…) with peace of mind.
How Do I Create My Safety Net?
From the mobile app home screen, the Goals card invites you to start with your safety net if you haven't created any goals yet. Tap Get Started. You can also create it from the goals list using the "Build a safety net" template.
Enter your monthly expenses: when possible, Finary suggests an estimate calculated from the transactions of your synced accounts, which you can adjust freely. In some cases, no estimate is suggested and you enter the amount yourself.
Choose your coverage duration (from 0 to 12 months, 6 months suggested by default). Your target amount is your monthly expenses multiplied by this duration.
Link the accounts that make up your safety net.
How Much Coverage Should I Aim For?
It's generally recommended to be able to cover 3 to 6 months of expenses. The app highlights a warning zone below 3 months of coverage.
The right level depends on your situation: income stability, family expenses, risk profile. If you need 12 months of reserve to sleep soundly, that's perfectly fine!
Why Cash Accounts Only?
Only cash assets (checking accounts, savings accounts) can be linked to the safety net. This is deliberate: precautionary savings must remain immediately available and risk-free. A stock portfolio can lose value at exactly the moment you need it.
What If My Safety Net Far Exceeds My Target?
Holding too much cash has a cost too: every euro sitting in an account yielding less than inflation loses value over time. If your safety net significantly exceeds your target, the app lets you know — it may be time to reallocate the surplus toward your other goals.
This reallocation is not automatic. As long as an account is linked to your safety net, its entire balance stays reserved there first and counts toward none of your other goals, even once your safety net has reached its target. To make an account fund another goal, remove it from your safety net's linked assets — bearing in mind that your safety net will then stop counting it.
Tracking My Safety Net
Once created, you can track its progress directly from the home screen, expressed in months of coverage (e.g., "4/6 months"). You can adjust your monthly expenses, coverage duration, or linked accounts at any time from the mobile app.
You can also view it on the web version, under the Goals menu, Safety net tab. That view is read-only: creating and adjusting happen in the mobile app.
Not to Be Confused with the Investor Profile Indicator
On the web app, the Investor profile card also shows a “Safety net” line, expressed in months. It is a separate, fully automatic indicator that predates Goals — so the same words appear in two places that do not measure the same thing.
It adds up all your savings accounts and euro funds, then divides that total by the monthly expenses set in Settings > Investor Profile. It takes no account of the accounts you linked to your goal, and there is no way to choose which accounts it uses. Unlike your goal, it also ignores your current accounts, whose balance moves with your day-to-day transactions.
The two figures can therefore differ, and that is expected: your goal reflects the accounts you chose, while the indicator reflects your total available savings.
The “too high” label is not an error. It flags that you are holding more low-yield cash than you need: every euro earning less than inflation loses value over time.
This indicator is not yet compatible with Family mode: the figures shown are for the account’s main member.
To learn everything about creating and tracking your goals, see Creating and Tracking My Goals.