The average job hunt now lasts about 6 months — and the classic emergency fund rule could leave you short after a layoff

While many people are able to bounce back from a layoff quickly — with 29.2% finding a new job in less than five weeks — 27.1% of people still take 27 weeks or more to find a job.

Traditionally, most experts agree that an emergency fund should cover around three to six months worth of expenses. While that might be enough for some people, it might be a good time to adjust your strategy and start saving for a longer gap in your career.

How to start (or grow) an emergency fund

Whether you have no money saved up at all or you’re sitting comfortably at six months of savings, the basic strategy you should rely on to grow your emergency fund is similar: Automate your savings and take it at a steady pace.

It can feel hard to save money each paycheck, especially if you’re living paycheck to paycheck. Most banks make it easy to move a certain amount of money to another account each month, and by doing so, you can start to build up your savings without ever having to consciously take the time to move it.

Once you’ve automated moving a small amount into savings each month, it’s much easier to stick to spending the amount you have left over. It’s easy to check your bank account, see that you have a small surplus over what you expected, and feel like you can splurge a bit. If you don’t have that small amount, you’ll eliminate that urge to overspend, and over time, you’ll build better habits around money.

Of course, that’s not to say that you should never spend a little bit extra on something nice. While you could tally up all your absolute essential expenses and carefully save every single penny that’s not absolutely mandatory, there’s a good chance that doing so will leave you feeling burnt out and unhappy.

The best place to keep your emergency fund is in a high-yield savings account. Most checking accounts have an interest rate of a fraction of a percent, and a lot of banks still don’t offer very large interest rates on savings.

A good high-yield savings account will usually net you orders of magnitude more earnings each year, with some offering as high as 5.50%.

It’s usually not a good idea to keep your high-yield savings account in an investment account. Even if you have the ability to pull money from it at a moment’s notice, you could end up in a situation where it’s not really a good deal to do so.

For similar reasons, while certificates of deposit (CDs) are good for certain types of savings goals, they’re not a great place to store your emergency fund, since pulling your money out of them early usually requires paying a penalty.

When to use your emergency fund

In an ideal world, once your emergency fund is large enough, you’d forget that the money is there and live your life comfortably.

In reality, you’ll probably have to spend some of it at some point. But how do you decide when it’s time to do so?

The key word to remember is emergency.