The Costs of Unexpected Bills

Imagine if one of the following bad and unexpected things has just happened to you.

• Your car broke down and you can’t get to work.
• You injured yourself and you need to go to the emergency room.
• Something broke at your house and you need to get it fixed right away.

We hope that none of these things is an everyday occurrence for you. After all, if any of them were, they wouldn’t really be unexpected and would be something for which you could specifically plan. But not these kinds of events. When things like these events happen, their timing is random and they come as a surprise. Being what they are, that often also means dealing with large and unexpected bills for you to pay.

While they may not be the kinds of things for which you may have a specific plan to address, they are exactly the kinds of things for which many personal finance experts recommend you have emergency savings to pay for, whether in part or in full. Emergency savings are perhaps the cheapest insurance you can have to deal with the unexpected costs of a personal emergency.

But how much do these kinds of emergency expenses cost? In truth, that’s something that will vary a lot from person to person and the nature of the unexpected events themselves. There is however some average cost data for each of the unexpected event scenarios we’ve outlined, which might be useful in plan out how much you need to have for your emergency savings. Or at least seeing if they can handle the cost of a “typical” unexpected emergency event.

The following interactive chart presents a range of “average” costs for each of our unexpected scenarios. Please hover your cursor over the low, average, and high-end estimate to get the numbers for each scenario (if you’ve accessed this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, you may need to click through to our site to access a working version):

Here’s where the numbers come from for each scenario:

• Car repair: The low estimate represents the average annual costs of car repairs from Cox Automotive, the parent of Kelley Blue Book, who also list the average costs for a variety of common car repairs in 2023. The “average” estimate is Consumer Affairs’ 2024 estimate of the annual cost of maintaining and repairing a vehicle. The high estimate is from AAA and represents the average annual maintenance and repair bills reported by the insurer for 2023.
• Medical Emergency: The low, average, and high estimates are all taken from BetterCare’s summary of the typical range for how much a visit to an Emergency Room costs in 2024. While other health insurance may cover part or all of the cost of bills you may have, you can still expect to have costs that it won’t cover where this cost is a reasonable estimate for what those extra costs might be.
• Home repair: If you rent, these estimates may not apply. However, if you are or have aspirations of someday being a homeowner, the low estimate for an emergency home repair is from Angi’s 2023 State of Home Spending report. The “average” estimate is provided from a 2022 survey conducted by Ipsos. The high estimate is from Thumbtack’s 2023 estimate of the average annual cost of home maintenance and repairs.

A lot of these estimates are taken from the annual costs of “typical” maintenance and repair procedures. Since many of these unexpected events won’t happen each year, you could aim at saving the “low” end estimates each year as your regular emergency savings plan or more if your income allows it, and build it up over time to where you can handle bigger emergencies. As for how much you might need to have altogether in any designated emergency savings you have, that’s a different question for a different day.

Image credit: Car accident by shuets udono on Flickr. Creative Commons CC by-SA 2.0 Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 Generic Deed.