Where to keep it: access, currency, several banks

A cushion has to pass the bad-day test: can you reach the money within hours, in the currency you pay with, even if one bank, an app or the power lets you down? That turns "where to keep it" into three questions — access, currency and how many places.

The first is liquidity: how fast and how cheaply savings become money you can spend. For a cushion it matters more than the interest rate. Each place trades differently: an instant-access savings account is reachable in minutes but pays modest interest; a locked term deposit often pays more but can't be touched until it matures; cash works with no power or internet but earns nothing and can be lost; dollars hedge a weaker hryvnia but move both ways; a second bank keeps money reachable when one bank's card or app fails.

No single place wins on every count, which is why a cushion is usually split across several.

To size the real cushion, count only the money you could actually use for an emergency today, and leave out everything that is spoken for or locked.

From Dana's four pots, two count: the 31,000 instant-access savings account and the 500 USD in cash, worth 500 × 44.8 = 22,400 UAH. Together that's 53,400 UAH. The 9,400 on the card is already this month's spending money, and the 40,000 term deposit is locked until 15 March 2027 — until then it is savings, not a cushion.

Against essentials of 23,102.34 a month, 53,400 is about 2.3 months of cover. The deposit's high rate didn't make it a cushion: a cushion is defined by access, not by return. On its maturity date the 40,000 can move into the cushion and push the cover past four months.

A cushion's one job is to pay the essentials when income stops, and in Ukraine those essentials — rent, groceries, the social contribution — are priced in hryvnias. So the core of the cushion sits in hryvnias, where it matches exactly the costs it must cover, with no exchange step in between.

A dollar or euro part is still useful: it hedges a sharp fall of the hryvnia and travels if you have to move abroad. But its hryvnia value moves both ways — if the hryvnia strengthens, the same notes buy fewer hryvnias — and every exchange costs the spread between the buy and sell rates. That makes foreign currency a sensible part of a cushion, not its core.

Two tempting but wrong reasons to avoid: foreign cash isn't useless (it hedges and travels), and hryvnia savings don't always outgrow prices — beating inflation is a separate topic for money beyond the cushion.

A deposit guarantee and same-day access solve two different problems, and a cushion needs both. The guarantee protects the amount: if a bank fails, the Deposit Guarantee Fund pays your deposit back. As of September 2026 it covers individuals' and FOPs' deposits in full during martial law and for three months after; under current law the cover is then capped at 600,000 UAH per person in each bank.

But a guarantee says nothing about timing. A payout after a bank fails takes time, and most bad days aren't failures at all — an app down in a blackout, a blocked card, a network outage. For those, what keeps the money usable this week is spreading it across two banks and holding a little cash.

So size and safety come from the guarantee; same-day reach comes from a second bank and cash. Martial-law rules change often, so check the current terms.

Passing the bad-day test is less about the amount and more about the layout. Three moves cover the three questions — access, concentration and currency: keep most of the cushion in instant-access accounts in two banks, hold about a week of cash for food, medicine and transport without power or cards, and keep a modest foreign-currency part as a hedge rather than the core.

The tempting failures each break one question. Moving everything into the locked deposit chases the rate but fails access. Keeping the whole cushion in dollar notes at home earns nothing, can be lost, and doesn't match hryvnia costs. Leaving it on the card you spend from every day fails too: money within easy reach of daily spending tends to get spent.

Notice none of this needs a new product — only a different arrangement of money you already hold.