My wife and I are new college grads as of last summer and have been on the FI train for about 6 months (we are thankful that we discovered FIRE right after college!). Besides the difficulties juggling the start up costs of moving to a new place and starting a life the main issue that we have been struggling with is where to keep all of our money. I am currently maxing my 401k and a Roth, but my wife's employer dose not offer these things yet, so we have a little extra cash to put into vanguard every month.
My question is, what money do you count towards the common ~50% savings rate. For example, we are using YNAB to track all of our expenses and according to YNABs tracking we are saving 50+% of our income (not including retirement accounts) but I don't believe this number because it also counts the "saving up for something" categories as savings for that month. Besides our investment category that gets shuffled into vanguard, we have a master savings category that covers things like a vacation fund, car repairs, home maintenance (we just purchased a home as well), this years medical deductible ect...
It seems really difficult to me to actually PUT 50+% of your money into investments, since there are so many little rainy day things that we are perpetually "saving for". Another example is, we just purchased a home and the inspector said that we should expect to put a new roof on in 3-5 years. So we started a YNAB category for the roof and add $200 a month to it. In 2.5 years we will have the 6k needed for the roof, but then its just sitting there doing nothing for us. Should we invest this money? Im hesitant because I've heard its not good to invest money that you might need in the short term in case of a market downturn. Are we being too conservative? What is everyone else's approach?
tlldr; How does everyone balance their rainy day savings and how much money you have on hand vs what money to invest?