Every year, something happens that you didn't see coming. The boiler dies in February. A family emergency needs an urgent flight. The car fails its MOT in a way that costs more than you expected. Your laptop gives up the day before a deadline.
You can't plan for what these things will be. But you can plan for the fact that something will happen. That's the iceberg fund — a buffer against the unknown, held liquid and untouched until genuinely needed.
Two kinds of surprise
Here's something we noticed when thinking about financial surprises: there are actually two very different types, and they need different responses.
The first type is genuinely unpredictable. Redundancy. A medical issue. A broken boiler. You couldn't have known these were coming. The only sensible response is to maintain a buffer — typically two to six months of essential expenses — so that when something does happen, it's a problem to solve rather than a crisis.
The second type is more interesting, and more frustrating: things that happen every year but still catch you off guard.
The predictable surprises
Think about your September. If you're like many households, that's when the car insurance renews. And the home insurance. And the kids need new school uniforms. And you're still recovering from the summer holiday spending.
None of this is unexpected. It happens every single year, on roughly the same dates, for roughly the same amounts. And yet every September, it feels like a surprise. The cash flow tightens. The careful plans from January feel like ancient history.
Why? Because monthly budgets can't see annual patterns. If you're only looking one month ahead, September's double insurance hit is invisible until it arrives.
Seeing what's coming
This is where Keep can help. Because Keep sees your historical data, it knows that September is expensive for your household. It can see that August spending is typically 40% higher than average. It can spot the annual rhythm that your monthly view misses.
More usefully, it can tell you about it in advance. Not as a warning or an alarm — just a calm heads-up: your expensive season is eight weeks away. Here's what came up last year. Here's what you might want to think about.
Smoothing the bumps
Once you can see an annual pattern, you can decide what to do about it. Your car and home insurance cost £1,200 every September. You could set aside £100 a month from January so September is already funded. You could switch to monthly payments — it costs a bit more per year, but it removes the cash flow crunch. Or you could keep paying annually and just plan for the hit.
There's no right answer. The right answer depends on your household, your cash flow, and what kind of financial stress you find tolerable. Keep shows you the trade-offs honestly and lets you choose.
Building resilience, not rigidity
The iceberg fund isn't about being perfect with money. It's about building a layer of resilience so that life's inevitable surprises don't derail everything else.
Keep gently encourages maintaining a buffer, and shows you how different scenarios affect your safety margin. If you overpay your mortgage by £200 a month, your iceberg fund covers fewer months — is that trade-off worth it? If you build the buffer to three months instead of two, how long does that take and what else gets delayed?
These are real questions with no universal answer. But having the clarity to think about them calmly is worth a lot.
Something is always coming
The most honest thing a finance tool can say is: we don't know what will happen next. But we can help you be ready for it — ready for the things you can predict, and resilient enough for the things you can't.
That's the iceberg fund. Not a budget line. Not a savings goal. Just a quiet acknowledgement that life is uncertain, and a practical way to live with that uncertainty.