Several answers here are very good, but I don't feel that any are 100% adequate. I hope my answer adds value and isn't just noise. And full disclosure, I am a Dave Ramsey disciple so I'm just going to say what he would say.
You should have $6,500 - $13,000 for you to feel secure, which is 3-6 months of expenses if I've done my math correctly (excluding debt payments which I'll address presently). But before you do that, you need to pay off your debt. I want you to imagine that you have $8,000 in the bank, but you have a car payment and credit card debt, and then you get laid off. How does that feel? Now imagine you have $8,000, no car payment, no credit card debt, and you get laid off. How does that feel? It feels better doesn't it? It isn't difficult to figure out that the more debt you have, the quicker your emergency fund is going to be eaten away.
SpartaSixZero makes an excellent point that the exact amount of money to help you feel secure will vary depending on how stable and how in-demand your career is, and how many dependents you have, but your debt should not be a factor because you should pay that off asap. And the reason Dave Ramsey recommends 6 months and no more for an emergency fund is exactly the reasons glglgl and bvoyelr point out in their comments on SpartaSixZero's answer: you have too much money that isn't doing anything.
Dave Ramsey outlines 7 Baby Steps:
- Baby Emergency Fund: save a $1,000 emergency fund, and nothing more. If anyone quibbles about this it's usually that they believe their emergency fund should be larger, but at this stage you should feel uncomfortable because you're in debt, and saving up a large emergency fund is going to keep you in debt longer. There are very rarely exceptions to this, and I do not think your situation is one.
- Debt Snowball: list all of your debts smallest to largest, and throw every dime you can at the smallest debt until it's paid off, then move to the next largest, etc. Paying off debt this way builds up emotional momentum, which is much more valuable than paying off your debts from largest interest rate to smallest.
- Emergency Fund: fill out your emergency fund to cover 3-6 months of expenses.
- Retirement: save 15% of your salary for retirement. This 15% should not include any employer-match. If your employee matches 3% of your contributions, do not use that as an excuse to put only 12% of your paycheck away, you should instead put a full 15% away.
- Children: save for your kids' college (if you don't have any children yet, don't save yet).
- House: Pay off your house early (or begin saving for a down payment if you don't yet have a mortgage).
- Enjoy: Be outrageously generous.
You're already past Baby Step 1 which is good, but you have debt so you need to tackle that before going any further. If you have less than $3,000 in debt, take the money from your savings and pay off all your debt today, cut up your credit cards, and vow to never go into debt again (with the unfortunate exception of a mortgage). If you have more than $3,000 in debt, and your stocks are not in retirement accounts, sell off all the stock necessary to pay off the debt. If you have more than $9,000 in debt, go down to a $1,000 emergency fund, throw everything you have saved at the debt, then continue with Baby Step 2.
At this point, some people complain about taking money out of an investment to pay off debt. And let me reiterate, do not take out money from a retirement account for any reason except to prevent a bankruptcy; the fees and taxes are just too much. But you absolutely should sell all other investments to pay off debt, and here's why. Almost no one would agree to go into debt to invest in something. It's a good way to lose everything you have. And those who would agree to do it aren't wise. But from a financial standpoint, that's exactly what you've done, you've borrowed money on a car to invest in some stocks.
So once you're debt free, your next step is to build up your emergency fund to at least $6,500, but maybe more if it will take you more than a month or two to find another job. But do not have more than $13,000 in your emergency fund.
Once you have a real emergency fund you can either do what Dave calls Baby Step 3b, which is to save for at most 2 years for a down payment for a house. No more than 2 years because you're probably under-saving for retirement to save for the down payment, and missing out on more than 2 years of retirement savings in your late 20s is just too much. After 3b, or instead of 3b, start saving 15% of your paycheck towards retirement. It sounds like you don't have children so I'm assuming you can skip Baby Step 5. And so on.
I get the feeling you don't have a whole lot of debt, so you can probably have your emergency fund fully-funded within a year, maybe sooner. And if you want to really throw gasoline on this fire, get a second job delivering pizzas or something, where you can make another $1,000/month. That will absolutely catapult you through this process.
And lest you're still concerned that you're missing out on investment returns at this age, if you invest just $623/month (which is 15% of your current paycheck, which you're going to get raises throughout your career so these are really low numbers in reality) at 10% (historically the stock market has done over 12%) from the age of 30 to 60, you will have just a hair under 1.3 million dollars. And if you follow Dave Ramsey's plan, you're going to build so much financial discipline and good habits that you're going to wind up with quite a lot more than that in reality.