Now you are running on subjective instead of quantitative measures.
Like that i bring in my ability to take risk. When you are young (below 45), you are able to take more risk (or to be exact, not so concern with the volatility of your investment), simply because there is no sequence of risk of decumulation. (basically, you are not worried of your investment going south now, because you can be confident if you invest in an index, it will go up eventually when you reach 55 when you exit your investment).
Your willingness to take risk is even more easily settled. IF you are so worried, have an emergency fund of 2 years, and you should be pretty much secured, because that fund will be able to help you continue your lifestyle for 2 years with no need for additional funds. So if your pay drops, you can still adjust your spending, while still paying for the important expenses in your life.
There is no "free to take different risk". What's that 24k growing at 8-10% when your whole mortgage is 500k (And the amount of money you save beats investing 24k) is growing at 1.4%? 500k is 20 times bigger than your emergency fund of 1 year (24k).
Try doing this exercise instead of going into some subjective term first.