Tag: emergency fund

How crazy is it to invest an emergency fund in stocks?

I thought I had written everything I wanted to write about emergency funds. Especially why I don’t like them! For example:

But this topic just keeps coming back. Most recently in the ChooseFI podcast episode 66 and the discussion that ensued afterward. One unresolved issue: the pros and cons of investing the emergency fund in the stock market. As I’ve mentioned before, I am not against having an emergency fund. Quite the contrary, if you’re on your path to Financial Independence (FI) you strive to accumulate 25 years (!) (or better 30+ years) of expenses – much more than the 3-6 or even 8 months of living expenses normally recommended to keep in the emergency fund. In other words, I view our entire portfolio as one giant emergency fund invested in productive assets (mostly equity index funds) and I don’t see the need for keeping a separate bucket of money in low-risk assets. One could view this as having an emergency fund that’s invested in stocks! 100%! How crazy and/or how irresponsible is that? That’s the topic for today’s post. Let’s look at the numbers and quantify the tradeoffs…

Continue reading “How crazy is it to invest an emergency fund in stocks?” →

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Five Fishy Finance Phrases Deserving Diabolical Deaths

Halloween is around the corner, as evidenced by the annual return of the “Pumpkin Spice Latte” at Starbucks and 5-pound bags of sweet stuff at the grocery store! That’s also a good time to stab through the heart and kill with a silver bullet all those scary senseless finance myths, truisms, and falsehoods. Every time I hear one of the phrases below I suffer a mini heart attack. I hope people would stop saying those. Continue reading “Five Fishy Finance Phrases Deserving Diabolical Deaths” →

Top 10 reasons for having an emergency fund – debunked (Part 2)

This is a follow up from our post last week when we couldn’t fit debunking all the arguments for emergency funds into one post. This is also good place the point out some of the great work other bloggers have done on this topic:

Here are our reasons 6-10. Enjoy! Continue reading “Top 10 reasons for having an emergency fund – debunked (Part 2)” →

Top 10 reasons for having an emergency fund – debunked (Part 1)

In a past blog post, we pointed out that a $0.00 emergency fund is most useful for us. Lots of visitor traffic came from both Physician of FIRE and Rockstar Finance (thanks for featuring us!!!) and most comments were very supportive. Good to know that others follow a similar approach. To make the case more complete we should also look at some of the standard arguments people normally use in favor of keeping a large stash of cash for emergencies.

That’s because in addition to some of the complaints we got in the comments section, someone we quoted in our post, Scott Alan Turner, is a blogger and podcaster and he dedicated almost an entire 28 minute podcast (transcript included if you don’t want to spend 28 minutes) to our theory and why he thinks we’re wrong. We respectfully disagree!

For full disclosure: I really like Scott’s blog and podcasts in general. I mean no disrespect and like to invite everybody to check out his material. I agree with most of what he has to say, just not the advice on emergency funds! Enjoy!

So, let’s look at some of the arguments in favor of an emergency fund and debunk them. It took us a while to put this together, but better late than never! Continue reading “Top 10 reasons for having an emergency fund – debunked (Part 1)” →

Beat Behavioral Bias: Mental Accounting

A lot of economic and financial research deals with behavioral biases, those occasions where the mind plays tricks with us and leads even very intelligent people down the path of irrational and sub-optimal decisions. Other bloggers have pointed out some of these biases before, see Plan Invest Escape on cognitive biases. Also, Northern Expenditure wrote an interesting post on the temptation of instant gratification over saving for the future. Among all the different biases, Mental Accounting is not that well-known but it’s one of the most fascinating. Mental accounting, sometimes called Framing, shows up in human behavior in the following ways:

Intentionally or unintentionally creating different buckets of money and ignoring the fact that money is fungible; displaying different degrees of risk aversion and/or different propensities to consume out of different buckets.

Quite intriguingly, in personal finance the mental accounting bias is not only committed frequently, sometimes it’s even celebrated as a great innovation. It’s not a defect, it’s a feature! Some of the well-known financial gurus fall for this fallacy and are not even ashamed! Continue reading “Beat Behavioral Bias: Mental Accounting” →