Tag: emergency fund

The Emergency Fund: It’s Still Useless!

May 26, 2021

One of my earliest blog posts back in 2016 detailed my thought process for skipping the emergency fund. Back then, while we were still accumulating and saving for early retirement, our entire seven-figure equity index fund portfolio served as our emergency fund. We never kept more than $1,000, maybe $2,000 in a checking account. We’d simply used the credit card float and/or the Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) if any larger expenses came up that exceeded my monthly cash flow, e.g., car and home repairs, medical bills, etc.

So, again, the idea is that if you are a practitioner of the FIRE movement and you save and invest aggressively just put all your money in an equity index fund and be done. It’s not crazy at all to simply invest your emergency fund in stocks! And I repeat it again in case people misunderstand (intentionally or unintentionally) my point here, I most definitely advocate stashing a large pile of money. I simply advocate for moving all that money into an investment with high expected returns, ideally equities, instead of letting the money languish in a money market account at 0.03% interest. Please refrain from quoting the strawman sob stories about people who couldn’t afford their roof or car repair because they live paycheck to paycheck. 

But a lot has happened since. We’ve had the 2020 recession and bear market and massive equity market volatility. Many financial experts, bloggers, and podcasters started spreading the “you need x months worth of expenses stashed away in a savings/money market account” mantra again. Have I changed my opinion? Heck no! Quite the opposite! The 2020 recession is a perfect example of the lunacy of the emergency fund invested in a money market account. Let me explain why…

Continue reading “The Emergency Fund: It’s Still Useless!” →

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?” →

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” →