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birb_cromble  7hr ago (text post)   128 thread views

Weekly Finance Thread

Since a lot of us here have expressed interest in not starving to death in a gutter, I figured I'd start a weekly thread to discuss financial matters.

Ground Rules

  • Remember that we're all just Internet randos. Don't bet your life savings on a hot tip from this thread.
  • Keep culture war in the culture war thread. Yes, global events may impact our personal finances, but that does not mean we have to incessantly harp on culture war aspects here. If you are going to discuss it, please stick to the practical impacts of it on an individual level.
  • Be kind. Remember that everyone here comes from different circumstances. We all have different resources available and different risk tolerances.
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How much emergency cash do people keep around? and where precisely so I know where to look I don't mean uninvested money in a checking account or whatever, I mean literal cash not in a bank.

I have a few thousand, which might be too much, but zero feels like too little.

My husband needed around 5k in assorted denominations. I need around 1k in bills no larger than 20s, and $100 in quarters. Neither of us had a convincing argument for why our way was correct.

For cash, usually zero to a thousand or so. I don't pay particularly close attention to keeping it up. It's more for if I'm about to go somewhere but find I don't have that much cash in my wallet, it's slightly easier to grab some than to stop at an ATM, though that's not at all hard either. I don't take it too seriously as emergency prep, mostly since living in a big city, any massive crisis that results in me not being able to get more cash from ATMs easily or buy things with cards will also cause much bigger, more widespread, and difficult to predict chaos that a little cash is not likely to save me from.

What I do consider as more useful emergency prep to keep safely stored at home is a valid working credit card and ATM card, working spare phone with no service, and expired spare ID. I can lose pretty much everything I typically carry on me and not experience significant hassle.

Right now, zero, but I think you're right that it should be nonzero. I'm going to start keeping some cash around, I think.

I think I have about $3000 ish in a safe. But sometimes it gets dipped into and not replenished when we are too lazy to hit an atm.

That said, the safe also has about $20k in gold though. Didn't mean to, but 6 oz appreciated in value a lot the last 10 years.

I have a few thousand, which might be too much, but zero feels like too little.

Same, and my brain won't shut up about how it would make much more sense for me to add it to my mad money brokerage account and reap the extra GAAAAINZ. But then, it's emergency money, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.

If it makes you feel any better, think of it as insurance.

If you invested $1,000 in the S&P 500 five years ago, you'd get a 77-78% return. Amortized over 5 years, that's about ninety-seven cents a day. How much is it worth to you to have cash handy if your card gets stolen and your bank is closed? Is it a dollar a day?

I've got about $20 in cash in my wallet and probably $5 in quarters somewhere in the car.

None in my crib, aside from some loose foreign bills and coins in various currencies I’ve accumulated from trips abroad over the years and have been too lazy to deal with.

I do keep a small amount of cash in my wallet in case I want to spontaneously buy dru— errr, something from a food truck and it doesn’t take card. Yeah, that’s it.

I wouldn't sweat the opportunity costs of not having invested a few thousand dollars or so, especially if it buys you peace of mind. After some number of years of being an investor, a few thousand dollars becomes trivial compared to your overall net worth.

I try to always keep $40-50 as a minimum on my person (separate from my spending cash in my wallet).

As far as cash in the house beyond that? None. The situations where I will need cash in an instant and a check/electronic venmo/run to the ATM won't work are... basically just an EMP/solar flare situation that I for some reason can't wait out for restoration. Maybe that happens, I run out of food in a week, there's still no government response, but the stores have product they're willing to sell for cash only?

Perhaps I'm unimaginative, but it just seems too unlikely to be worth worrying about for me personally. Not that there'd be any harm in keeping extra cash in house, though, so it's not a terrible idea just for things I haven't thought of and/or convenience.

Maybe it’s different for you, but for me:

  • I had my wallet stolen once, so no card.
  • Sometimes the fraud systems flag you, no card.
  • Potentially a cyber crisis or run on the banks.
  • Sometimes, rarely, you need to pay for something in cash and you have withdrawal limits.

It’s mostly the first two. Given that banks take a week to replace cards, I think you need at least a week of money hidden at home.

I've got multiple credit cards plus a bank card all stored on my phone. When my banks have flagged transactions as fraud, I'm able to authorize them via SMS. IME digital wallets continue to work even if a card is deactivated for some reason and replacement cards are mailed overnight, so the opportunity cost of keeping thousands under the mattress outweighs anything else.

I've also never had a situation where I had an expense that positively could not be put off for a few days and was payable in cash.

Usually between fifteen hundred and three thousand in the safe, plus another two or three hundred in my wallet. Enough to get me through a month or two of room and board, and also useful for unexpected expenses.

I'm extremely conservative by the standards of this forum, and I keep $1,000 cash in my house. That's enough to get me a couple of weeks of my bank account gets hacked or something.

What the hell is going on in Korea?

South Korea's stock market suffered a sharp selloff on Friday after a historic rally pushed valuations and investor positioning to extreme levels, exposing how heavily the market had become dependent on a handful of artificial intelligence-linked semiconductor stocks. The benchmark Kospi plunged 6%, wiping out early gains after briefly crossing the 8,000 mark for the first time in history during morning trade.

Is anyone putting money into Korean equities? There is a lot of momentum in that area, but momentum investing is a risky game. In some ways, it feels like the Korean market is a preview of the US one. They're smaller, and growth even more concentrated in the semiconductor --> GPU --> data center --> AI chain than the US is.

They also have the smallest remaining oil stockpiles, so it's possible Hormuz is finally hitting them.

I hold Korean equities insofar as I hold international ETFs/mutual funds. It's not uncommon for emerging markets and the smaller developed markets to experience eyebrow-raising one-day drops. Korea is only about 2.3% of the global portfolio.

Korea is one of those weird economies/markets that's classified as both emerging and developed, depending on who's doing it, right?

A given investment company won't classify an in-between country like Korea as both emerging and developed simultaneously, but indeed, investment company A might consider Korea developed but company B consider it emerging for fund composition purposes. An example of A would be Vanguard, an example of B would be BlackRock (whose index funds typically track MSCI indices, which classify Korea as such).

I think so. I've seen Korean stocks in both international and emerging market funds.

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