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Comment by ixwt | Hacker News Reader

So putting my money into a HYSA isn't a good place for an emergency fund? It will take 2-3 days to transfer (without fees).

I've never understood this mentality. I've got a credit card with nearly 6 months of expenses as a limit, most of it not used because I pay it off month to month.

I'd be more worried about the tax implications of selling ETFs and such than the 2-3 days of wait to transfer.

Maybe I lack imagination, but I can't think of anything that I'd need my entire emergency fund immediately. Throw the emergency cost onto a credit card, and transfer the money from the emergency fund to pay off the bill. I guess that doesn't work in some other countries where credit cards aren't as prolific as the US.

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For what it's worth, Wealthfront's HYSA offers free same-day transfers, at least to major banks (they just need to support RTP transfers, which many do). But I agree with your point that an emergency fund is fine as long as you can access it within a few days.

> It will take 2-3 days to transfer (without fees).

This depends on the bank. If you have a checking account with the same bank, the funds can be available right away. The standard withdrawal frequency limits still apply.

Withdrawal limits on savings accounts were suspended for COVID, and at least in my experience, hasn't come back - but ymmv

I think this is one of those places where mass-market financial advice is aimed at people who are bad with money and might not be able to float a month of expenses on credit.

I'm not sure I've ever had a nontrivial expense in the US that simultaneously couldn't be paid on credit and wasn't known for weeks in advance either. I would expect any no-credit charge in excess of about a dinner bill to be announced at least a week in advance, implicitly through an invoicing process at the very least, and I would frankly have reservations about whether any vendor who didn't have a way to handle this was really a legitimate business.

Even if that's not an option, your broker is probably fine with floating you a sum of cash matching your recent MMF sale amount as overdraft or margin at a price of somewhere between "we've already factored it into our fees as a cost of doing business" and <0.05%/day of the loan amount anyway, because overnight loan alchemy is a well-understood problem and the bread and butter of retail banking.

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