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Comment by ashconnor | Hacker News Reader

I might use Money Market Funds if moving money between accounts wasn't such a pain. Until then the HYSA will be the default place to stick money that might be needed with 24 hours notice. Maybe this will change when FedNow has fully rolled out.

For longer term investments I hold my nose and suffer through the Treasury Direct website.

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This is a strange take. Many brokerages, like Fidelity (their “Cash Management Account”) let you write checks, send ACH, or send wire’s directly from the brokerage. They even have a debit card. It also has an account number that you can use to pay bills, it’s exposed by fidelity as a “checking” account type.

For me, Fidelity IS my bank for daily life. I only go to a physical bank like chase / bank of america if I need to deposit cash, or i need to withdraw a lot of cash.

For daily life yes, for large amounts of money, the extra layer due to not being a real bank makes a huge difference.

> large amounts of money, the extra layer due to not being a real bank makes a huge difference.

Can I ask why?

You need to get the money to an actual bank, an extra hop is just extra delay and cause for problems. See links to examples of failed wire transfer below.

In theory correct because large sums of money wired out of an account can be subject to holds for any number of reasons.

But it’s the same with banks too. The only difference is there is one fewer party in the transaction to trace (whereas Fidelity has to work with UMB which is their bank partner).

But the probability of a hold is the same, which is usually very low. I’ve been with Fidelity for over a decade now and have never had large transactions held.

Wire transfer is not really the point. It became a topic because that was posed as an "instant" way to get money out of a brokerage. I pointed out it isn't always reliable and that unreliability is a symptom of a real liquidity difference.

The point is that if I demanded money from you, you can give me your money out of a bank immediately, simply by walking into one. You cannot get money out of a brokerage account for me. You need it transferred for you to a bank first before it becomes your money. This is an actual difference to me who wants money from you now and it's not in theory.

That’s a fair point.

I guess for me it’s extremely rare for me to need (large amounts of) money “now” apart from daily needs but that’s usually charged to my credit card and paid off from my Fidelity cash management account on an interval.

I can see in emergency situations where that is true. But the currently level of liquidity that I get with brokerage accounts + cash management account works for 99.99% of my use cases.

I’m willing to take the higher interest in MMF for what is a negligible impact to liquidity for my use cases.

You can spend directly out of a money market fund at Fidelity. Yes, there is a bank involved in some transactions behind the scenes, but there is no delay and no extra step to take by the customer.

what do you recommend then? To transfer large amounts to my personal bank via ACH, and then perform a wire from my physical bank?

Keep some funds in a marginable brokerage account attached to a major bank, one with physical locations. That way if you really need funds immediately during banking hours you're good to go.

I can wire funds from my cash management or brokerage account for free, use the debit card for anything that takes debit payment rails, etc. I do keep a Chase account around for Zelle, but am looking to switch to Navy Federal Credit Union to eliminate Chase but retain Zelle until FedNow uptake improves. Wires to my Wise account land super fast for quick cross border money movement to EUR and AUD. Wise only charges $1-$2 for domestic US wires, so also convenient for funds that need immediate availability elsewhere.

(lots of detail that might be potentially unhelpful, but I hope it helps others, the plumbing is easy if you know the primitives; Chase is horrible, I do not recommend, Schwab, Vanguard, or Fidelity is the way)

Wire can easily get held up for unknown amounts of time with no recourse. A brokerage attached to a real bank is the only liquid solution for large amounts. Everything else is on an ACH timeframe, which is usually next day with push, but that's often not good enough when you actually need large amounts of money.

Any bank can do this.

It has to do with KYC, in many cases, and being a brick and mortar bank doesn't help. There are heaps of horror stories involving Chase, WF, BOA, etc freezing money up.

A “real” bank is not necessary. The bank charter is for their benefit, not yours, and a brokerage offers everything one should need to satisfy their financial service needs (assuming no lending products besides margin).

Read and learn:

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/lhrr49/cha...

https://www.reddit.com/r/fidelityinvestments/comments/1ctpz8...

huh? I successfully sent a $60k same-day wire with Fidelity, for my mortgage downpayment. The escrow company confirmed they got it by end of day.

My father in law once purchased a home with “cash” and sent an $800k same-day wire (vanguard or fidelity - i forget). Also went through successfully.

First time i’ve heard of this. Can you share more details? Any reading material?

My guess is any kind of "suspicious" wire can be held for manual review.

Lots of reasons, joint accounts, name mismatch, weird names, fat finger by bank employee, missing odd info deemed necessary by the receiving bank, fraud/money laundering holds. One of my very normal wire transfers of not even a huge amount arrived next day for no reason, defeating its purpose, and neither Fidelity nor the receiving bank had any explanation, or really knew anything about it, without a formal trace. Fidelity after all is not a bank. They'd have to check with their own bank.

This is true, but so can any Zelle or other real time payment if flagged by fraud or anti money laundering heuristics.

This doesn't happen

What realistic scenario do you envision that you would need / want to move a large amount of money with a 24h notice ? And what would be the reasons why that can't wait one more day if the transfer doesn't work out ?

An investment purchase?

To be honest I want as close to instant as possible. If the FTSE100 drops 15% then I want to be there to buy it before it pops up again.

Every brokerage account I have lets me trade instantly when transferring funds in even though the actual bank transfer takes a day or two to settle.

This is true for Vanguard. The other way takes around a day though.

It doesn't happen a lot but it has happened a few times.

My house deposit in Toronto. Offer was accepted and we had to get a portion of the deposit ($5k) to the sellers broker within 12 hours. I banked with an online bank at the time Tangerine and we had to drive to their only office off Steeles to get the draft same day. I stopped banking "online only" after this.

Elevator deposit when I moved into my apartment. This was their fault because they never told us prior.

But there are a multitude of different scenarios. Bail money for example.

Buying or selling a house is one. You want the money transfer to occur at the same time as the title transfer.

There's plenty of ways where missing the payment date means you lose your deposit which can be tens of thousands of dollars.

Nobody buys a house with a one day notice. You have multiple days and weeks to prepare.

> There's plenty of ways where missing the payment date means you lose your deposit which can be tens of thousands of dollars.

Please elaborate. Which one requires 1-day turn-around ?

> Buying or selling a house is one.

Who wakes up one day and decides they're buying a house today, without any prior planning?

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