Something like Fidelity's Cash Management Account (has a debit card, automatically liquidates money market funds to cover spending) works fine as an emergency fund. But you need your emergency fund in two separate accounts at two different financial institutions to be safe from shenanigans like this.

This is not merely a theoretical risk. Patelco (a Bay Area credit union with half a million members) got hit with ransomware back in 2024 that disrupted banking services for two weeks.

I find a T-bill ladder works best for me. I keep half my emergency savings in 4 week bills. Given that my emergency savings is intended to sustain me for months, I can easily access the back half of my savings over the course of 4 weeks as each bill expires, returning another 12.5% of my emergency savings to me.

And in a worst case scenario where I can’t access the front half of my savings due to a bank run or other failure, I am only a week or so away from getting access to some part of my savings.

> the process of liquidating and transferring securities is much slower than ACH or Zelle.

That doesn't seem relevant here. The account disappeared due to a data maintenance error; it wasn't extracted via a legitimate transfer to another account, they literally forgot about it.

Safety deposit box as a 2nd backup maybe? ;)

As a "public service announcement," avoid using Zelle as transactions performed with it are not reversible.

Friendly reminder that banks are not a reliable place to keep emergency funds, they don't really have a vault full of everyone's cash always available.

What about bitcoin

I don't know that I'd call it clickbait, that's underselling it a bit. If you can call your bank and they flat out pretend you don't even exist, that you are not a customer, or whatever -- that's more than just a display error. Her accounts weren't even visible to bank staff. That's a pretty significant error.

Sorry but this is rich. The vast, vast majority of times that Github goes down, even though the issue is almost always resolved within the day if not in the next couple of hours. Yet we'd all agree that "Github is down" posts are worth their time on HN, even though everyone knows how to access to status API, because it's not so much about being notified about the outage but understanding why it happened.

What exactly is "clickbait" here? Is the disappearance "mysterious" or not here? I'm not a banking tech engineer, so I don't have the slightest clue how a bank's app could completely glitch out for days about something as critical to people as their life savings. Were you even aware that this is something that could just happen? Do you have a notion that this issue would have resolved itself without the aggressive petitioning by the account holder? Explain to us how you would go to the FDIC with a claim when the FDIC covers customers with provable losses, and the article reports that this person was so ghosted out of the system that Fidelity's customer support was telling her, “Are you sure you shouldn’t be calling Schwab”?

From the article:

> Ms. Gruntmane felt she had little choice, and was forced to cancel her 20 or so patients for the day. After a quick stop at home to retrieve her personal computer, identification and other records, she got back into her car and started driving. “It just felt out of, like, a psychological thriller,” she said.

> As she was driving through Vail, she called her mother, who suggested trying to reach Fidelity’s fraud department one more time. She pulled over, and finally reached a rep who was more helpful. He also couldn’t immediately find any evidence of her accounts, but she had found one account number to share with him. After a second hourlong call, he promised they would continue to investigate, but said it was most likely a systems-related issue.

Explain to me how this isn't of interest to people who touch online systems? Is there a status.fidelity.com that we have access to, that you could point out how systemic or non-systemic this kind of incident is?

FDIC usually doesn't protect against attacks on individual depositors. Fraud, scams, and theft for instance arent covered. If your bank just steals it FDIC usually won't be for that.

  Deposit insurance coverage protects depositors against the failure of an insured bank; it does not protect against losses due to theft or fraud, which are addressed by other laws

And it's a glitch that the 'average' person will probably never somehow trigger in their life. The amount of overlap required to trigger this issue is such an edge case. Apparently Fidelity's systems went wild after realizing the same person had both a TIN and a SSN and multiple overlapping accounts somewhere.

> Since her account was originally opened with a tax identification number (she was a permanent resident at the time), a system glitch emerged when she recently opened a custodial Roth I.R.A. for her daughter using her own Social Security number. Even though she said she had used her Social Security number at Fidelity for years, it appears her profile and accounts hadn’t been properly merged and updated. A work profile set up by a former employer more than a decade ago with her Social Security number may also have complicated matters. (She said she had never activated or used it.)

> prevented her account from being displayed for a few days

...and prevented her from having any access to money? That's way more than a glitch, that's essentially a temporary version of theft.

Think about how comfortable you would be with such a "glitch" preventing you from having access to any of the money in your main spending account? One day? One week? A month? How about a year, with court battles?

If you get uncomfortable at a month or a year, remember that the only difference between you and some other people is one of magnitude. Some people can't wait two weeks or even a week for financial institutions to get their shit together and fix their "glitches". This can upend their entire life and needs to be treated with the appropriate seriousness.

It was a glitch that was a little more that "prevented her account from being displayed". The reps could not see it ever existed. Meaning the backend really snafued.

But there was more than likely post mortems and days of meetings over it. Since it sounds it was a edge case upon edge case they didn't plan for.

>When she called on Monday, she received some more clues on what went wrong: Since her account was originally opened with a tax identification number (she was a permanent resident at the time), a system glitch emerged when she recently opened a custodial Roth I.R.A. for her daughter using her own Social Security number. Even though she said she had used her Social Security number at Fidelity for years, it appears her profile and accounts hadn’t been properly merged and updated. A work profile set up by a former employer more than a decade ago with her Social Security number may also have complicated matters. (She said she had never activated or used it.)

I think it's time to revise HN guidelines, when the original title is clearly intentionally misleading/clickbait/omitting key facts ("temporarily disappeared in this case). Editorializing to fix that should be encouraged, not just allowed.