Remix.run Logo
cheschire 14 hours ago

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.

smallnamespace 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

T-bills are highly liquid. You can sell them before they mature for very low transaction cost and get back their true market value, including the accrued interest, meaning there’s not much monetary benefit to staggering them week by week. You could just as well only roll them once a month and dip in freely if you need the cash.

SpicyLemonZest 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you have the capability and discipline to perform a T-bill ladder, you've gotta understand that you're not the person who general financial advice is targeted to. Being deliberately vague, but I've lost nontrivial amounts of money simply because I got distracted when doing a critical financial task and only remembered to get back to it months later. I think I can safely speculate that the story in the source article would never happen to you because you could easily locate the right account numbers if you found yourself locked out of a financial webapp.

cheschire 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I appreciate the vote of confidence but to be clear I just set it up on auto-reinvest for 24 months. There’s an initial setup every two years but the rest is mindless.

Maybe you’re right though. I maintain a non-trivial amount of data in my password manager to ensure I always have a centralized place to begin the hunt for information.