this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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If you're sitting on cash, you're guaranteed to lose money to inflation. If you invest it wisely, you have a good chance of beating inflation. Even in personal finance, it's very stupid to sit on a big pile of cash; everything above and beyond an emergency fund or savings for a short-term goal should be invested.
Honestly even the idea of an emergency fund, I mean accounting dorks say things like "save six months salary in an accessible, liquid form".
Does anybody really do that? I mean for a middle-class well-educated dual-income household that's probably close to 100k, which we were all recently reminded the limit for bank account insurance.
If you own your home doesn't it make more sense to have a secured line of credit set for emergencies and then ride as close to the wire as you feel comfortable?
Your emergency fund is usually recommended to be 3-6 months of expenses, not salary...though I guess for plenty of people, even at high salaries, that may be the same number, but then you'll never have savings anyway. Really your emergency fund is for however much risk you can tolerate, like if you end up unemployed for 3-6 months, but your emergency fund is for things other than just unemployment, like sudden medical expenses or replacing a water heater. If you're comfortable with a line of credit on your home being your emergency fund, go for it. There's some risk to that, but there's different kinds of risk to everything.
Yes, because otherwise how the fuck can I afford to move apartments when my landlord raises the price by a thousand dollars a month. But also I have no assets so it's my entire savings and I can't put it anywhere because I need it within a year.
So yeah some of us are fucked and the idea that a middle class household would make 100k in 6 months means you have no touch on reality for real wages for lots of people.
Sorry, forgot this was an international community. $100k CAD. So $75k USD. We've the same 100k bank-insurance limit here, but its $100k CAD.
Either way, I know plenty of people who make near $200k of household income and are still fucked because they didn't get into the housing market in time before the door slammed shut (average home in Greater Toronto is now well north of a $million, even with our stupid-expensive interest rates). Like, teachers and realtors make $90k CAD after a few years of experience these days, but that doesn't accomplish much when rent keeps jumping and nobody can afford to buy. Basically the only reason everybody isn't eating cat-food is they're either in a pre-rent-deregulation unit or they bought before it all hit the fan.
Also, side-note: the traditional concept of "middle class" is not the modern expansive definition of "basically everybody who doesn't own either a private jet or live in a cardboard box". That is, somebody who pays rent and has a job that doesn't require grad-school used to be considered "working class". It's just that for some dumb reason we all collectively decided that "working class" was something to be embarrassed about.
I'm assuming that "big pile of cash" is their emergency fund - Spencer implies as much when he says that it serves as an impediment to buying them out.
There's some use for an emergency fund, but since businesses this size have steady streams of revenue, they usually only want to sit on tons of cash when they can't find anything better to invest it in. Microsoft went on acquisition sprees, but other companies might buy back shares to return that excess cash to investors.