[stefanheule]

I like your explanation of how to think about money, and I think it's the right strategy for some people. But there are also a lot of people (e.g. if you have a decent amount of extra taxable investments) you can do better your checking account in the market. Yes, this has risks (markets can drop), but this is okay for many people. One way to deal with this is to just keep more money in the "checking account". This is fine, now that the balance is getting market returns.

[trailrunner46]

Im not sure I agree with this. If you have a lot of extra taxable money just put it in a taxable investment account and keep some lowing amount in checking to handle bills. Keeping it all in checking and making the entire thing investments seems like an odd approach, the low interest you are getting in like <10k in your checking is not a big deal.

[konne88]

I personally used to keep about a $20K balance in my checking account, and I was actually surprised by how much a difference it can make to invest that. If you have an investment with an expected annual return of 5%, that's a $1K / year that you are missing out on.

We've also seen users who needed to keep much larger amounts of money in their account for relatively long periods of time, because they were shopping around for a house or trying to buy a new car.

[md_]

Note the point I made elsewhere: that you’re likely to draw on your “cash” emergency fund in times of market downturn. (E.g., you lose your job because of layoffs due to a market crash.)

Having that “emergency fund” be invested in the market means you will have “buy high/sell low” events.

For sure some people can afford this and just like to live dangerously, of course.