If you don’t have the nerve to hold a stock for 30 years through ups, downs, crashes and rebuilds, there’s a thing called a high yield savings account that may better fit your current stage of life better and risk tolerance.
While this is usually true, I personally am discovering that I may need to liquidate all my stocks to pay for an escape plan. If the stock market crashes, that will change what I can do to escape.
Usually, the recommendation is to have an emergency fund before you make investments. If you foresaw the potential need for an emergency plan, you could’ve bumped up that emergency fund up.
Of course, if your situation is unique and not “I need to escape Trump/a Red state” (like suddenly needing to escape from an abusive situation), then that’s much harder to anticipate.
An emergency fund is generally ~6-12 months of expenses. I recently migrated from the USA to Germany, which cost me about 30 months worth of expenses, all told. It could be done more cheaply, but there’s also a huge element of luck, so it would not be smart to assume that it will cost much less than 24 months worth of expenses.
That’s a fair point. I live in a high cost of living area, so relocating myself internationally as a single individual (without needing to pay for a storage locker or anything) was easily covered by less than 3 months worth of living costs. Maybe even 2 months would’ve gotten me change back. But I wasn’t moving too much stuff…
Anyways, you’re right. Relocation can cost a lot more than a standard emergency fund depending on one’s circumstances.
Tbh, it wasn’t even moving a lot of things (though I did bring my cat), just that unexpected things came up.
Opening a local bank account took, I shit you not, eleven weeks. From when I made the first appointment to when I got my visa, it took almost eight months, during which time my prospective job fell through (reasonably). My first landlord is still holding on to my security deposit and nearly evicted me with no notice (because of said cat, whose presence I negotiated before moving in) it’s not legal to do that at all here, but they were betting that a foreigner wouldn’t know the laws.
I was in a fortunate position and I had a lot of savings, but it was still really expensive to be able to be adaptable
While this is usually true, I personally am discovering that I may need to liquidate all my stocks to pay for an escape plan. If the stock market crashes, that will change what I can do to escape.
Usually, the recommendation is to have an emergency fund before you make investments. If you foresaw the potential need for an emergency plan, you could’ve bumped up that emergency fund up.
Of course, if your situation is unique and not “I need to escape Trump/a Red state” (like suddenly needing to escape from an abusive situation), then that’s much harder to anticipate.
An emergency fund is generally ~6-12 months of expenses. I recently migrated from the USA to Germany, which cost me about 30 months worth of expenses, all told. It could be done more cheaply, but there’s also a huge element of luck, so it would not be smart to assume that it will cost much less than 24 months worth of expenses.
That’s a fair point. I live in a high cost of living area, so relocating myself internationally as a single individual (without needing to pay for a storage locker or anything) was easily covered by less than 3 months worth of living costs. Maybe even 2 months would’ve gotten me change back. But I wasn’t moving too much stuff…
Anyways, you’re right. Relocation can cost a lot more than a standard emergency fund depending on one’s circumstances.
Tbh, it wasn’t even moving a lot of things (though I did bring my cat), just that unexpected things came up.
Opening a local bank account took, I shit you not, eleven weeks. From when I made the first appointment to when I got my visa, it took almost eight months, during which time my prospective job fell through (reasonably). My first landlord is still holding on to my security deposit and nearly evicted me with no notice (because of said cat, whose presence I negotiated before moving in) it’s not legal to do that at all here, but they were betting that a foreigner wouldn’t know the laws.
I was in a fortunate position and I had a lot of savings, but it was still really expensive to be able to be adaptable