Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Few thousand at most. That’s all we need to keep there for 1 month expenses and it mitigates the risk of fraud draining our balance. We actually just had a fraudulent transaction happen on a literally brand new debit card (inside job?) and I’m happy we didn’t have a huge amount sitting there just waiting to be stolen.

Lost my reply— had 20K stolen when my wallet was stolen (debit card), since then I just keep a 1-2k buffer. I did get the money back but it was a stressful few days.

How did they get the money without a pin? Can you not freeze the cards using your phone? Maybe I should remove physical debit cards I don't even use from wallet.
I got my identity stolen thanks to tickemaster. Now I keep most cards frozen.

Yes. Everybody has Apple pay now

Anonymous wrote:Some of you guys are blowing my mind. I keep about $1k in checking and feel bad that I don't watch cash flow more closely so it can be lower. Most of our money is in savings and my credit card and mortgage come out of that account. Checking pays the utilities and student loans as well as a couple charitable donations that asked us not to use a credit card to save on fees.

I don’t understand what’s so earth shattering. You pay your mortgage from your savings. I pay mine from my checking. So I need to have enough cash in my checking to pay my monthly bills - mortgage, car payment, insurances, utilities, credit card bills, medical bills etc. if I kept the cash in a HYSA then I would need to be constantly moving it to checking.

$10-$15k plus $5k in savings and $20k in CD's with the same bank that I could close early if I needed liquidity.

Also, having more than $200k in any one account is silliy, since that is the limit of FDIC protection.

Agreed that some people here are crazy.

I keep $1-2k as the base minimum in my checking account. My pay is auto-deposited, and then I use that to pay bills, transfer to savings, invest, etc. I see zero value to keeping a significant amount of money in a non-investment, low-interest-bearing account.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When I get paid, I very briefly have $2k in my checking account. That money disappears and most of the time, I have appr. $100 or less. Payday is this Friday and I have $29 which will go towards gas tomorrow.

Hang in there. We had a spell five years ago when I got mad at my wife for filling up the gas tank two days before payday. We ended up hitting the automatic overdraft protection on our checking account, so the gas ended up costing about $20 a gallon.

I did that a few weeks ago. I got gas today and the pump cut off after $15.09 so now I’m at zero. Sigh.

We target a $20k balance in checking for monthly expenses; I rebalance the account at the beginning of each month with a high yield savings account that we target at $100K (emergency fund/ large one off expenses); any excess goes to the brokerage account to be invested.

Roughly $10,000 depending on when in the month it is (less right after we pay our mortgage and bills on the 1st and before our paychecks hit on the 15th).

We do keep about $50,000 in a money market with our same bank, which is our emergency fund.

Some of you guys are blowing my mind. I keep about $1k in checking and feel bad that I don't watch cash flow more closely so it can be lower. Most of our money is in savings and my credit card and mortgage come out of that account. Checking pays the utilities and student loans as well as a couple charitable donations that asked us not to use a credit card to save on fees.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wow those numbers seem so high to me! I leave anywhere between $500-$2k in checking. Almost everything gets transferred to savings. I rarely use my debit card (Costco only) so I don’t need much there. It’s really only the account my pay gets deposited and that’s it.

Where do you pay your credit cards from?

Savings account

Anonymous wrote:My account never even gets above 2800. This board is so earth shattering sometimes.

I think they make good money. I made it to financial freedom making minimum wage since 1996. I still have all the money I ever made and then some.
Had I had a good income, ever, I'd probably still be working. I would have upgraded my lifestyle, trusted and depended on a 401k, and would have never learned to invest on my own.

I think anything above $20-30k is grossly excessive. The rest should be in HYSA, govt securities, or in a brokerage making more money. Or divert towards a backdoor Roth.

Anonymous wrote:Currently have $1.2m in there. Usually around $500k-$1m. Too high and ridiculous. We got around $1m in bonuses that we haven’t moved out yet. We are too busy to constantly be moving money to our financial advisor or to our own accounts, and don’t have the time to research the market to make good investments. And we’ve been expecting a crash for about five years so it always seems like a bad time to put money in the markets which is why I always dither.

My husband’s parents are like this. Millions are sitting in a checking account. Wanting it there for ‘easy access in an emergency’ is their reasoning. They have tons of money and don’t ‘need’ returns to make them more but like the PP mentioned, moving even a fraction of it over would be making you easy returns. I shudder thinking about the millions they have let slip away keeping that amount in a regular checking account.

My account never even gets above 2800. This board is so earth shattering sometimes.

Anonymous wrote:Currently have $1.2m in there.

In checking?

Anonymous wrote:And we’ve been expecting a crash for about five years so it always seems like a bad time to put money in the markets which is why I always dither.

Oof. The S&P 500 is up 87% over the past five years. If you'd put $1.2 million in an S&P index fund five years ago, it would be worth $2.2 million today. But with inflation, that $1.2 million buys about 23% less than it did five years ago.

In other words, your fear of investing has cost you a lot of money. You should really find someone who can help you put that money somewhere that will earn a reasonable return at a risk level you can tolerate.