fancy fintech’s fishy fun

When is a bank not a bank? When it’s a fintech startup pretending to be a bank. For example let’s hear it for Revolut, strapline “get more for your money”.

I like a lot of their offering. You can hold cash in all sorts of different currencies. Most of the time that’s only useful to globetrotters and people buying goods over international borders, and even that can be handled by a decent credit card in many cases.

Way back when, sometime last year, I had the fond idea of saving cash in a bunch of currencies. I don’t ask much of cash, I don’t even expect to come back in a year and find it worth as much as it was before. However: Brexit. I don’t believe in it, and I don’t think it’s going to be good for me.

Revolut seems to match the requirement of being able to diversify that cash holding across currencies, with very low transaction costs.

Retirees need a bigger emergency fund that their employed selves

Anyone living off investment income but without an income stream against which you can borrow money has to hold a fair amount of cash, typically one to three years’ spending, to avoid becoming a forced seller into a down market.

For people with investment income only, a market crash is an emergency writ large, because realising income from bombed out stocks hammers your capital. You need to sell of a larger part of your capital to get the same income, and a cash buffer puts that off. Unlike emergencies when you’re working, the emergency lasts a while, and there’s nothing you can do to swerve it. A bear market can last a couple of years.

Unlike your normal emergency fund of three to six months, that’s more exposed to losses simply by being larger.

Emergency fund counterfactual – if you’re working, you don’t need a year-long cash buffer

I had come across people who didn’t subscribe to the working life  emergency fund of three to six months expenses approach, early on. I read Early Retirement Extreme who was characteristically straight between the eyes on the subject.

I don’t have a disaster fund or an emergency fund. For emergencies, I use a credit card.
If I use a credit card, I will have a 20 day grace period during which I do not pay interest. This gives me sufficient time to move money from my savings account or my broker account into the checking account from where I can pay off the credit card. This way I am not losing money from money gathering dust in a checking account.

Hmm. The first this to say here is that ERE was young and employed, so perhaps more resilient. We tend to get more fiscally conservative as we get older, which is the way of the world – the future income stream from work is less because there are fewer years of income. But I recently read a similar iconoclastic attitude at EarlyRetirementNow, who is much further down the line than ERE was. He takes the same line. So does MedFi. Let’s take a look at ERN’s answer to an emergency

1. Credit card float (=interest free loan from the credit card company between the transaction and the credit card payment due date)
2. Papa ERN’s paychecks
3. The $100,000 HELOC (home equity line of credit) on our condo
4. Finally, a large sum in several brokerage accounts, more than half our liquid asset net worth

The Ermine is short items 2 and 3 – although there’s an argument that my pension is some variant of 2. A HELOC is probably what I understand as an offset mortgage. ERM is/was a banker, and is much more comfortable with leverage than I am. I don’t ever want another mortgage in my life – I spent 20 years trying to ground the last one. I do accept that’s an opportunity cost, Monevator tells you why. Some things are just a gut feeling, in the same way that so many people violate the personal-finance principle “never take financial responsibility for something that eats” for lifestyle reasons. Britons tend to regard property=money tree, but I do not regard property as a finacial store of value. I value it for the usufruct. This is because I have had the experience of the capital value of a property falling by a third, and about a half in real terms. Bricks and mortar is not a store of value in my book.

It is possible that living for several years with no capacity to borrow money  has skewed my perspective. All lenders want to see an income, paradoxically the financially independent are zeros in the eyes of lenders, because they are atypical. Your average wage-slave wants to borrow money because they want to spend more than they earn, and lenders are used to that. Sometimes that is reasonable – few people save up for a house to buy it cash, because it is easier to live in it and service the debt than to pay rent on top of saving for 20 years to avoid paying the mortgage interest.  OTOH if it is for weddings, holidays, cars or other wasting assets then it’s barmy. But lenders gonna lend, and unlike bank managers of yore they want to do it at scale, so they don’t really put any effort into analysing edge cases.

If you’re FI and not working, you need an emergency fund. You are your banker of last resort

We want to be financially independent, and for many of us that’s independent of The Man. But there is another side to financial independence. You look damned odd to the system, and in practice that means the non-working financially independent are independent of finance too. They are pariahs. You’re not going to be borrowing money from anybody unless you can show income. In practice that means your non-working self needs a larger emergency fund than your working self.