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.
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.