[Moodles]

I mean honestly, using a credit card for a month before interest hits is usually fine too? My credit limit is like 50k or something ridiculous across all my cards. Not to mention when all in on stocks you can sell for better long-term capital gains tax treatment or even tax loss harvest losses too, which you can't do with a savings account. And ETFs are actually pretty liquid: I can sell and withdraw in a few days if I wanted to anyway.

[sokoloff]

Yes, but then you need cash to pay off the credit card, which is cheaper to pull from your margin available than to let the credit card charge you interest.

[Moodles]

I'm not suggesting to pay credit card interest. I'm saying you can cover any emergency expense with a credit card which buys you a month, and then you might have ordinary salary or time to sell your stocks before interest is due.

No offense but I'm pretty surprised you commented what you did. Literally my first sentence says "... before interest hits...".

[sokoloff]

I’m perhaps equally surprised that you’d consider anything an emergency that would covered by your ordinary salary within a month’s time. I mean, that’s just normal credit card use, right?

[Moodles]

Maybe we’re talking cross purposes here because I generally save a large % of my paycheck. So if an emergency came up (and I was still employed) I would just save a smaller % of it.

But regardless I’m just saying you can use a credit card to buy time interest-free before you pay off the emergency with your salary/stocks/whatever. It’s better than taking a margin loan, no?

[chii]

> So if an emergency came up (and I was still employed) I would just save a smaller % of it.

i mean that's not really an emergency.

An emergency is one such that if you weren't prepared for it, you can't handle it. For example, losing one's job can be considered an emergency (a short one, if you're in high demand).

A medical emergency is a good example of an emergency - to which you prepare for by purchasing insurance.

So by saying that a person's portfolio would perform better by ditching the emergency fund is just the same as saying 'take on more risk and get more return'.

[Moodles]

You’re kind of nitpicking here. It doesn’t matter how much the expense is: the point is that you can use a credit card to buy time interest-free before you pay off the expense with stock/paychecks/whatever. Regardless of what the expense is, this is clearly better than taking out a margin loan immediately.