All,

I have been wanting to ask fundamental questions about financial planning in a series of posts and get an opinion from fellow members. The questions will revolve around identification, taking action, and management of the underlying assets like stocks, commodities, cryptos, brokerage accounts, retirements accounts, etc...

The question will be of 3 parts: What, Why, and How?

Let's start with the first question :

Let's assume you want to hold 6 months of emergency funds in an entity/form, then what, why, and how would it be?

Options that I found so far :

-- Cash (Highly liquid but loses value over time...inflation!)

-- Checking account (Liquid but hardly earns anything while you sleep)

-- HYSA - High yield savings account (Liquid and earns minor interests but won't be a hedge against inflation)

-- Certain forms of deposits like CDs(I read somewhere that it is not liquid at least for 3 yrs)

-- Taxable brokerage accounts (Semi liquid and risky due to reliance on the stock market performance irrespective of what funds, ETFs, stocks you choose)

-- Dollar-cost averaging investment apps like Acorns which has a Debit card for liquidity (Stock market risks relative less compared to lump-sum deposits). Here is the link to the app if anybody wants to try it out. https://share.acorns.com/Abilash

-- Crypto-interest earning accounts like BlockFi (Not sure about liquidity but lawsuits are ongoing on these companies on this approach. High risk!)

And finally,

-- Gamified checking accounts like Yotta.

The idea behind this app/FDIC insured account is that they generate lottery tickets based on the outstanding balance in the account. They draw daily which gets finalized on Sunday to realize gains. You always win some money and earn interest too. You can set your own lucky number sets for the system to pick up before it starts picking random numbers for each ticket on your behalf.

The interesting thing about this app is that the gains could potentially be between a savings account and a brokerage account. Try it out here: https://join.withyotta.com/ABILASH1

This is the end of the post. Looking forward to hearing from you all on what is the best way to manage emergency funds with liquidity and earn gains while we hold them.

PS:

To give credit where it's due. Thanks to @commonstock team for an amazing social platform without information overload like Twitter :).