> “There was no warning that I would not be able to access my accounts for five days,” she added. “If I had to use that money, it was completely inaccessible.”<p>A good reminder that your emergency fund should be held in cash at a bank, not in shares a brokerage. Not that a glitch like this couldn’t block access to your bank account too, but rather that the process of liquidating and transferring securities is much slower than ACH or Zelle.
Something like Fidelity's Cash Management Account (has a debit card, automatically liquidates money market funds to cover spending) works fine as an emergency fund. But you need your emergency fund in <i>two</i> separate accounts at two <i>different</i> financial institutions to be safe from shenanigans like this.<p>This is not merely a theoretical risk. Patelco (a Bay Area credit union with half a million members) got hit with ransomware back in 2024 that disrupted banking services for <i>two weeks</i>.
You can have multiple accounts, yes; but you can also diversify via friends and family.<p>As a good friend, if I know that you are good for the money, I'd happily spot you even a few tens of thousands for a few days or weeks. (I'm actually more reluctant to do that with some family members, because I might be less likely to get the money back.)
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I find a T-bill ladder works best for me. I keep half my emergency savings in 4 week bills. Given that my emergency savings is intended to sustain me for months, I can easily access the back half of my savings over the course of 4 weeks as each bill expires, returning another 12.5% of my emergency savings to me.<p>And in a worst case scenario where I can’t access the front half of my savings due to a bank run or other failure, I am only a week or so away from getting access to some part of my savings.
T-bills are highly liquid. You can sell them before they mature for very low transaction cost and get back their true market value, including the accrued interest, meaning there’s not much monetary benefit to staggering them week by week. You could just as well only roll them once a month and dip in freely if you need the cash.
Safety deposit box as a 2nd backup maybe? ;)
I know you're joking, but safety deposit boxes aren't nearly as safe as you think they are. (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box-theft.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...</a>)
Not totally joking after some thought. If the problem that a person experienced is "complete loss of bank account" then having a physical backup - not at a bank! - would help to cater to that scenario.<p>And yeah, looks like that's not a foolproof solution either. 3rd backup option might be needed... :D
As a "public service announcement," avoid using Zelle as transactions performed with it are not reversible.
> the process of liquidating and transferring securities is much slower than ACH or Zelle.<p>That doesn't seem relevant here. The account disappeared due to a data maintenance error; it wasn't extracted via a legitimate transfer to another account, they literally forgot about it.
Yes, that is why I caveated my comment. But her quote is still a good reason to point out that if there is a chance you might need access to money within short notice (I’d say within a month), it should be in a checking or savings account.
Friendly reminder that banks are not a reliable place to keep emergency funds, they don't really have a vault full of everyone's cash always available.
Which is the way it's supposed to work. You keep enough for daily transactions, because the expectation of multiple large scale withdrawals happening either in short succession or simultaneously is the most unlikely scenario to happen during operation. A bank keeps records of every account's value, but at any given time only has enough cash to cover one fifth of all of the money it has on record to be in those accounts. In other words, the bank's physically only got 20% of the money it has on the books. It has to work this way because there's no way a bank could hold all of the money it's customers are said to have, either because of physical space constraints or because there's literally not enough money in existence to cut it out of circulation without creating ridiculous deflation. The change away from the gold standard changed this quite a bit, and so has digital banking, but the numbers in your account are still backed by something that tangibly exists.
Why would that be necessary? For most people, liquid funds are something that's electronic anyway, and in most countries banks can't run out of customers' electronic money. (Safeguards kick in pretty quickly.)<p>Most of the talk in this discussion is about personal emergencies, like being locked out of your accounts; not about system-wide bank collapses.
> they don't really have a vault full of everyone's cash always available.<p>When the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, funds were only inaccessible for 72 hours, and no depositors lost any money [0]. Which is still not ideal, but most people will never experience a bank collapse, and there are plenty of banking activities that will take longer than 72 hours to process in regular circumstances anyways.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Bank" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Ban...</a>
What do you recommend instead?
What about bitcoin
NYTimes with the clickbait title.<p>A glitch prevented her account from being displayed for a few days, then was resolved. Your money, when covered via FDIC/SIPC and federal regulations, doesn’t just “disappear”.
FDIC usually doesn't protect against attacks on individual depositors. Fraud, scams, and theft for instance arent covered. If your bank just steals it FDIC usually won't be for that.<p><pre><code> Deposit insurance coverage protects depositors against the failure of an insured bank; it does not protect against losses due to theft or fraud, which are addressed by other laws
</code></pre>
<a href="https://www.fdic.gov/resources/deposit-insurance/brochures/deposits-at-a-glance" rel="nofollow">https://www.fdic.gov/resources/deposit-insurance/brochures/d...</a>
I don't know that I'd call it clickbait, that's underselling it a bit. If you can call your bank and they flat out pretend you don't even exist, that you are not a customer, or whatever -- that's more than just a display error. Her accounts weren't even visible to bank staff. That's a pretty significant error.
One had a bank do that with a safe deposit box. They had no record of it.<p>Pretty much had to physically find it myself. Was the last time I let that happen…
That's why you save local copies of records (statements, etc.). "Computer says no" can be fought with "judge says yes".
Paper statements are now opt-in most places, so most people won’t have local copies of the records anymore. It’s extremely important, because there is no duty for a company to provide historic data. None of my banks provide detailed data back more than a couple of years.
Yeah saving statements is important but banks make it so hard to automate. 2FA for login, and statements have to be navigated to, sometimes time range set.<p>My bank just sends a note that a statement is available, rather than an actual statement.
> Yeah saving statements is important but banks make it so hard to automate. 2FA for login, and statements have to be navigated to, sometimes time range set.<p>Which is why all of my accounts mail a physical statement each month. Yes, just about every time I log on they <i>beg</i> me to switch to electronic only, I say no and move along.<p>> My bank just sends a note that a statement is available, rather than an actual statement.<p>Yep. If they had implemented it just like the mail, they'd just email me the PDF (encrypted if necessary). But they don't, so I don't ever agree to "go electronic statements".
It was a glitch that was a little more that "prevented her account from being displayed". The reps could not see it ever existed. Meaning the backend really snafued.<p>But there was more than likely post mortems and days of meetings over it. Since it sounds it was a edge case upon edge case they didn't plan for.<p>>When she called on Monday, she received some more clues on what went wrong: Since her account was originally opened with a tax identification number (she was a permanent resident at the time), a system glitch emerged when she recently opened a custodial Roth I.R.A. for her daughter using her own Social Security number. Even though she said she had used her Social Security number at Fidelity for years, it appears her profile and accounts hadn’t been properly merged and updated. A work profile set up by a former employer more than a decade ago with her Social Security number may also have complicated matters. (She said she had never activated or used it.)
> prevented her account from being displayed for a few days<p>...and prevented her from having any access to money? That's way more than a glitch, that's essentially a temporary version of theft.<p>Think about how comfortable <i>you</i> would be with such a "glitch" preventing you from having access to any of the money in your main spending account? One day? One week? A month? How about a year, with court battles?<p>If you get uncomfortable at a month or a year, remember that the only difference between you and some other people is one of magnitude. Some people can't wait two weeks or even a week for financial institutions to get their shit together and fix their "glitches". This can upend their entire life and needs to be treated with the appropriate seriousness.
Gift link:
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/your-money/fidelity-investments-fraud-alert.html?unlocked_article_code=1.dlA.2bK0.gN47H93flP5j&smid=url-share" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/your-money/fidelity-inves...</a>
"The money you can't touch is the money you don't own".<p>If someone else can freeze, deny, censor, or condition your access to your money, then your "ownership" is incomplete, and definitely, not yours.<p>Never let cash go away. Never.
Can we update the title to append "and came back 5 days later" we don't need click bait titles on hn.
I think it's time to revise HN guidelines, when the original title is clearly intentionally misleading/clickbait/omitting key facts (<i>"temporarily disappeared</i> in this case). Editorializing to fix that should be encouraged, not just allowed.
<a href="https://archive.ph/xeMtb" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/xeMtb</a>