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brazil84 comments on Rational Home Buying - Less Wrong
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Six months salary is usually given as a minimum for liquid assets. At $150k his take-home is maybe $7500-8500 depending on various with-holdings and insurance premiums. So $45K would be the low-end. Note this does not include assets in retirement accounts or other accounts where the funds cannot be withdrawn without a penalty.
And you agree that even with 45k in cash sitting around, there is a decent chance that our hypothetical home buyer might need to sell the house in a hurry?
He would have a little more incentive but the costs of a house sitting vacant are pretty straightforward and anyone would have an incentive to avoid those. This could come about unexpectedly due to a lay-off but could come about for other unexpected reasons as well. It doesn't really matter if he's laid off or not, these facts remain:
To a large extent, I agree with both your points. The reason I was asking about the size of one's emergency fund is to demonstrate that for your typical person, you can't just rely on having an emergency fund to avoid the possibility of having to sell your house.
The sensible (dare I say "rational"?) thing to do is to rely on both strategies, i.e. have extra financial resources AND try to buy a house which will be easy to sell if you need to.