> “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.”
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 two separate accounts at two different financial institutions to be safe from shenanigans like this.
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 two weeks.
You can have multiple accounts, yes; but you can also diversify via friends and family.
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.)
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.
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.
> the process of liquidating and transferring securities is much slower than ACH or Zelle.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Indeed; most personal banking customers can fall back on FDIC insurance ($250k should be more than enough to cover your emergency fund). This isn't the 1920s.
It sure isn’t the 1920s, it’s the 2020s so things like digital money are ephemeral and whimsical.
The bigger question is how much food and medicine is there in the supply chain buffers? If all production was to stop immediately — how many calories are on the continent? How many grams of insulin or penicillin
In a crisis how will those things be distributed? Will it be based on immediate need or social class?
What’s keeping the system going anyways? Why do ships continue to come with consumer goods from China? Why do farmers send their grain to market?
Alas, for Silicon Valley Bank they went with 'too big to fail' and also covered uninsured deposits. That's moral hazard and endangers the core purpose of the insurance.
Agreed. That said, FDIC would have not been able to cover all $150 billion or so of uninsured SVB deposits directly from the insurance fund, so had that been the only available option for making depositors whole, then FDIC would have had to pass.
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.
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
> prevented her account from being displayed for a few days
...and prevented her from having any access to money? That's way more than a glitch, that's essentially a temporary version of theft.
Think about how comfortable you 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?
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.
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.
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.
That is a good point and at the very least it’s a good idea to download electronic statements, maybe with a script to retain the most recent n statements
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.
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.
Which is why all of my accounts mail a physical statement each month. Yes, just about every time I log on they beg me to switch to electronic only, I say no and move along.
> My bank just sends a note that a statement is available, rather than an actual statement.
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".
I think it's time to revise HN guidelines, when the original title is clearly intentionally misleading/clickbait/omitting key facts ("temporarily disappeared in this case).
> “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.”
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 two separate accounts at two different financial institutions to be safe from shenanigans like this.
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 two weeks.
You can have multiple accounts, yes; but you can also diversify via friends and family.
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.)
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.
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.
As a "public service announcement," avoid using Zelle as transactions performed with it are not reversible.
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. (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...)
> the process of liquidating and transferring securities is much slower than ACH or Zelle.
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.
What about bitcoin
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.
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.)
Most of the talk in this discussion is about personal emergencies, like being locked out of your accounts; not about system-wide bank collapses.
You can be locked out of all your accounts simultaneously by a court order, for one.
There is no one reliable place. You must hedge with diverse custodial and non custodial forms of store of value for best assurance.
What do you recommend instead?
Mayonnaise jar buried in the backyard.
> they don't really have a vault full of everyone's cash always available.
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Ban...
Indeed; most personal banking customers can fall back on FDIC insurance ($250k should be more than enough to cover your emergency fund). This isn't the 1920s.
It sure isn’t the 1920s, it’s the 2020s so things like digital money are ephemeral and whimsical.
The bigger question is how much food and medicine is there in the supply chain buffers? If all production was to stop immediately — how many calories are on the continent? How many grams of insulin or penicillin
In a crisis how will those things be distributed? Will it be based on immediate need or social class?
What’s keeping the system going anyways? Why do ships continue to come with consumer goods from China? Why do farmers send their grain to market?
Alas, for Silicon Valley Bank they went with 'too big to fail' and also covered uninsured deposits. That's moral hazard and endangers the core purpose of the insurance.
Agreed. That said, FDIC would have not been able to cover all $150 billion or so of uninsured SVB deposits directly from the insurance fund, so had that been the only available option for making depositors whole, then FDIC would have had to pass.
"The money you can't touch is the money you don't own".
If someone else can freeze, deny, censor, or condition your access to your money, then your "ownership" is incomplete, and definitely, not yours.
Never let cash go away. Never.
NYTimes with the clickbait title.
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.
https://www.fdic.gov/resources/deposit-insurance/brochures/d...> prevented her account from being displayed for a few days
...and prevented her from having any access to money? That's way more than a glitch, that's essentially a temporary version of theft.
Think about how comfortable you 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?
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.
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.
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.
That is a good point and at the very least it’s a good idea to download electronic statements, maybe with a script to retain the most recent n statements
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.
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.
Which is why all of my accounts mail a physical statement each month. Yes, just about every time I log on they beg me to switch to electronic only, I say no and move along.
> My bank just sends a note that a statement is available, rather than an actual statement.
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".
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/your-money/fidelity-inves...
https://archive.ph/xeMtb
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 ("temporarily disappeared in this case).