its an opportunity cost the insurance i have is for the large things like home owners and health but at high deductibles. the difference here is that and E fund in its typical sense doesnt make sense to me when you have taxable accounts and roth accounts . once you've reached this step on the ladder of FIRE its just a poor choice for your money. people on this site are far too risk averse in my mind.
I'm going to concur with this (and I'm obviously more risk-averse and spendypants than boarder. :).
I'd argue a few things:
(1) The concept of an emergency fund predates ~3 business day ACH transfers from Vanguard to your checking account.
(2) It predates the popularity of Vanguard and others' no purchase or redemption fee funds.
(3) It applies mostly to people who have no large existing savings buffer, as boarder42 notes above.
For someone who:
(a) Has their budget under control and has sufficient cash buffer to handle the monthly ups and downs experienced by their checking account to balance the time between income and expense, and for whom having their paycheck deposit be delayed by half a month would not be a problem in any sense other than messing up their automatic transfers;
(b) Has a decent amount of credit available (let's say $10k) in any form - credit cards are fine;
(c) Has a positive savings balance in their taxable or roth accounts of > 3x the typical "emergency fund" amount;
it doesn't make any sense to have a separate emergency fund, because you've already got the funds to cover any emergency. It *does* make sense to maintain a certain minimum balance available at no delay in your checking+savings accounts, because you might have to withdraw, say, $1k cash on very little notice. (Can you tell I'm still grumpy about the time our car got towed? Yes. I'm grumpy.) But beyond that, credit cards can handle everything that exceeds that amount for the 3-5 days it might take to liquidate some of your investments. The odds of your investments dropping to under 30% of their value is very, very small -- and a crash of such a magnitude might well just eat your bank too, so it's probably not worth fretting much about.
In other words: Once you're financially healthy and have a decent surplus available to you, you already have access to the cash you'd need to handle an emergency.
If you don't have enough money in taxable/roth or available in some other way to handle a few months income loss, you're probably not yet financially healthy. :) <puts on his flame-retardant suit>