Thank you for the compliment; I just pontificate on forums. > There is no Bank of America, Citibank or any of that retail nonsense in my basket of credit mix.

Thank you for the compliment; I just pontificate on forums. > There is no Bank of America, Citibank or any of that retail nonsense in my basket of credit mix. Majority of them are in geographically diversified credit unions You have already figured out what I meant by issuers with different risk profiles, so you're ahead in the credit "game" for sure. My largest credit lines are also with credit unions and they've not fluctuated once through three economic dips. That's not so much bragging--I'll never achieve a six-figure CL with any of them--as it is a data point. The large issuers have their purposes and I have credit lines through them, just not the ones I use for more long-term planning. As for this: > cash causes me headaches. Even with my 3% APY bank accounts (people seem to believe there are none of them in the US which is untrue!) after effort and inflation, I barely break even. > I have to track it, protect it try and ensure it does not loose value too much. I have to visit local branches when I need to take it out or deposit it. I think you are conflating cash as an investment and cash as an asset. You're right that it comes with a cost, but with that cost you (in currencies like EUR, JPY, and USD) are buying stability. Cash absolutely is not a viable growth investment but diversification means you have a stable block of cash on which you can fall back. The emergency fund is not an investment; the most risk it should ever see are perhaps well-insured municipal/state government bonds. I have my emergency fund parked in two different online savings accounts paying about 2% interest each. Yes, I wind up behind relative to inflation over a long enough period of time but it's worth it to me to know that money will always be there and immediately accessible. (Also, for what it's worth, moving money electronically in the States has gotten easier. I have set up two of my credit union credit cards as bill pay destinations on both of my emergency fund savings accounts. If I need to use the emergency fund, I simply put the charge on a credit card and pay it from the emergency fund account instead of my regular account. No branches involved.) > Credit is awesome. In the U.S., it's really cheap and consumer lines of credit have extremely strong protections. This is true, but that's not what I mean when I talk about emergency funds and that's not what I thought you were getting at when you referred to the reducing of credit lines for people who thought they were getting them to plan ahead and use in lean times. Credit is a tool, one with a somewhat slimy handle, but it's not a good tool in an economic downturn because that's when it will break the fastest. I have a handful of 0% credit lines in use at the moment for just this reason; if they're going to give me money to use for free on something I'd have done anyway, I'm damn sure going to use it. I also have money to pay them off in short order squirreled away just in case I need to extinguish that debt in a hurry.