**Please don’t fight the hypothetical: this is a question about how theoretically liquid people are, not how much money you’re willing to trust your best friend with. Discussion of the latter question goes in the thread.
It’s Tuesday morning at 10 AM. You get a phone call from your closest friend in the world (or a family member if that’s needed for the scenario to work for you) – someone you trust implicitly.
“Hey, I’ve got a serious problem. I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s a matter of life and death. I need to borrow as much cash [literally cash] as you can possibly get your hands on. I’ll be at your house [or other agreed-upon meeting location] in two hours.”
You trust this person completely and want to help him or her as much as possible.
“Ok. I’m pretty confident I can get you as much as…”
I voted “$500-$1,000” because could get to about $600 at most because of daily transaction limits on my various cards. If it was a time when bank branches are open, though, I could get considerably more by withdrawing it in person.
I don’t have a local bank, and I honestly don’t know what my ATM withdrawal limits are. So, probably not that much, unless there’s some other way to withdraw cash that I am unaware of.
I don’t get it…what’s the problem?
At 10:00 in the morning, can’t just about anybody go to his bank in person and withdraw as much as you have in any/all your accounts?
I could probably bankrupt myself for this hypothetical emergency, if I wanted to.
And even negotiate a second mortage on my house or something, too.
We have a money market account with a little under USD 50,000 in it for emergencies so I could write a check on that. I hoping to get my American Express Black card.
Okay, I put in the amount in my brick-and-mortar chequing account, more or less.
I figure the online tax-free savings would take more than 2 hours to cash out, though not more than a couple days.
ETA: Do cash advances on credit cards count?
Given that it’s during banking hours and there’s no doubt that my friend is paying for all the scary finance charges that I’m incurring I said 50 - 100k.
That’s time dependent - we’re closing on our new house in May so a lot of money is in a more liquid form at the moment that will disappear in a few months. I suspect in June next year the answer will be closer to “Here’s a quarter call someone who can actually help”
Sure. Any method that will put actual currency into your hand within the allotted time is germane. This is life & death! We’ll deal with the ramifications later.
Could you really do that fast enough to have cash-in-hand in two hours?
As for me, I’m very liquid on a percentage basis, but I just don’t have a lot of, you know, money. I’m the one guy so far who’s voted for $4K-$6K, which is basically my poker bankroll.
At some point the bank can ask you to provide notice for any large cash withdrawal. Large cash withdrawal is fuzzy and is going to depend on the bank - and probably the branch, but I wouldn’t promise my friend that I could get more than $10k out of the bank within two hours, regardless of how much cash I had in my savings and checking accounts. Multiple withdrawls in one day can count. And the securities settling issue. So I don’t think anyone is going to have a lot of success getting more than $50k out of a bank in two hours, the red tape will stymie them. So after that, you need to have your cash under a mattress.
