The role of cash in personal finance

Andrew Leung
3 min readSep 12, 2023
Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Cash is one of the foundations of your personal finance plan. Nothing happens without cash, its what we are trying to save, and get the most out of. Although cash has gotten a bad reputation. Many expound that cash isn’t useful unless its in a growth vehicle such as stocks or real estate because its not growing fast enough. Cash loses its purchasing power due to inflation. But the biggest problem for the lack of understanding of the role cash plays in personal finance.

The role of cash is to handle day to day expenses. Without cash you can’t pay your monthly bills and expenses. Cash is liquid and flexible, there are many situations it can be used. This liquidity is so well known that people always refer how their cash is tied up in investments. When you liquidate an investment you lose out on any potential gains. Now lets take a literal example of this. For example a stock over the course of the year will gain 50%, going from $10 to $15. You have invested all of your unused cash into the stock, but you run into some bills you need to pay. Then because you had put all your cash to “work” you need to take some of the cash out. When you sold the stock was only at $10.50, not only did you lose out on the future gains, you were late on the bill because you weren’t able to access the cash quickly. Now lets consider the same situation but the stock didn’t rise, it fell and sits at $9.50…

--

--

Andrew Leung
Andrew Leung

Written by Andrew Leung

I will be sharing the plain and honest: truths, pros and cons as well as my experiences of Personal Finance, Side Hustles, and Investing.