credit card Archives • Bitches Get Riches

You check the mailbox. In between the ubiquitous Bed, Bath & Beyond coupon, snail mail from your Aunt Clarita, and a bill you’d rather ignore, you see it: you’ve been pre-approved for a brand new credit card!

Holy shitballs, what luck! Of all the random folks with mailing addresses, you have been deemed special enough to receive a credit card pre-approval offer! Bring out your finest meats and cheeses, for surely this means you are that most superior of beings: a person worthy of credit! Dance about the maypole and imbibe your most decadent libations!

You should call your bestie, your family, your therapist! Things are looking up now that a credit card company has bestowed upon you a pre-approval offer. Cancel your evening plans, for you need to respond to this with… an application? For… a credit card? For which you’re already… “approved”???

Something’s off. If you receive a credit card pre-approval offer in the mail, shouldn’t that mean you don’t need to apply for it? Especially since you didn’t even ask them to consider pre-approving you.

Today we’re going to teach you what those credit card pre-approval offers are really all about. And we’ll show you exactly what to do with them. It’s easy, it’s fast, and anyone can do it! Read on to learn The Deep Magicke.

We, the Bitches, have said many times that emergency funds are absolutely foundational to financial stability—which makes it wild that today, I’m here to completely contradict myself and say you might not need an emergency fund at all!

When we first started this blog, our frame of reference was regular folks. We gathered experiences from friends and coworkers who were mostly young and broke, with neither interest nor experience in managing money. Overwhelmingly, those people needed emergency funds and often didn’t have them.

Now we have a healthy readership of self-identified personal finance nerds… and we’re seeing the opposite problem! These people took the “build an emergency fund” step and ran with it. But like, past the goal post, straight out of the stadium, and deep into Parking Lot B. They’re sitting on shockingly large piles of cash, afraid to spend or invest, chasing ever-higher amounts for “safety.”

So today I want to talk about why you might not need an emergency fund. Or at least, why you might not need a classic emergency fund (i.e., the giant pile of X months’ expenses in cash). In some cases, it’s a smart, strategic decision to have a smaller or less traditional emergency fund. Especially if there may be better uses for your cash right now.

It doesn’t apply to everyone—but if you’re reading this blog, odds are good it applies to you!