Is There Such a Thing as Having Too Much Money In Your Brokerage Account?

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Unlike with a savings account, you can’t really have too much money in a brokerage account. But you can have money that doesn’t belong there. See why. 

Deciding where to put your money can be complicated. If you’re trying to balance where your funds should be for the best financial benefit, you may be wondering if it’s possible to have too much money in your brokerage account.

The reality is, unlike other kinds of financial accounts, you can’t really go wrong with a bigger brokerage account balance. However, while you want to put as much money into a brokerage account so you can invest in the market, you don’t want to end up with more risk than you should take on.

So while it’s not really a problem if you have a big brokerage account balance, it can be a problem to have money invested with a broker when it should be accomplishing some other task.

Here’s why you can’t have too much money in your brokerage account

Putting your money into a brokerage account allows you to invest in stocks. You can buy shares of individual companies if you want. Or you can opt to purchase exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which are traded like stocks but track the performance of a broader financial index (which can make them easier to invest in).

The stock market has historically been the best way for average people to invest because you can usually earn a pretty good return over time with minimal risk if you make smart investments, such as buying shares of an S&P 500 ETF that tracks the performance of around 500 large U.S. companies.

Since you can expect a good return over time if you make informed choices, you can’t really have too much money in your brokerage account. After all, you want as much money as possible earning the highest possible returns. This is different from, say, keeping your money in a high-yield savings account. If you put too much in savings, you end up capping your potential returns in a way that can hurt your wealth-building efforts because you can only earn so much on that cash, depending on your account’s APY.

You can have too much in a savings account

Say, for example, you have $50,000 in a brokerage account earning a 10% average annual return over 30 years. (This is in line with the stock market’s average annual return over the last 50 years.) That $50,000 would turn into $872,470 over 30 years. If you instead kept it in a high-yield savings account and earned just a 4% average annual return over that same time period, you’d end up with only $162,169.88. It’s also important to note that savings account APYs fluctuate, and it’s unlikely that you’ll see a 4% return over such a long period.

Since you don’t want to lose the chance to earn the returns needed to build wealth, you only want to put money in savings that you think you’ll need soon and can’t take the risk of investing in stocks. So your savings account balance could definitely be too big. A bigger brokerage account balance, though, would just end up allowing you to invest more over time, and you could end up a lot richer as a result.

Some money doesn’t belong in an investment account

While investing as much as possible in a brokerage account isn’t a bad thing, you could run into problems if you’re putting money into one when it is needed for something else.

Your emergency fund and any money you may need in the next three to five years should be in savings rather than in a brokerage account because you need to keep that money safe. You don’t have time to wait out a market downturn and recovery if you’ll need the cash to make a down payment on a home or fund another large purchase.

If you have money in a brokerage account that you can’t risk losing, you should move it to a savings account where it will be safe and accessible if you need it. But if you already have a fully-funded emergency fund, are saving for short-term and mid-range goals, and don’t have a lot of high-interest debt you need to pay back, then you’re good to go and can put as much of your spare cash into a brokerage account as possible without worrying about a large balance.

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