u/vishwesh_shetty

Usually you're expected to keep a decent chunk of money in your savings account as an emergency fund, for easy access to liquid cash.

I recently tried out Loan Against Securities and realized you can get a decent overdraft limit against your current holdings. There's a one-time processing fee of around ₹6k in my case (processing - stamp duty) for a ₹20L overdraft limit. And you don't pay any interest until you actually use the funds.

So instead of keeping ₹20L sitting in a savings account, you keep it invested and use LAS as your emergency backup.

Benefits I can see:

- You don't need to withdraw your investments in an emergency

- You can hold your stocks longer and avoid short term capital gains tax

- All your money stays invested in the market (equity, debt, however you want to allocate it)

You can pay back to overdraft account from your next salary or after taking your time to choose which stocks/funds to sell and when.

Of course there is a downside if the market crashes, your pledged shares could be sold, but usually you already get a leverage only on small portion of that amount you would pledged stable stocks/mfs that's unlikely to drop 30-40%.

Any flaws with this idea?

I genuinely don’t get the hype around using credit card points for business class flights.

Yeah, I understand it feels like you’re getting a free luxury experience. But you’re burning a huge chunk of points on like 10–12 hours of luxury comfort.

That same value could easily get you multiple economy flights or a few really great hotel stays. Like, instead of one fancy flight, you could fund an entire trip (or even a couple of trips). Staying in a 25k hotel instead of a 5k one, where you have flexibility of movement, can enjoy all luxury and amenities with an amazing breakfast spread, seems like a better deal than paying 2.5L instead of 50k for a flight for 12-15 hours of luxury, especially when most international carriers have a great economy experience and most flights would be overnight where you'll mostly sleep.

For something that lasts half a day, the trade-off feels kind of off to me.

I get it if you have tons of money and just want to enjoy the experience and doesn'treally care for optimising your points. But for a normal person trying to maximize value, how does business class make sense?