Borrowing money at low rates when emergencies arise
Posted By RichC on September 9, 2015
I’m a Dave Ramsey advocate for 
the most part and prefer not to borrow
money for anything other than a home. Unfortunately that’s challenging for most people as well as yours truly a few items in the past.
Brenda and I borrowed when starting and expanding our small business, for the occasional new car (a foolish luxury) and even at times when we could have paid cash things … but the incentive rates made it difficult to justify withdrawing invested money for a large purchase.
We’re facing a similar decision this year in dealing with a income shortfall due to Brenda’s recent injury, high deductible medical plans ($12,000 out of pocket) and short term disability compensation (this year only 60% of her base pay – hm, when did that change???). This uncalculated loss of income and the extra expenses make paying our fixed expenses tough. It is probably my mistake in running our budget so tight as not to have enough extra emergency funds available … outside of tax favored savings, but I’m starting to conclude that borrowing short term may make more fiscal sense in the long term (although it still bothers me).
So here’s the plan … I’m pulling out an old Chase INK business credit card that is currently not being used and am using the balance transfer option. I picked Chase due to the 15 month 0% interest offer with only a 2% transaction fee (less than most). This means that the annual percentage rate on borrowed funds is actually less than 2% (although beware of the terms if you should miss a payment, use the card for something else, etc). Frankly borrowing unsecured at less than 2%/year is hard to beat, particularly if I were to calculated the tax consequences of adding additional business income or the loss of investment earning that I would normal dip into to be used instead of borrowing.
So perhaps there are times when borrowing for the short term is a financially wise thing to do? It is times like these that I see the value in borrowing from a cash accumulating whole life insurance policy rather than choosing only term insurance.
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