Can I withdraw unsettled funds?
Yes, via a margin account, one can trade or transfer on unsettled funds. These are tight regulations that begin with the Federal Reserve, extend to FINRA, and downward. In a cash account, this is not possible. Since speed is a necessity, a margin account can actually be approved nearly instantly.
"Whoa. These things are on two dimensions.  It's like burger and fries, you can also have chicken sandwich and fries, or burger and onion rings.   You can invest in an taxable brokerage account and/or an IRA.  And then, within each of those...  You can buy index funds and/or anything else. All 4 combinations are possible.  If someone says otherwise, take your money and run.  They are a shady financial ""advisor"" who is ripping you off by steering you only into products where they get a commission. Those products are more expensive because the commission comes out of your end.  Not to mention any names.  E.J.    If you want financial advice that is honest, find a financial advisor who you pay for his advice, and who doesn't sell products at all.  Or, just ask here.  But I would start by listening to Suze Orman, Dave Ramsey, whomever you prefer.  And read John Bogle's book.   They can tell you all about the difference between money market, bonds, stocks, managed mutual funds (ripoff!) and index funds. IRA accounts, Roth IRA accounts and taxable accounts are all brokerage accounts.  Within them, you can buy any security you want, including index funds.  The difference is taxation.  Suppose you earn $1000 and choose to invest it however  Later you withdraw it and it has grown to $3000.  Investing in a taxable account, you pay normal income tax on the $1000. When you later withdraw the $3000, you pay a tax on $2000 of income.  If you invested more than a year, it is taxed at a much lower ""capital gains"" tax rate.  With a traditional IRA account, you pay zero taxes on the initial $1000.  Later, when you take the money out, you pay normal income tax on the full $3000.  If you withdrew it before age 59-1/2, you also pay a 10% penalty ($300).  With a Roth IRA account, you pay normal income tax on the $1000.  When you withdraw the $3000 later, you pay NOTHING in taxes.  Provided you followed the rules.   You can invest in almost anything inside these accounts: Money market funds. Terrible return.  You won't keep up with the market.  Bonds.  Low return but usually quite safe.  Individual stocks.  Good luck.   Managed mutual funds.  You're paying some genius stock picker to select high performing stocks. He has a huge staff of researchers and  good social connections.  He also charges you 1.5% per year overhead as an ""expense ratio"", which is a total loss to you.  The fact is, he can usually pick stocks better than a monkey throwing darts.  But he's not 1.5% better!  Index funds.  These just shrug and buy every stock on the market.  There's no huge staff or genius manager, just some intern making small adjustments every week.  As such, the expense ratio is extremely small, like 0.1%.    If any of these investments pay dividends, you must pay taxes on them when they're issued, if you're not in an IRA account.  This problem gets fixed in ETF's.  Index ETF's.  These are index funds packaged to behave like stocks.  Dividends increase your stock's value instead of being paid out to you, which simplifies your taxes.  If you buy index funds outside of an IRA, use these.  Too many other options to get into here." The Trinity study looked at 'safe' withdrawal rates from retirement portfolios. They found it was safe to withdraw 4% of a portfolio consisting of stocks and bonds. I cannot immediately find exactly what specific investment allocations they used, but note that they found a portfolio consisting largely of stocks would allow for the withdrawal of 3% - 4% and still keep up with inflation. In this case, if you are able to fund $30,000, the study claims it would be safe to withdraw $900 - $1200 a year (that is, pay out as scholarships) while allowing the scholarship to grow sufficiently to cover inflation, and that this should work in perpetuity. My guess is that they invest such scholarship funds in a fairly aggressive portfolio. Most likely, they choose something along these lines: 70 - 80% stocks and 20 - 30% bonds. This is probably more risky than you'd want to take, but should give higher returns than a more conservative portfolio of perhaps 50 - 60% stocks, 40 - 50% bonds, over the long term. Just a regular, interest-bearing savings account isn't going to be enough. They almost never even keep up with inflation. Yes, if the stock market or the bond market takes a hit, the investment will suffer. But over the long term, it should more than recover the lost capital. Such scholarships care far more about the very long term and can weather a few years of bad returns. This is roughly similar to retirement planning. If you expect to be retired for, say, 10 years, you won't worry too much about pulling out your retirement funds. But it's quite possible to retire early (say, at 40) and plan for an infinite retirement. You just need a lot more money to do so. $3 million, invested appropriately, should allow you to pull out approximately $90,000 a year (adjusted upward for inflation) forever. I leave the specifics of how to come up with $3 million as an exercise for the reader. :) As an aside, there's a Memorial and Traffic Safety Fund which (kindly and gently) solicited a $10,000 donation after my wife was killed in a motor vehicle accident. That would have provided annual donations in her name, in perpetuity. This shows you don't need $30,000 to set up a scholarship or a fund. I chose to go another way, but it was an option I seriously considered. Edit: The Trinity study actually only looked at a 30 year withdrawal period. So long as the investment wasn't exhausted within 30 years, it was considered a success. The Trinity study has also been criticised when it comes to retirement. Nevertheless, there's some withdrawal rate at which point your investment is expected to last forever. It just may be slightly smaller than 3-4% per year. I still don't see the point of this software; rebalancing frequently is a waste of money (through fees).  If you invest in index funds, you don't have to rebalance at all--effectively, the fund is doing it for you, and since they can generally trade more efficiently than individual investors can, that's a win.  The Coverdell ESA is a great example.  There's a maximum contribution amount, just as there are for almost any tax-exempt account.  A decent financial adviser could help you plan how much to contribute to which accounts, at what time, and when you can/should start to withdraw from them. In my opinion, the fee is criminal.  There are ETFs available to the public that have expenses as low as .05%. The index fund VIIIX an institution level fund available to large 401(k) plans charges .02%. I'll pay a total of under 1% over the next 50 years,  Consider that at retirement, the safe withdrawal rate has been thought to be 4%, and today this is considered risky, perhaps too high. Do you think it's fair, in any sense of the word to lose 30% of that withdrawal?  Another angle for you - In my working years, I spent most of those years at either the 25% or 28% federal bracket taxable income. I should spend my retirement at 15% marginal rate. On average, the purpose of my 401(k) was to save me (and my wife) 10-13% in tax from deposit to withdrawal. How long does it take for an annual 1.1% excess fee to negate that 10% savings? If one spends their working life paying that rate, they will lose half their wealth to those managing their money.  PBS aired a show in its Frontline series titled The Retirement Gamble, it offers a sobering look at how such fees are a killer to your wealth. Generally it is advisable to mention what country you're asking about, as tax laws differ. To the best of my knowledge, however, this particular issue is handled consistently in every tax jurisdiction I'm familiar with. You invested X, it appreciated and is now worth X + Y. In your example, X = $10,000 and Y = $40,000. Total X + Y = $50,000. When you withdraw an amount, say A (in your example A = $10,000), it is considered a withdrawal of both the earnings and the original capital, in proportion to the total of your account. Taxable portion of the withdrawal is proportional to the earnings. Lets mark it T. In your example, T = $10,000 - $10,000 * $10,000/$50,000 = $8,000. I.e.: 80% of the withdrawal will be attributed to earnings and would be taxable (short term in your case, if you're in the US), and 20% to the original capital. This will keep the proportion of the remained the same - 20% of the remaining amount will be attributed to the original capital (accidentally, it will be $8,000), and the remaining 80% will be attributed to the earnings. The withdrawn amount attributed to the capital ($2,000), and the remaining amount attributed to the capital ($8,000) will equal exactly to the invested amount. It's not legal unless you have written permission to do so and have cleared it with the broker. You'll probably get away with it until one time when communicating with your broker, you'll mention you're not the account owner, in which case the account is frozen and closed immediately (money laundering regulations). So, couple of things. Firstly, every international ETF includes risk disclosure language in the prospectus covering both market disruption events as well as geopolitical risk, so the sponsor would be pretty well insulated from direct liability for anything. If the Russian market were truly shut down there are true-up mechanisms in place but in the scenario you're describing the market is still open, it's just only a few participants can trade in it.  First thing to do is shut down creates- that is, allow no new money to come into the fund. This at least prevents your problem from getting bigger.   Second you're going to switch all redemptions to in kind only. MV itself can't trade in the underlying so they're kind of jammed here. An ETF sponsor can't really refuse your redemption request (can delay, but only for a short time), but they can control the form in which they respond to it.    What theoretically should happen here is an AP not subject to sanctions will step in and handle redemptions.  Issue is, they'll probably charge for this so you should expect the fund to start trading at a discount to NAV (you, as an investor, sell to them cheaply, they submit a redemption request, then sell the stocks locally). Someone else has pointed that market makers will start stat arbing the fund using correlated/substitute instruments, which totally will help keep things in line, but my guess is that you'd still see the name trading away from NAV regardless. Driver of this will be the amount of money desperate to get out - if investors are content to wait the sanctions out who knows. "A major danger of keeping ""emergency"" funds in the form of stocks is that many of the scenarios where one would need quick access to the money will also momentarily depress the stock market.  Someone whose emergency funds were in some other form could avoid selling stocks during a momentary downturn, but someone who has no other emergency funds would have no choice but to sell during the downturn (thus losing money as well as making the downturn more significant for everyone else)."