"Financial slack" refers to having extra available funds or resources beyond what is required for immediate expenses or obligations. It allows organizations or individuals to have a cushion to cover unexpected emergencies or invest in future opportunities. It provides a sense of financial security and flexibility.
Full definition
Better to manage such that you can buy - and - hold for moderate lengths of time, with
enough financial slack to tide over rough patches in the market.
We tried to force homeownership on people that were not ready for it, people who didn't have
enough financial slack to make it through even a slight recession.
My first article on RealMoney dealt with the concept
of financial slack, and why it is particularly valuable for cyclical companies not to take on as much leverage as possible.
It is wise for a founder to have enough
financial slack so that the business can iterate but not so much capital that people try to potentially fatal things like scale the business prematurely, broaden the scope of the product too far or pivot too often.
Ms. Financial Slacker is in commercial real estate and she works with her appraisers all the time to get to the values that they need.
Survivors / winners sell their worst assets and hunker down — they have
enough financial slack that they don't have to engage in panic behavior.
The time to buy a company in any industry is when it is out of favor; as a matter of risk control (and humility) the companies to buy when an industry is out of favor are those
with financial slack.
One of the keys to this is insisting that the companies that I invest in possess «
financial slack.»
FInancial slack is valuable, especially in a bear market.
To return to a concept I discussed in the first column I wrote for RealMoney, Valuing
Financial Slack in the Steel Sector, banks with a high degree of leverage relative to the overall riskiness of their assets and liabilities possess little in the way of financial slack.
For instance, the primary breadwinner loses her / his job or is demoted and the other partner must pick up
the financial slack.