I’m More Interested in Your Personal Savings Rate than the Interest Rate on Your Personal Savings!

That’s a tongue-twister, huh?

Whereas how much wood a wood-chuck can chuck is useless to debate, I can promise you that my title is extremely helpful.

Where’s The Best Place To Put My Money?

This is a question I get 25 times each week. While exhaustive to answer, the question itself never gets old. That’s because my answer is usually:

“Well, it depends.”

Primarily, it depends on what the money is for.

Give Your Money a Purpose

Is this money set aside for retirement? Would you tap into this money if you had an emergency? These 2 questions (along with many others) must be answered before you can ask “Where’s the best place to put my money?”

A Problematic Commonality

Even though each conversation I have it different, I have noticed a similar pattern.

ALL THAT MATTERS IS INTEREST RATE.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about $1000 or $100,000. All anyone cares about is interest rate. But the truth is…

INTEREST RATES ARE INSIGNIFICANT FOR MOST PEOPLE.

For example, I was recently asked where to stash $1000 in order to earn some interest. The harsh reality is that it doesn’t matter. If you earn 1% (which you probably won’t get) on your $1000, then you’ll earn a whopping $10 of interest. You can “earn” the same amount simply by not ordering an appetizer at dinner.

Therefore, I would recommend you pay more attention to your savings rate (how much you save) than the interest rate on your savings.

Make sense?