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I’m teaching you how to earn more on your cash savings and more proven interest rate strategies without risking on stocks.
Last year, all you had to do was throw money at the market to see it double or more but it seems the easy money is over with a selloff last month and a lot of investors are shifting to cash ahead of lower stock prices.
But the average rate on bank savings is just 0.06%…meaning you earn just sixty-cents a year on a thousand-dollar savings and LOSE $54 to inflation! On inflation of 5.4% a year, the average household with $6,000 in cash savings is losing over $300 a year!
What do you do with your emergency savings, cash you need in the next year…or just money you don’t want to see wiped out in the next market crash?
In this video, I’ll reveal five ways to get up to 100-times interest on your money WITHOUT the risk of stocks. I’ll show you how to earn more on your cash savings without sacrificing safety. Stick around and then I’ll share the three questions you need to ask when looking at any low-risk investment.
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Earn More On Your Money with the Best Interest Rate Strategies
Now I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this first idea, high-yield online savings accounts, because while it will earn you 10-times the interest you get from a regular bank account…it’s still not that much.
But I feel like it’s a good start to our list of high-interest strategies because there are still so many people losing more by locking it away in a traditional savings account. In the U.S. alone, households and non-profits have more than $10 trillion in savings deposits with much of that earning the 0.06% interest.
So if you are stuck earning that near-zero rate and you’re not quite ready to try some of the other ideas on the list, start with a high-yield savings account. You’ll earn up to 0.55% interest and even the lower ones here pay 0.4% or about six-times that bank rate. I use the Capital One 360 account but all of these are super easy to set up and offer all the services of a traditional bank account.
How to Set Up an Online Savings Account
I’ll walk you through how to set up an online savings but the whole process takes less than 10 minutes. You’ll be able to set up direct deposit for your checks and automatic withdrawals to pay your bills. You can transfer directly from other accounts and have access online or through a mobile app. You can even deposit checks by taking a picture on your phone.
With any of these accounts, you’ll fill out your personal information just as you would opening a regular bank account. You’ll put in contact info like name and address along with employment data and your social security number and then agree to the banking terms. You’ll confirm your identity online with a driver’s license or other ID and you’re all set, everything is totally online. You can deposit checks with your phone and the entire process takes less than the time it takes in line at that brick-and-mortar bank.
The best part about CITBank is that you can easily pay people and any bills you may have with no monthly fee.
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The next best way to earn interest on your money is through short-term bonds and here I’ll use the Vanguard Short-Term Bond ETF, ticker BSV as an example.
The fund holds thousands of bonds in U.S. Treasuries or investment-grade bonds, really the safest fund out there.
What’s more important though is the fund has an average duration of 2.8 years. That means the average bond held matures in less than three years and the fund will be able to reinvest that money constantly, collecting the higher yields. That’s important as interest rates rise because bond prices fall when that happens but the bond fund, because it’s constantly reinvesting into new bonds at higher rates will be able to keep producing positive returns.
The return of 2.35% annually over the last five years may not be enough to trip your trigger but that includes a 1.5% dividend yield and is already 39-times the rate you get from bank savings.
Even on that 2.3% rate though, we’re still losing money after inflation so stick with me because the last idea on the list is going to pay you up to 8.5% on your money!
Next on our list, at a rate of 3.54% and 59-times what you earn at the bank are Series I Savings Bonds from TreasuryDirect.
I Bonds have been called the market’s best kept secret. You won’t hear about them from a financial advisor because they don’t earn any commissions or kickbacks from it. You can invest in these for free straight from TreasuryDirect.gov and it’s the best risk-free return you’ll ever get!
Now the 10-year Treasury Bond has been called the ‘risk-free’ asset because the government can always print more money so there is zero-percent chance of not getting paid back…but the ten-year only pays a 1.5% interest rate which, higher than you get from a bank, is still less than you lose each year to inflation!
But Series I Bonds give you a better option. In fact, not only is this investment totally risk-free but it pays twice that return and gives you a tax break!
The Series I Savings Bond was introduced in 1998 to help small investors earn a return and fight inflation. The bond earns interest at a fixed rate plus an inflation kicker that is adjusted every six months.
I Bonds are currently paying 3.54% which is the highest since 2011 and that’s bound to increase as inflation heats up.
Nation, I know this isn’t as sexy as talking growth stocks or the potential to double your money but to a money nerd like myself…this is like Christmas, July 4th and my birthday all in one!
You can invest as little as $25 with no costs directly from TreasuryDirect.gov and each I Bond pays interest for 30 years. That’s a guaranteed return plus inflation protection for three decades!
Now as we say here on the channel, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. You have to hold your I Bonds for at least 12 months and you give up three months’ of interest if you sell within five years but that’s pretty nominal.
But against the average savings rate of 0.06% right now. This is a way to get that same risk-free protection on your emergency savings but make almost 60-times the interest rate!
This next high-yield investment is where we really start getting a return on your cash, with longer-term bonds and the Vanguard Long-Term Index ETF, ticker BLV.
Like we saw with the short-term bond fund, this one has almost half the investment in U.S. government bonds and the other half in bonds of highly-rated companies. The difference here is that these are longer-term bonds, so debt issued by companies with five years or more to maturity.
These are still very safe companies with little or no credit risk, in fact the triple-A rated bonds have a higher rating than the U.S. government does on its debt. When stocks in the S&P 500 lost half their value in 2008, the BLV fund protected your money with a 0.4% gain in the price and more than 3% dividend yield.
Since these are longer-term bonds, the price will tend to get hit harder as interest rates increase so I’d recommend combining this with either the short-term bond fund or the last on our list but even alone, the BLV has produced a 7.3% annual return over the last five years including a 2.9% dividend yield, that’s 121-times the interest on a bank account.
But the highest-yielding way to earn interest on your money is with stablecoins.
There is a huge demand for lending stablecoins right now in international transfers as well as other transfers where you need fast and frictionless payment processing without all the fees charged by banks. Because of this platforms like BlockFi are paying interest rates up to 8.5% on accounts. It’s a lot like what a traditional bank does with your savings, paying you interest and then loans it out on mortgages but here, you have a savings account holding stablecoins and the platform makes loans on that…except the rate BlockFi is paying out right now is more than 140-times the average .06% rate you get from the bank.
Earn up to $250 instantly when you open an account on BlockFi and invest in cryptocurrencies!
And you don’t have to be a believer in cryptocurrencies to use this to earn high-yield interest. Stablecoins are backed by assets like commercial paper and money market funds to hold their value to the U.S. dollar and you can see in this price chart, it stays almost exactly at that $1 each.
I earn just over $25 a day or about $750 a month in interest, and that’s interest on my stablecoins as well as my investments in bitcoin and Ethereum. I’ve got about $80,000 in stablecoins with an 8.5% rate or about $570 a month of that total.
Now of course, any time you see a high-yield interest on what amounts to a savings account, you’ve got to ask what’s the catch…is it too good to be true. The drawbacks to stablecoin interest are, first you’ll notice BlockFi only pays that top rate on the first $40,000 in coins…so if you have more than forty-grand in any one stablecoin, you’ll earn a lower rate.
I get around that by having part of my savings in USDC and part in the PAX stablecoin, so I come in under $40,000 each and make the top rate on both.
Another drawback is, these aren’t FDIC insured like you get with bank savings. So while I don’t think you have anything to worry about because these coins are backed by real assets like commercial paper that keeps their value, it’s not a guarantee.
Getting started on BlockFi takes less than five minutes and just an email address. You’ll enter some basic contact information like address and mobile number which is going to help to keep your account secure. After verifying your account, you’re all set. You can do a direct transfer from you bank account into stablecoins like the USDC and you’ll earn interest for every day you hold a balance.
Earn interest up to 8.6% on your bitcoin and other cryptocurrency investments. Learn more here!
BONUS: The “Secret” Criteria You Should Use for Safe and Better Investments
Now you’ve got five great low-risk investments to earn interest on your cash savings but all you in the Nation know, I’m not about to just tell you what to invest in. Here I want to give you three criteria, three questions you can ask looking at safe investments to help make you a better investor.
The first thing you want to do when looking at any “safe investment” is to find out how safe it really is. Ladies and gents, there are a lot of high-risk investments out there masquerading as safety. Perfect example is utility stocks which are supposed to save you when the rest of the stock market tumbles.
And it makes intuitive sense. Utility companies have a monopoly and pricing power in their areas. They sell something you have to buy so even when the economy struggles, ConEd is still going to make money!
But this thinking just hasn’t played out in the past. Comparing the utility select sector fund, the XLU, against the broader S&P 500 index over the year to the bottom of the 2008 crash…those safe stocks in the utilities sector lost 44% of their value. And while it is 4% better than the 48% loss on the market…it’s not exactly what I would call safe.
So you need to start by looking for the largest drawdown, the biggest loss the investment has taken in the last big market crash. You can use the charts on Yahoo Finance to compare stocks and funds or go to the Historical Data tab to find the exact amounts over a period, and here I would look from October 2007 to March 9th 2009.
This was around the market peak and then the low for the 2008 crash. And I’d use that period rather than the 2020 crash because the pandemic scare wasn’t a typical stock crash so it might not be a good indication of how safe an investment is.
But for example, we can add the Vanguard Bond Fund, the BSV, to our chart here and see that even over the worst of the 2008 crash, those short-term bonds gained 2.2%, outperforming the supposedly safe utility stocks by 46% and the market by more than 50%!
Comparing Investments to Ensure Safety
Here you’re just comparing investments to see which are really safe and how much they could lose in a crash.
Another question you need to ask while comparing these is, what is the interest rate or dividend yield you collect while investing?
Nation, anything truly safe probably isn’t going to offer much for a return…that’s just how the trade-off between risk and return works. But that doesn’t mean you have to lose money while you seek safety in these investments.
The five interest-bearing investments we highlighted in the video pay anywhere from half a percent to over eight-percent so use that to compare other investments and understand, you want to compare these against inflation as well. For example, with the Consumer Price Index of inflation up 5.4% over the last year, that means any investment with a interest yield under 5.5% and you’re losing money! So you need to balance that safety with cash return to truly protect your money.
Possibly one of the most important questions in these safe, interest-rate investments is what level of guarantee do you have?
Just as with the interest rate comparison, here you want to rank your safe investments from least to most risk. With some like the Series I Bonds or treasuries, you have that guarantee backed by the full credit of the U.S. government. With CDs, you’re backed by the FDIC and the bank. The next riskier would be corporate bonds because these are debt obligations backed by the company but can still default. From there, you would have some of the hybrid financial products like stablecoins which are backed by safe holdings like commercial paper and money market funds. And finally on that scale of least to most risk, you would have your stocks and derivatives like options and futures.
The best part about CITBank is that you can easily pay people and any bills you may have with no monthly fee.
Open Your CIT Bank Account Today!
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