Today I bowed my head and did the most basic financial management work, sigh.

Help plan deposits for my mother-in-law’s family. The amount is on the order of dozens of units. I checked with more than a dozen local banks and shortlisted three or four candidate options.

The target is the interest rate on a three-year bank time deposit.

When I asked around,
the big four state-owned banks are basically 1.5% per year.
Joint-stock banks are around 1.8%.
Some smaller regional banks may be close to 2 percentage points.

Also, there are questions about whether the deposit can be partially withdrawn early, and whether there are options like gifts, etc.

After tinkering for two days, it turns out the additional benefit is only about 0.30% (in ten-thousandths terms) higher than what she originally planned. Over a year, that’s only a few thousand dollars in interest more.

As for time deposits, this is something I only started doing about ten or so years ago. After that, I stayed fully invested in the stock market. I’ve always had some liquidity in the market and I never needed it elsewhere—so I just treat it as demand deposit.

Now there’s a feeling like the movie “Back on the Road” where a middle manager from a big company loses his job and ends up delivering food.

If it had been two or three months earlier, I definitely would have said: this money isn’t as good as letting me help you invest in the stock market—earning five or six percentage points in a year (that’s already pretty conservative). It would be no problem.

During Chinese New Year, my mother-in-law gave me ten units. I put it into the stock market and bought some bank stocks, so I can at least say we didn’t suffer a big loss. The problem is I bought dozens of shares—fortunately only dozens—of Hongtu and Longda.

Over the past month, prices have fallen, and my confidence is gone. I don’t dare to brag anymore. I’ll just keep my own money to myself. My mother-in-law’s money—let’s not. Bank deposits are the safest.

By the way, I also want to ask: do you all have any commonly recognized safe wealth-management channels with annualized returns above 2%??