Maybe it's just from being involved with crypto for so many years but it hurst to have money in an account not earning any yield. Now it's not going to be 40% like hive on Binance or 15% on HBD onchain.
For some reason it's very hard to get any returns on fiat from banks. Interest rates in Europe are very very low. In Ireland most banks are under 1% on flexible savings with very limited option for investment on a small scale.
I was trying to find ways of investing under 10K but there are very few that have any returns and then you pay 33-50% in tax from any profits that you do make.
It's very hard to make any money for a regular person and break out of the working class cycle that we are stuck in from an early age. At the moment the best thing that you can do with money is to try and repay your mortgage early which saves a lot of money rather than earning you any but is still a net win.
We managed to make a 10K payment off of our mortgage this year which had a $300 penalty since we are on a fixed rate but it will save us 35K in interest payments over the course of our mortgage and will become a net profit three months from now. That's a saving of $100 a month that we will not be paying any more and the equivalent of 9% APR on the 10K that we paid to the bank.
Looking at savings options in Ireland you are doing well to get over 2% APR on your savings before taxes which will bring it down to about 1%.
This is the easiest option to use as they have no paperwork and make it very easy to move money in and out of each account. They say 2.5% but that is for premium users and the actual rate on my app is 1.7% or 1.1% in reality.
They have fixed term options as well but we have plans for the next couple of years and want access to funds. With all of that we are looking at 2.25% or 1.5% in reality.
This seems like an interesting option as they offer a competitive interest rate but also a full banking service with joint account and multiple cards.
We have a joint account in an irish institution but it has no savings rate and limited facilities.
All of this is about savings rather than investments. I already have investments in stocks and crypto's but all of these are volatile and not always accessible on demand.
Other options moving forward are precious metals, whiskey, race horses and long term property but come with a lot of risk and no guarantees. It's also important to keep some money ready to go for when a good opportunity might present itself in the years to come rather than having everything tied up in investments.
