How to earn up to 4% more by putting idle money to work
Put your money to work to earn more.
Here’s a simple idea that earns practically every one of our customers anywhere between 2,000 and 30,000 extra every year. You don’t need to make any special effort, or take risk. Just check out how much average amount you are holding in your savings account. Find it difficult to estimate an average? Just look at the ‘Interest capitalized’ credit column in your account statement. There are usually 2 entries – one in end-September and one in end-March. If it is anything over 2,000 in a year, you are leaving too much money idle in your savings account. If you hold multiple bank accounts in the family, the idle money just multiplies.
The problem is simple – money in your savings account earns a measly 4% a year. Some banks offer 6%, but put so many caveats that you still end up with only 4%. This amount can easily earn you ~8% a year, without taking any risk. That means, if you have an average of 1 lakh lying idle, you are losing 2,000 interest every year for nothing. A rule of thumb is that you should be earning double the interest shown in your pass book every year.
Why do we still let money lie idle? Usually, it is because we want flexibility – we aren’t sure when we would need the money. It seems too much of a hassle to carefully keep track of the balance and do paperwork to move the money. Worse, we fear it will take too much time to retrieve the money when we need it.
Now, thanks to improvements in technology and regulation, all this has changed. From the anytime-anywhere comfort of your mobile, you can move money into what are called liquid funds. Liquid funds are basically mutual funds that park money in papers issued by government or banks. They do not deal with the stock market, and are practically as safe as your savings account. Currently, they earn you about 8% a year. The best part is that when you want to withdraw, you just put an order on the mobile app. The amount gets credited to your bank account next morning. Now, you don’t hear about this in advertisements because your bankers / brokers don’t make any money from this – only you do!
We have customers using this to optimize returns quite well. For instance, Rajesh gets his salary credit on the first of every month, and his home loan EMI is due on the 20th. He uses liquid funds for the intervening 20 days, and finds he earns an additional 150 every month. Even if you don’t want to get to this level yet, you can start in a simple way by moving excess cash from your balance to liquid funds. Download the fisdom app, and click on ‘Park money safely’ to start earning!