As 2023 draws to a close, we wanted to share some perspectives on the past year and some thoughts on what the year ahead might hold.

Why Max Exists

Max was founded in response to the Global Financial Crisis. In March 2009, as some of the largest banks in the country were on the verge of failing, it became clear that then-current approaches to cash management were fundamentally flawed. For years, large banks and broker-dealers had relied upon cash sweep programs (known in the industry as brokered deposits) as a means of convincing customers to keep all of their money in one place. The reality is that brokered deposits are fraught with risk, both for banks and depositors, and are also plagued by conflicts of interest. These cash sweep programs now serve primarily as a means for brokerage firms to profit off of clients’ cash, at the expense of the client. We knew there had to be a better way to manage cash, and so we set out to create Max, with a simple focus: your best interest.

The Year in Review

As a leader in cash management for more than 10 years, we’ve devoted ourselves to creating a safer, more liquid, higher-yielding approach to managing cash. It turns out that depositors can be best off simply by keeping their money in their own bank accounts — so long as they select the right banks. By holding money directly in your own name, you retain full transparency and same-day liquidity, with no intermediary custodian and no single point of failure.  

The importance of the simplicity of Max became abundantly clear in March 2023, when large banks again began to fail and people worried whether their funds were safe. Max members slept soundly, knowing exactly where their cash was, confident that their money was safe and sound in their own FDIC-insured bank accounts.

Beyond the primary importance of safety and liquidity, the other big story of 2023 was yield. Interest rates rose dramatically, surpassing 5%. Certainly, those who kept their cash in online banks in 2023 earned considerably more than those who kept their money in brick-and-mortar bank or brokerage accounts. But with rates changing so frequently, it’s hard to keep tabs on which banks are offering the best rates at any given point in time. Again Max excelled, helping our members earn substantially more than they would have elsewhere by keeping an eye on rates and helping our members reallocate their cash to whichever banks were offering the highest yield each month. Max’s current top rate of 5.36% is about 1.00% higher than the leading online banks, and more than 11x the national savings average (a paltry 0.46%, according to the FDIC).¹

A Culture of Innovation

Our team worked hard in 2023, continuing to innovate and build new features for the benefit of our members.

• We added support for more high-yield savings banks on the Max Common Application, making it easy to open additional accounts and increase your FDIC insurance coverage with just a few clicks.
• We upgraded Max Checking, partnering with a new bank to provide faster funds transfers and superior service.  
• We migrated all Max settings onto a single page, making it easier to set custom bank-by-bank limits, so that you remain in full control of all your money.
• We simplified how members set their target checking account balance, and added clarity to how to request funds transfers. You can expect more improvements to this interface in 2024.
• We pioneered a multi-bank savings goal feature, making it easy for you to set and monitor progress towards goals directly from your Performance page.
• We added more integrations, making it easy for your financial advisor to incorporate your Max balances into your financial plan. 

In 2024, we’ll accelerate our product development efforts to serve you even more fully. Correspondingly, we’ve been busy investing in our team and technology platform to make Max even better, faster, and simpler.

Member Feedback

We appreciate those who took the time to complete our Max Member Survey. We’re pleased to report that our members gave Max its highest-ever Net Promoter Score, putting Max just ahead of Apple and Google in terms of customer satisfaction. We’re proud of our product and member services teams. Our aim is to delight every customer, and we’ll work hard to incorporate your feedback into our product plans for 2024.

The Year Ahead

Many have been speculating on what might happen with interest rates in the year ahead.  We don’t have a crystal ball, but ever since the start of the pandemic, we’ve consistently held the view that fiscal and monetary stimulus would lead to significant inflation, which in turn would necessitate higher interest rates. In February 2021, when interest rates were still set at 0% and the Fed was indicating that inflation was “transitory,” our view was markedly different. Witnessing the 35%² growth in commercial bank deposits during the pandemic, we concluded that rates would likely end up in the 5.5%-6.0% range. Our rationale was pretty simple: with such a large boost to the money supply, absent a change in the velocity of money, inflation was inevitable. Even to this day, we’ve only experienced 19.2% cumulative inflation since March 2020³, suggesting that there’s more inflation in store before we can get back to an equilibrium. Despite the market’s optimism of rate cuts in 2024, we may be in a “higher for longer” environment in 2024, at least until such time as the influx of fiscal and monetary stimulus is fully absorbed into the economy. With much of the remaining inflationary pressures seeming to come from excess consumer demand, it may be that a recession is necessary to ‘reset’ consumer expectations and get prices under control. Time will tell.

Regardless of the rate environment, and no matter your outlook for whether rates are poised to rise further or fall, Max is here to help you make sure you’re earning the highest rates. Over the past 10 years, Max has delivered the highest yields in the market.  Our back-testing analysis has demonstrated that Max members have outperformed in all market environments.

We are grateful for the trust that you have placed in us. We’re proud to serve the clients of more than 2,500 wealth management firms across the country, as well as self-directed investors who are looking out for their own best interest. 

We wish you and your family good health, happiness, and success in the year ahead.

Sources: 

¹FDIC National Savings Average as of 11/17/2023.

²St. Louis Fed FRED Total Deposits, All Commercial Banks.

³US Inflation Calculator as of 12/12/2023.

In the weeks since the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, other banks, brokers and fintechs have scrambled to roll out increased FDIC insurance solutions to capitalize on the opportunity to attract new deposits. Unfortunately, in the mad rush to roll out something, anything, they are exposing your clients to the very same risks that they should be seeking to avoid.

The collapse of SVB was scary for depositors for two reasons.

First, when a bank fails, any deposits in excess of $250,000 — the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. limit — leave depositors unsecured, which means they may not get all of their money back.

Second, when a bank fails, even insured deposits can’t be withdrawn until the FDIC takes over the operations of the bank or orchestrates a sale. 

If you think about why clients hold cash, it’s for safety and liquidity. Any solution that puts either safety or liquidity at risk would defeat the purpose of holding cash. That’s why we created MaxMyInterest.com and MaxForAdvisors.com, to create a better, safer, more liquid, and higher-yielding way for clients to manage cash.

The Problem With Sweep Accounts

For decades, banks and brokerage firms have used sweep accounts (known in the industry as brokered deposits) to earn a spread for themselves on client cash. While these solutions are marketed to clients as a means of keeping cash safe by obtaining increased deposit insurance, if you peek under the hood, you’ll find that they expose clients to safety and liquidity risks and are rife with conflicts of interest. 

To identify these risks, it’s first helpful to understand how these sweep programs work. Essentially, an originating institution — could be a bank, brokerage firm, or fintech company — tells you they can provide increased FDIC insurance by spreading (selling) your cash across their network of other banks. That may sound okay on paper, but the reality is that your cash gets swept up into omnibus accounts held in the bank’s name, not in the client’s name. 

This means that if the originating institution were to fail, your clients would lose access to all their funds until the resolution process is complete. In the case of a bank, that may happen in a matter of days, but if a fintech has custody of a client’s funds and they fail, clients may be stuck waiting through a bankruptcy process. Just ask anyone who thought their funds were safe at FTX. 

If a client needed that cash to buy equities when the market dips, too bad. And if they needed the money to make a tax payment or close on the purchase of a house, they may be out of luck, with dire consequences. Clients can’t contact the underlying banks that hold their funds, since they have no relationship with them. 

Furthermore, they don’t know to whom their deposits were sold, and if they happened to be placed with a bank where clients already hold other deposits, they may overlap and exceed the FDIC limits. This means that clients might not be fully insured, even when you thought they were. 

Avoiding Unnecessary Risk

These risks are avoidable. In fact, the main beneficiary of clients taking on these risks is the very institution that is brokering their deposits, since in the process of selling deposits out to other banks, they keep a spread for themselves, passing along a net rate to the customer while hiding the embedded fee or spread that they’re keeping. In short, there’s a conflict of interest that leaves the depositor with less yield and more risk than had they just opened more bank accounts directly in their own name. 

In 2009, in the midst of the Financial Crisis, I identified these risks and began managing my own cash differently, spreading it out across my own accounts held directly at multiple banks, so that I’d have the benefit of increased FDIC insurance coverage while maintaining full visibility, liquidity, and control over my cash, with no single point of failure. When I found that my safer approach had also generated tens of thousands of dollars of incremental yield, I figured that many more people could benefit from this same approach, and we created MaxMyInterest in 2013 to create a new, safer, higher-yielding way to manage cash.

It Pays to Read the Fine Print

Not 48 hours after the collapse of SVB, many advisors, banks and fintechs began repeating the same mistakes of the past. They looked for solutions that purport to keep cash safe without considering the implications of these solutions for safety and liquidity. As a fiduciary, when it comes to your clients’ cash, it pays to read the fine print. By avoiding brokered sweep accounts, you can keep cash safer, more liquid, and earn higher yields at the same time.

This week, Max is at the T3 conference in Orange County, Ca., which is spurring us to think about financial advisors and how we can help them best serve their clients.

As financial advisors think about where to put their clients’ cash, many head automatically toward money market funds. But in today’s regulatory environment, where money market funds pay ultra-low rates and can force investors to pay redemption penalties in times of market turmoil, they may no longer be the best choice.

There is a better solution for cash held in brokerage or bank accounts. It’s called Max.  

Some statistics about cash: high-net-worth households in the U.S. are currently holding 23.7% of their assets in cash. That works out to a staggering $3.5 trillion, just among the top 4% of the U.S. population.

Most of this cash is being kept in the wrong place. In money market funds, it is under-earning its potential and it’s not insured.

Clients hold cash for a host of reasons, including as a reserve for a future real estate purchase, private equity capital call, or other asset buy. A recent U.S. Trust survey showed that a majority of clients were holding cash on the sidelines to serve as “dry powder” to capitalize on market opportunities. That’s the same reason why Warren Buffett has said he likes cash so much.

Most financial advisors think that clients aren’t holding much cash because what they see is the cash allocation within the client’s investment portfolio. The reality is that there’s a lot more cash sitting on the sidelines, out of view of the advisor. Most high net worth investors maintain multiple advisory relationships at several institutions. Advisors’ wallet share is only what clients choose to bring to them.

Where is this cash being held? Up until this point, the default for many financial advisors was to keep client cash in a money market fund. This is no longer best practice, especially in a fiduciary environment. It’s difficult to justify offering your clients less of a yield on uninsured cash when there’s a solution that allows them to earn more and stay FDIC-insured.

After the 2008 financial crisis, the SEC imposed new rules on money market funds, rendering them no longer a true cash equivalent. Under the new regulations, retail-held prime funds are subject to redemption gates of up to 10 days and redemption penalties of 1-2% in periods of financial stress. This means that your clients may not be able to access their funds when they need them most. At the same time, yields on money markets are still relatively low, and these funds are not insured.

How can Max solve these problems? Max offers a tool that lets advisors bring more cash into view, help clients earn more on that cash, and help ensure that cash is fully insured. We’ve created a better solution for cash, offering liquidity, higher yield, and greater FDIC insurance. Max doesn’t take custody of clients’ funds. Their cash stays in the client’s own name, while our software acts as a sort of air traffic control system, telling the banks to move funds among the client’s own accounts whenever it’s advantageous to do so to get better rates. In this manner, clients continuously earn the highest yield possible within the FDIC limits. That means Max members can keep up to $5 million per couple insured, and we have a partner solution that can deliver up to $50 million of FDIC coverage per tax ID for business accounts or complex trusts.

Now that money markets are considerably less attractive, isn’t it time to find a better way to manage cash? Learn more about Max at MaxForAdvisors.com.

We all know that interest rates have remained low for the last eight years, a deliberate policy on the part of the Fed to keep the cost of funding low to help spur the economy.  This has made it easier for people to borrow money to buy homes, propping up the housing market. It has been good for the stock markets, helping companies refinance high-cost debt and fund share repurchases.  And it’s been favorable to hedge funds as well, reducing the cost of leverage used to boost returns.

Where low rates have had a negative effect is on investors’ cash in the bank, which yields barely anything.

There’s something odd at play this time around, though.  Historically, money market funds yielded more than bank savings accounts.  No longer.  Most money market funds yield a small fraction of what is currently being earned by Max members.

Even more surprising, though, is the fact that term deposits and longer-term bonds are yielding far less than online banks these days.  The yield on the 2-Year Treasury stands at 0.84%, and 5 Year CDs at most brick-and-mortar banks hover around 0.60%. At Chase Bank, a 10-year CD pays 1.05% — and that’s only if you keep $100,000 or more in the CD, and lock up your money for 10 years.

We at Max are puzzled as to why investors would buy 2 Year Treasurys or lock their funds up in bank CDs when it’s possible to stay liquid and earn up to 1.05% on FDIC-insured bank deposits, with no minimum deposit level.

With rates expected to rise, online banks seem like the most logical place to keep cash. As interest rates go up, cash held in these accounts can be expected to follow the upward movement in rates. With Max, cash automatically flows to the banks with the best rates, even as these banks vie to offer the highest yield on savings. This happens while keeping cash safely below the FDIC insurance limits at each bank.

While hedge funds can’t take advantage of the higher yields available through online banks, individual investors can earn significantly more by keeping cash in these online accounts. Learn how MaxMyInterest.com can help with a fully-automated solution that makes it easy to open and manage online bank accounts, all without changing how you interact with your existing checking account.

Continuing the trend of rising interest rates, this morning American Express increased the rate it offers on its Personal Savings accounts to 0.90%. This represents American Express’ second rate increase in two months.

Online savings rates have been rising rapidly since December, with several banks now offering more than 1.00% in interest on FDIC-insured bank deposits. For investors, this represents a compelling opportunity to finally earn more on the cash portion of their portfolios after five years of near-zero interest rates.

This stands in contrast to the Bankrate.com national savings average, which remains stuck at a paltry 0.09%. Brick and mortar banks have much higher overhead costs than their online peers, which contributes to their lower rates. It’s the same dynamic that makes online shopping compelling: just as a toy might cost less at Amazon.com versus buying that same item at Toys-R-Us, online banks are able to pass on the efficiency of transacting online to their depositors by paying higher rates. Since online bank deposits are FDIC-insured in the same manner as brick-and-mortar bank deposits, depositors can rest easy knowing that their deposits at leading online banks such as GE Capital Bank, Barclays, Ally Bank and American Express are just as safe as deposits at their brick-and-mortar peers, so long as total deposits are held below the FDIC-insurance limits, currently $250,000 per bank, per depositor, per account type (individual and joint accounts count as separate account types.)

With Max, we’ve created a system that helps depositors mange their cash more intelligently. Our members link their existing brick-and-mortar savings accounts to a number of higher-yielding online bank accounts. Max then monitors changes in interest rates, and periodically tells your banks to transfer funds between your own accounts so as to maximize yield, even as interest rates change. By default, Max also helps keep your cash below the FDIC insurance limit at each bank, so that you know that your cash is safe. And with Max, there’s no change to the manner in which you interact with your existing bank – direct deposit, bill pay, and access to tellers and notaries remain unchanged.

With American Express’ latest rate increase, Max members are now earning a weighted average 0.98% on cash – that’s 0.89% more than the national savings average, and 0.97% than the yield on most money market funds. Today, many members are earning as much as 1.05% on their first $250,000 being optimized by Max.  And as rates continue to rise, Max members benefit automatically.

What could you do with an extra 0.89% of ‘found money’ each year? Save it, of course, and let it compound. Or donate it to your favorite charitable organization. Or take your family on a nice vacation. You can try out the Max calculator to see what this might mean for you.

Max members are continuing to benefit from a rise in rates offered by online banks.

This morning, American Express increased the interest rate paid on its Personal Savings online accounts to 0.85%.  This comes on the heels of GE Capital Bank‘s rate increase on Monday.

For Americans with substantial cash balances, the ability to spread deposits across multiple online banks helps keep larger amounts of cash safe via increased FDIC insurance, while dramatically increasing yield vs. other alternatives, such as brick-and-mortar savings accounts or money market funds.  Max makes it easy to manage a basket of these accounts, monitoring changes in interest rates and automatically reallocating cash among your accounts to seek the best combination of yield and FDIC insurance protection.  Max charges a small fee of 0.02% each quarter for this service.

For months we’ve been predicting a rise in rates, and in turn a widening of the spread between the yield available from the network of online banks supported by Max vs. the national savings average.  Max members are now earning a weighted average 0.93%, as compared to the Bankrate.com national savings average of 0.09% or most money market funds that yield only 0.01%.

More information about Max can be found at MaxMyInterest.com.

Do you hold cash in your portfolio? Of course you do. It’s the universal asset class. Everyone needs some degree of cash to manage their monthly expenses: homes, automobiles, tuition, travel, dining and entertainment. But how much cash is enough cash? Should you hold cash beyond what you need on a monthly basis? And how much are you earning on the cash portion of your portfolio?

For most high net worth investors, the bulk of their portfolios are comprised of domestic and international equities, tax-advantaged fixed income instruments, real estate, commodities and alternative investments like private equity, hedge funds or real assets. Yet today, cash represents a substantial portion of the portfolios of both individual investors and family offices. Most of it is earning next to nothing.

Forbes Magazine contributor Jim Cahn recently cited a study by US Trust that found that “one-fifth of all high net worth individuals (with $3 million or more in investable assets) are holding more than 25% of their portfolio in cash.” This is consistent with our anecdotal conversations with individual investors and family offices. Sure, we occasionally run into investors who hold virtually no cash, choosing to margin securities when they buy a car or pay tuition. But most investors do keep a meaningful cash allocation. One family office we know is 100% in cash – to the tune of $250 million.

For most investors, having a sizable cash cushion helps them manage both personal and portfolio risk. As I discussed in a recent interview with Christine Benz at Morningstar, we all remember the depths of the financial crisis. Most investors prefer to have a cash cushion to withstand economic swings. They also like to have on hand some “dry powder” that can profitably deployed, so that they can, in the words of Warren Buffett, “be greedy when others are fearful.” Cash can serve not only as a hedge, but also as a strategic reserve.

Among the most conservative investors are investment bankers, many of whom hold seven figures in cash. Working in a volatile industry, where layoffs accompany each business cycle, it makes sense to hold a rainy-day fund in cash. Law firm partners are similar. One leading private banker told me his white-shoe law firm clients tend to hold between $1 million and $3 million in cash, with one client holding a staggering $20 million, all earning no more than 0.30%. Whether that reflects inertia or a deliberate allocation doesn’t matter – what matters is how clients invest that cash, to ensure it doesn’t unduly drag down the returns of the entire portfolio.

At Max, we don’t take a view on how much cash investors should hold – each individual is different, and should consult with his or her financial advisor to determine what’s prudent. However, for whatever portion of your portfolio that you’ve chosen to hold in cash, you ought to earn as much as possible on it, while ensuring that it is safe, insured, and accessible when you need it.

MaxMyInterest is a cash management solution that helps investors earn substantially more on their cash, while keeping it safe. Max members are today earning a weighted average 0.89% on their cash, held in their own accounts at leading FDIC-insured online banks such as American Express, Barclays and GE Capital. As interest rates change, Max automatically reallocates cash to help ensure its members benefit from the best rates available. Best of all, Max members need not change the way that they interact with their existing checking account, so direct deposit, bill pay, and access to tellers and notaries remain unchanged.

An incremental 0.80% of return can be meaningful, particularly when compounded over time. Savvy investors know that it’s important to monitor every aspect of portfolio risk and return. With Max, investors can generate incremental return without incremental risk, the holy grail of investing. So, much like you wouldn’t put up with a mutual fund that consistently underperformed the market by 0.80%, no longer should you suffer such a fate from cash.

We’re all busy, and focusing on cash often falls to the bottom of the To Do list. However, Max was designed so that – after a one-time setup – you never have to think about your cash again. You can just sit back, knowing that the cash portion of your portfolio is optimally invested in your own FDIC-insured bank accounts.

Is Max too good to be true? How can I earn more money on my cash without paying expensive fees, being subject to stiff restrictions on transferring my money, or maintaining a high minimum balance?

We heard many versions of these questions last week when we presented Max at Finovate. Banks, brokerages, and RIA platform representatives all came over to meet us, as well as individuals eager to try out Max for themselves.  We were excited to receive some terrific press coverage from journalists who really grapsed what we’re doing.  To address some of the questions we recieved, let’s dispel a few Max myths:

Max is not a bank, and Max never takes custody of your funds. Many customers have asked how they can send us money to optimize. With Max, you don’t send us any money.  Your money remains in your own bank accounts, automatically moving between your own accounts to where you can earn the best yield each month.

There is no minimum balance required to use Max. These are your accounts, so the only minimums are those imposed by the banks. The online banks in our system have account minimums of either zero or $1.00.  They charge no monthly fees.  The only minimums that might apply are those imposed by your own checking account; often banks will require that you keep a minimum of $1,500 to avoid monthly fees.  But Max does not impose any minimum balance requirement.

There are no incremental transfer fees associated with the monthly optimizations. Every three months, Max charges a simple fee of 0.02% on the balance that is being optimized in your linked online savings accounts, for a total of 0.08% per year. This works out to approximately 10% of the gain that most members can expect by using Max, while our members keep the remaining 90% of the gain. We don’t charge a fee on the money that’s in your checking account.

There is no term to the deposits. These are savings accounts, held in your name, to which you have daily access. The rates offered by these online banks are typically better than even a 5-year CD at most brick-and mortar banks.  These rates are so good simply because the online banks don’t have to pay for the costly overhead of branches.  This saves them ~1.50%, and they’re passing on roughly half of these savings to depositors in the form of higher rates That’s why most Max members today are earning approximately 0.90%, which is about 0.80% higher than the national savings average and almost 0.90% higher than the yield on most money market funds.

Max keeps you optimized automatically. Max doesn’t just tell you what you need to do to earn more on your cash; Max does it for you. The Max system is fully automated, so you set it up once and then Max does the rest.  Max monitors interest rates daily, and once a month, instructs your banks to send funds between one another to keep you optimized, maximizing your interest income while staying within the FDIC insurance limits at each bank, and restoring your checking account to your desired balance each month.  You can log into Max at any time and see your balances, view the status of each of these transfers, request intra-month transfers via our Intelligent Funds Transfer^SM feature, and change settings to customize how Max works for you.  Come tax time, we plan to have in place a feature that delivers all of your 1099s to you via a single PDF, eliminating the hassle of retrieving a separate tax form for each account you hold.

Have more questions? You can reach Max Member Services at member.services@maxmyinterest.com.

MaxMyInterest is presenting at the FinovateFall conference this week in New York City. In honor of the conference, which showcases innovative financial-technology solutions, we’re taking a look at the problem that Max solves: people are not earning enough on their cash in the bank, and they’re taking more risk than they’d like by not staying under the FDIC limits on their bank accounts.

Cash makes up a reported 40% of Americans’ holdings — far more than most asset-allocation models would recommend. With the stock market at an all-time high, why are investors holding onto so much cash?

There are several logical reasons why people would choose a more conservative asset allocation, yet in doing so they’ve missed out on a stock market rally which has been going strong for more than three years.

Some investors feel the market is overvalued and are waiting until stock prices fall to buy more.  They remember the tremendous buying opportunities that existed at the depths of the financial crisis. Investors who had “dry powder” — cash on the sidelines available to invest — were able to triple their money simply by buying the S&P 500 Index at the bottom and waiting for the recovery to take hold.

Many savvy investors employ a strategy called dollar-cost averaging, which reduces the risk of market timing by taking a fixed amount of cash and deploying it methodically in equal installments over several days, weeks, or months. This strategy requires holding extra cash, because it takes some time to accumulate the position that the investor ultimately wants to hold.

Investors’ appetite for cash also depends on how old they are. For millennials, who came of age during the 2008 global financial crisis and the recession that followed, the equity markets are viewed to be perilous. Many investors in this age bracket are ultra-conservative in asset allocation and don’t want to own any stocks at all. As a result, they keep a larger proportion of their assets in cash than people their age usually do. According to a recent Forbes article, 40% of millennials favor cash over any other asset class.

Investors approaching retirement tend to hold a larger portion of their portfolios in cash and fixed income instruments — but with interest rates expected to rise, holding long-term bonds could be a losing strategy, so many of these investors have pulled cash from bond funds, hoping to preserve its value better by keeping it in cash.

One investor who’s holding lots of cash is Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway has $55 billion in its corporate bank account. Buffett knows that opportunities are out there, and cash gives him the freedom to scoop them up when they become available. As we wrote earlier, Buffett has historically saved up cash when the markets rise, and spent it quickly when the markets fall.  He is perhaps the ultimately market timer.

The trouble with keeping a large percentage of your portfolio in cash is that cash provides little, if any, real yield, often underperforming inflation. Many investors also grapple with the limits of FDIC insurance, which only cover the first $250,000 per depositor, per account type, per bank.  For investors who hold cash in money market funds (as is often the case in brokerage accounts), they are not even covered by FDIC insurance, meaning their cash could be at risk.

For Max members, holding cash on the sidelines becomes less of an issue. Max members are currently earning a weighted-average 0.88% yield on their cash, far more than the national savings average of 0.11% or most money market funds that yield a paltry 0.01% today. Even in this low-interest-rate environment, that means Max members are earning 8 times as much as the average bank customer on cash deposits. While each investor should make his/her own determination as to how much cash to hold, at least via Max, they can rest easy knowing that they’re earning as much as possible on that cash, so that there’s more of it at the ready when the next investment opportunity presents itself.

In school you learned how to get the highest score on a test: first answer all the questions you know, then go for partial credit on the harder ones. Your family’s portfolio can work the same way, first focusing on the decisions that will have the biggest impact and then searching for ways to enhance your returns on the margin. Here are three ways to streamline your finances so that your money works harder for you.

 

– Choose ETFs

Picking individual stocks is tough; even the pros often can’t select winners. Statistically, investors who try to bet on individual companies rarely beat the market. But many people keep trying to pick individual stocks because they’ve read the fairy tales about others who have built fortunes on one stock. Unfortunately, unless you invest in a company early on and it becomes a stock-market juggernaut, you are unlikely to amass a huge profit from just one holding.

The more conservative way to invest in equities is to buy low-cost, broad-market ETFs and to hold on to them for many years, dollar cost averaging into your position over time. That way, you diversify your risk among a large number of stocks without trying to time the market, while keeping your costs low.

 

– Avoid high fees

Why do fees matter? This is one of the areas where investors have a chance to make a real difference in their results, regardless of how the market performs. Every dollar you spend today paying fees – on your funds, your bank accounts, or your investment adviser’s services – is a dollar that won’t compound in your portfolio over time. The power of compounding is what makes a portfolio grow in a steady, reliable way for most investors. Fees aren’t inherently bad — what matters is the performance of your investments net of fees.  If you have a stock fund or a financial advisor that consistently outperforms the market, it may be worth the extra fees.  The problem is that with equities, it’s difficult to find someone who can consistently outperform the market by a wide margin year in, year out.  If you’re paying 1.0 – 1.5% in fees each year, that can put a real drag on your returns over time.

 

– Earn more on your cash

There will always be some portion of your portfolio that you choose to keep in cash, typically held in your bank account or in money market funds. If that cash on the sidelines isn’t earning as much interest as it could, you’re leaving money on the table. Just like with high fees, earning little interest on your money in the bank puts a drag on your portfolio — money that could otherwise be compounding over time. MaxMyInterest.com offers an investor-friendly system that helps you consistently earn more on your cash by helping take advantage of the higher yields offered by online banks.  Today, these yields are as high as 0.95%, considerably higher than the national savings account average of 0.11% or most money market funds that yield a paltry 0.01%.  By monitoring for changes in interest rates, and automatically helping your money move to the leading FDIC-insured banks offering the highest rates each month, MaxMyInterest can help you earn higher yields on your cash, boosting the returns on this portion of your potfolio.