Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works,

how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host David Stein,

today's episode 412. It's titled, Where to Invest your Cash Savings for Higher Yeals.

In 1990, I was attending university at the University of Cincinnati. Lepron and I were recently

and I made one of my first investments. I invested in the Gratison Money Market Mutual Fund.

Gratison Company was a local broker in Cincinnati and I felt like I was a genius in the sense that I

could earn an 8% yield on this money market mutual fund. Now I was studying finance,

but even so I didn't really understand exactly what a money market mutual fund was.

I just knew the yields were attractive and I had read about them but I didn't have the

true understanding that I do now of money market mutual funds having done episodes on them

understand the legislation. The Money Market Mutual Fund is effectively private money.

In this case, Gratison was taking in funds and investing those funds in short-term government

securities and short-term commercial paper or commercial obligations. The Fed funds rate at

that time was around 8% and that was the business model. They invested the money. They charged

a little bit of an expense ratio. I have no idea what it was and then they paid that interest.

For much of the last decade, interest rates have been very, very low around the world.

And so we didn't have to spend a whole lot of time concerning ourselves how our cash was

invested. That's different today. Yields are much higher, inflation is higher and so there's

an opportunity cost for not putting our cash to work. In this episode then we want to look at

some of the options out there and that Gratison money market mutual fund example is important to me

in that I realize that many listeners or even newer investors while cash investing can seem

simple, some of these products are actually kind of complicated. Some of the products really

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