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

Help my mother-in-law’s family make a deposit plan. The amount is in the dozens range, I guess. I looked up more than ten local banks and selected three or four candidate options.

The goal is the annual interest rate of a three-year bank time deposit.

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

Also, whether the deposit can be partially withdrawn early, and whether there are options like gifts, etc.

After running around for two days, in the end it only adds about 0.3% of extra returns compared with her original plan. Over a year, that’s only an extra few thousand in interest.

Time deposits—this is something I did only ten-something years ago. After that, I went fully into the stock market the whole time. I also never needed any liquidity in the stock market; I basically just left it as if it were in a savings account.

Now there’s this feeling like what happens to a mid-level manager at a big company in the movie “Back to the Reversal,” getting laid off and then delivering food.

If it had been two or three months earlier, I would definitely have said: this money would be better off if I helped you put it into the stock market and invest—earning five or six percent in a year (that’s already pretty conservative). No problem.

During the New Year, my mother-in-law gave me ten. I went into the stock market, bought some bank stocks, and that way it counts as not suffering a big loss. The problem is I bought dozens of shares (good thing it was only dozens) of Hongtu and Longda.

In the past month, the market has dropped, and my confidence is gone. I don’t dare to brag anymore. Keep my own money, I can hold it. But my mother-in-law’s money—I’d better not touch it. Bank deposits are the safest.

By the way, I’d like to ask: do you all have any widely recognized, safe wealth-management channels with an annualized return above 2%??