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 of money is in the dozens of units, I guess. I looked up more than ten local banks and selected three or four candidate options.

The goal is the interest rate on a three-year bank fixed-term 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 may be close to 2 points.

Also, there are questions about whether deposits can be partially withdrawn early, and whether there are options like gifts, etc.

After fiddling with it for two days, it turns out it only increases the expected return by about 30 per ten-thousand (30/10,000), compared with her original plan. Over a year, that’s only a few thousand yuan in extra interest.

I only started doing fixed-term deposits about ten-plus years ago. After that, I kept everything fully invested in the stock market. Any liquidity in the stock market I never really used—so I just left it sitting as if it were in a savings account.

Now it feels like the kind of situation in the movie 《Reverse Life》 where a mid-level employee at a big company loses their job and ends up delivering food.

If this were two or three months earlier, I definitely would’ve told you: this small amount of money is better off for me to invest in the stock market for you. You could earn five or six percentage points in a year (and that’s already being pretty conservative). No problem.

During the New Year, my mother-in-law gave me ten, I put it into the stock market, and bought some bank stocks—so it counts as not suffering a major loss. The issue is that I bought dozens of shares (luckily it was only dozens), Hongtu and Longda.

Over the past month, the market has dropped, and my confidence is gone. I don’t dare to boast anymore. It’s best to keep my own money as it is. My mother-in-law’s money—I’ll pass. Bank deposits are the safest.

By the way, I’d like to ask: does anyone have any well-recognized, relatively safe wealth-management channels with an annualized return of 2 percentage points or higher?