Friday, 4 August 2017

The Cost of Holding Physical Cash



The above photo shows a Malaysian 20 sen coin minted in 1967.  This 20 sen coin is still legit today and you can use it to buy something, perhaps, a piece of candy?

You may notice that you can’t really do much with this 20 sen nowadays because inflation has eroded the purchasing power.

Cash is king!  You always hear that.  But keeping cash without “transactions” is bad.  Cash shine because the “transactions” polish it!   Assuming you had invested this 20 sen in 1967 with a compounded annual return of 8%, it would worth RM 9.38 today, a whopping 46.9x of capital appreciation!  If you were not comfortable with the risk in investing, and opted for depositing this 20 sen in bank for 3% annual interested rate, it would worth 88 sen today.


But if you chose to keep this 20 sen in your drawer from 1967 to 2017, your penalty would be at least 3x loss!  In conclusion, keeping physical cash is a money losing practice!

However, if you keep the coin long enough, may be coin collector would like to offer you a good price for it!


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