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Picture a stack of coins on a rock at the shoreline, the tide coming in a little further with each wave, no hand or figure present to intervene. Nobody is acting on the stack. Nothing dramatic removes a coin all at once. Each wave simply leaves the pile a fraction shorter than it found it, and by the time the tide is fully in, the difference is unmistakable even though no single moment looked like loss.
Over the last decade, cumulative inflation has meaningfully outpaced what the average saver earned holding cash in a standard deposit account 🚩 — the exact gap depends on the specific years and specific account, but the direction is consistent and the shortfall is real, not a hypothetical worst case. This isn't a fear-based argument. It's arithmetic that's easy to verify and easy to ignore precisely because it never presents itself as an event.
The reason this matters isn't to induce panic about holding any cash at all — liquidity has real value, and nobody should move every dollar they own into a yield-seeking product. The point is narrower and more useful: the decision to hold cash idle should be an active one, made with the actual cost in mind, not a passive default made by never having considered the alternative.
