Forget Savings Accounts: The Stock Market Is Still the Best Wealth Builder, and This Is My Top Pick for 2026.
The good news is, investing in the stock market can be surprisingly easy if you're disciplined enough to remain patient.
Overview
If you're a working-age adult who's old enough to be thinking about how you're going to fund your retirement, you've likely come to a realization I reached a while back: Building a meaningfully sized nest egg isn't easy if you're limiting yourself to banks' basic savings accounts, which pay you next to nothing for your idle cash.
You can fare somewhat better if you shop around among online banks and brokerage houses, where the best money market yields on offer are currently in the ballpark of 4%. Even so, these rates don't always outpace inflation. To actually get ahead, you'll need your nest egg to consistently and significantly outgrow inflation on its own. And the only way for most people to do that is by investing in the stock market, even though that's guaranteed to be an up-and-down affair.
Details
To be clear, of course, this is not to suggest that you should put all your money in the stock market. For funds you might need in the near term -- an emergency fund, for example, or next semester's college tuition bill for your child -- the risks that a short-term market decline could sap your portfolio's value just when you need to tap it may outweigh the potential for gains. Savings and money market accounts have their place in a well-rounded financial plan, too.
Source
Originally published at www.fool.com.