What is the punishment for bank robbery in this country? Ten years, I think. As a tax paying, money-depositing citizen, if you are found guilty of robbing a bank, the minimum amount of time you will serve in federal jail is ten years.

But what if your bank is robbing you? Is there a comparable sentence for that? How about a pat on the back and an increase in the bank’s profits?

Stick ‘Em Up!

Now, when I say your bank is robbing you, I’m not talking about the recent fraud case that has the head of Wells Fargo staring down Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and giving an answer for opening thousands of fraudulent credit accounts in the names of Wells Fargo customers.

But most of the people I know keep their money in the bank. Getting a bank account is a rite of passage in the U.S.. When children mature into teens, their parents take them gleefully to the bank where the kids set up their own bank accounts and start the great, but unprofitable habit, of stashing money in a low-yield savings account. We are training our children wrong!

Here is a hard truth for you: The longer you keep your money in a bank account, the less your money is actually worth. That’s because the interest rate paid on money socked away in the average bank account is earning less than 1% in interest, and usually that rate is lower than the rate of inflation. That means for each of your dollars that you allow to spend a year vacationing in a low-yield savings account, you lose a fraction of its overall spending power.

Let’s look at a quick scenario to make this point clear: If you are a retired person and you have $250,000 in your bank that you depend on for monthly income, and the interest paid by the bank is 0.5% per annum, your total income for the year is  $1,250 or $104 per month. That amount may cover a cell phone bill or, let’s say, your daily dose of tall Java Chip FrappuccinoⓇ from Starbucks. But if you have more financial obligations than just your cell phone or your coffee habit, that interest rate isn’t going to cut it. After calculating the cost of inflation and paying taxes, you’re going to have to downgrade your drink from a frappuccino to an iced coffee – a fancy iced coffee, but an iced coffee nevertheless.

We can liken this situation to running an employment agency that finds and employs field laborers. You get your hard-earned dollars (or recruit laborers, for the purposes of this analogy) and instead of hiring them to work for you, you send them out to work for the bank. The bank is more than happy to pay you a pittance on what it earns with your money.

Banks start by loaning out your money. Your local business may get a cut in the form of a business loan, your real estate investor friend may need some of your money to buy and flip a property. Heck, your old uncle can even get in on the action just by swiping his credit card at the local hardware store. Yes, banks do keep some reserves, but by law, they can leverage your money up to ten times.

Now, let’s say instead of sending your “workers” out to sweat for the bank, you harness their power and have them work for you. Instead of hiring out those field workers, you are managing all 250,000 workers as they labor in the field, planting corn for you. In order to run this operation, you have to rent the field and the farm equipment needed to plant the corn. You have complete control over the effort and yield of each worker and after paying all your expenses, you find that your yield for deploying the 250,000 workers yourself is 10 times more than what you would have made letting them work for someone else. That’s what it’s like when you choose to invest your money rather than let it sit in a bank account – greater yields, more money.