How this works
InvestMoney takes an amount, a risk level and a length of time, and works out what real financial products would have paid on those terms — after fees and after tax. It is a calculator, not an adviser.
What this is not
Not investment advice. InvestMoney is an information and calculation tool. It is not a licensed investment adviser, broker or bank, it does not know your circumstances, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any product. Ranking reflects fit against the criteria you entered and nothing else.
Deposit and CD rates are published figures recorded on the date shown next to each one, and may have changed since. Fund and ETF figures are derived from historical prices and prospectus disclosures; the ranges shown are what that fund has done before, not what it will do. You can lose money on any product not covered by deposit insurance, and inflation can erode the real value of products that are.
Verify every rate with the institution before committing money.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure traces to one of these. Nothing is estimated from a comparable product.
- Institution rate pages (reviewed by hand)
No free feed publishes per-bank deposit rates, so headline products are recorded by hand from each institution’s own rate page. Every row carries the date it was read and a link back to the page.
Identity and financials for every FDIC-insured institution: certificate number, total assets, year established.
National average deposit rates published by the FDIC, the Treasury yield curve, the federal funds rate and CPI.
Actual auction yields for bills, notes, bonds and TIPS, plus Series I savings bond rates.
Average interest rates on outstanding Treasury securities.
Expense ratios and annual returns as filed in fund prospectuses, tagged in XBRL. The authoritative source for what a fund charges.
- Historical price series
Dividend-adjusted monthly closes, used to derive volatility, worst falls and the range of past outcomes over each horizon.
Private fund disclosures filed by investment advisers: assets, minimums and fee structures. Returns are not disclosed and are never shown here.
- Calculated by InvestMoney
Figures computed from the sources above using the assumptions listed on this page.
Bank rates are recorded by hand
The one part of this that a machine cannot keep current.
There is no free, official feed of per-bank deposit rates in the United States. The FDIC publishes national averages; the commercial sites that publish per-bank rates block automated access and licence the data. So each bank product here has to be read off that bank’s own rate page by a person and dated.
A rate that has not been verified is never shown. It is not estimated, not carried over from a similar bank, and not filled in from an average — it simply does not appear as a product until someone has checked it. Government securities and fund data have no such problem and update themselves.
Low risk — what the ranking weighs
- Headline yield20%
- Gain after tax16%
- Share of your money insured14%
- Margin over national average12%
- Fit to your horizon10%
- Days to access7%
- Cost to get out early6%
- Minimum5%
- Age of the rate5%
- Risk level5%
Higher risk — what the ranking weighs
- Median historical return20%
- Poor-case return16%
- Worst fall12%
- Fees over your horizon12%
- Volatility10%
- Annual fee8%
- 10-year annual return7%
- Gain after tax7%
- Track record5%
- Minimum2%
- Age of the rate1%
How the projections are made
Products with a committed rate — CDs, Treasury bills and notes — compound at that rate and produce a single figure. If the term is shorter than your horizon, the remainder is assumed to reinvest at a discount to today’s comparable rate, because nobody knows what rates will be. If the term is longer, the early-withdrawal penalty is deducted.
Funds and ETFs produce a range, never a single number. The range is built from every overlapping period of your chosen length in that fund’s own history — so 2008 appears as something that actually happened rather than as a statistical assumption. When a fund has too little history to fill even a couple of those periods, no projection is shown at all.
Tax follows the timing, not just the rate. Interest is taxed every year as it is earned, so it compounds more slowly; a fund’s gain is untaxed until you sell. Treasury interest is exempt from state income tax. State rates use the top marginal bracket, which overstates what most people pay — figures here run conservative on purpose.
Fees are shown as what they cost you in dollars over the period. Fund returns from price history are already net of the annual fee, so it is never subtracted twice — the figure compares the fund against the same performance at no cost.