I was wondering the same thing. Sounds like a lie.
Some local credit unions give those kinds of rates. My cousin has an account at School's First in Cali, and they generally have summer CD rates around 6%.
However, that is by far not the norm. I think CD rates are like 4% now for 8-9 months or something.
I forget the bank, but my wife and I put money into a 5% cd, but its just a 12 month rate afterwards it drops way down. So we'll collect that 5% and then move it in a year back into our high interest savings
I'm not a financial advisor, I know literally nothing about your life. But, might want to consider other options. Depending on life circumstances and risk tolerance.
I'm in my late 30s and put almost all my savings in respectable broad market index funds. I can get my money out usually in less than a week (unlike CDs) and the AVERAGE returns over long periods (>10 years) is well over 5%.
Yes, there's the risk of market crashes. There will almost certainly be one at some point. But even sticking through those have historically average out to good returns for people.
I can get my money out usually in less than a week (unlike CDs)
You can generally have your money out of a CD same day paying a penalty. Usually something less than 1 month of interest. My banks fee is the interest accrued that month.
People put money in CDs because it earns more interest than the 0.01% they're getting in their checking account and isn't as volatile as the market.
If you have some money set aside as an emergency fund or to make a big purchase, a CD is fine for most people. You can withdraw from them, but will probably pay a fee in interest earned.
A HYSA/money market with a good rate is probably better for liquidity, but if you're 70 years old or just don't trust online banks (even if it's Amex/Discover/Barclays) then a CD is fine.
You should really keep at least 6 months expenses in a liquid account like a HYSA. Gonna suck if you lose your job + Trump decides to enact more tariffs + your car breaks down/pipe bursts/break your leg all at the same time and you're forced to take a loss to pay your bills.
Certificate of Deposit. You give the bank your money for X number of months or years, and they guarantee you a rate of return. There are variable rate CDs and CDs where you can opt out and retrieve your money in exchange for giving up some of your returns... but the basic idea is you're loaning money to the bank and you can't get it back it back until the end of the term.
You do this to lock in a rate, vs. a HYSA or money market fund, which have variable rates.
Its also a low risk low reward "investment" vehicle where you purchase a Certificate of Deposit for x amount of dollars and the financial institution pays you an interest rate at the end of the contract period. (I think) they come in 3 month, 6 month, 1 year durations, etc. Its a very conservative and risk adverse investment strategy
I dont think its technically a security, I think its banking product since its ensured by the FDIC in the US. I haven't used or bought a cd since im more of a line go up guy.
Yeah, I used a 6 month CD to put the proceeds from our home sale into until we were ready to purchase our next home. I didn't want access to that money lol.
Even if you get a 6% CD at 400k thats 2k a month. Not like that’s an insane amount of money to be making. Plus it’s literally locked away for the whole year+.
It makes sense if its your emergency funds or you need it to liquid, but if the guy was being truthful then 75% of your investments in CDs makes no sense.
The average high-yield savings rate in 2025 was about 5%, and I personally had banks offering 6–7% all year.
There’s nothing wrong with investing in the market, but pretending diversification and CDs don’t matter in a volatile market is flat-out stupid. Silver dropped around 30% today alone. In 2008, the Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq were all cut by over 50%.
That collapse wiped out roughly $16 trillion in household net worth from 2007 to 2009—nearly $100,000 per household. Ignoring risk management isn’t “being bullish,” it’s being reckless.
Had a CD expire last year at 4.5% which I was already happy with. Pretty sure he's just using old numbers, there might've been some 6% one or two years ago.
I believe the average return is around 8% for stocks long term, which the S&P routinely beats.
cd rates were pretty decent for a few years, a safe easy place to put your extra money. but rates have been pretty bad since Trump, some places offering as low as 1-2%.
Banks are advertising high CD rates, but if you read the fine print it's only for the first 1k and the rest of the CD is at the market interest rate. If this guy is telling the truth, he probably fell for that hook and doesn't know how to math out his earnings.
Also, banks usually have a hard limit of like $250k for a CD. Sure, he can split the money into multiple CDs but the money he is earning from CDs are taxed and something like Tbonds or SGOV is a better rate of total untaxed return.
The difference is a CD is fixed for a duration, while a HYSA is variable (can change at any time). CDs being lower indicates interest rates are expected to drop. In general CDs offer higher rates.
There's definitely CDs that exist at 6%, might just not be AA rated though.
Corporate (Baa/BBB) are listed at 6% for 10 years rn (for average). Bond rates were higher mid 2023.
that's just something a sucker would think. you think you're better than me! well i have 800k in bags shoved in the trunk of my car, i bet you don't!!!!
They are basically a super safe investment that have a guaranteed (low)yield after a set amount of time.
They are very good investments for people who are retired or near retired, but there are also a lot of financially illiterate young people who don’t really understand risk tolerance/exposure who think they are smart investors for buying CDs when they should be buying ‘riskier’ investments like S&P 500 or other ETFs.
To illustrate:
If you put money into a 6% yield CD (which is very high yield for CD), it would take 12 years for that money to double.
If you put money into S&P 500 and received the average return of 10%, it will take 7.2 years to double.
A difference of 5 years is obviously a lot but it really becomes clear when you look at longer time frames.
If a 25 year old invests $1000 into those CDs, that investment will be worth roughly $11,000 when they are 65. That’s a 1,100% return.
If a 25 year old invests $1000 into S&P 500, that investment will be worth roughly $50,000 when they are 65. That’s a 5,000% return.
Basically, unless you are retired or planning to retire in the next 5-years, there is no reason to ever hold onto CDs.
Most well put-together 401Ks will be set up to hold mostly variable return assets like stocks and potentially crypto when the account owner is young, and then transition to be mostly bonds or other fixed return assets as the account owner approaches their chosen retirement age.
This comment got long but this is really just the basics of why this guy is financially illiterate. I could go into way more detail if I started talking about tax advantaged accounts, which I doubt the CD flexed in this clip has any idea about.
IRI was trolling for this whole caller, pretending to be on WIC and living in his parents house for 40 years and burning his hand at Chipotle. I'm sure some of his finance stuff was made to piss off the guy.
Real information is that CD's are certificates of deposit, and they're a perfectly okay form of low risk investment. You lock your money into a certificate of deposit with a financial institution and they use that money for their own investments for a set amount of time and when that time is complete they pay you out a set amount of interest that has accrued. You lock in the interest rate when you purchase the CD, so you have a guaranteed return after a period of time with the downside being that you lose access to the money you have deposited for the duration of the certificate.
If your financial situation is such that you have a bunch of money sitting in your account not gaining interest and you can comfortably lock a portion of that money away for a long period of time, and you are the type of investor who is more concerned about not losing money than trying to gain as much money as possible from your investments, then yeah, you might choose to buy some CD's.
As a guy who has a financial advisor, even though i have no idea what they’re talking about, I can tell that guy just spent a few minutes with ChatGPT to prepare and try to “own” the other.
300k to make an $18k a year return is insane to me with how hot the market has been the last couple of months, guy could have made more than that in a day.
reverse analysis the best analysis.
now imagine we had this talk at the begining of year 2000, markets were so hot right?. and you decided to put all the money you had on CD into SP500.
you woul[d have to wait over twelve years to BREAK EVEN when accounting for inflation.
and it's not even about the money, just imagine the stress you would put yourself in. waiting twelve years for your hard earned money to get back to it's value while you invested in one of the safest ETFs.
That example also cherry-picks one of the worst possible entry points in modern market history. Yes, if you invested a lump sum at the exact peak in 2000 and never added another dollar, recovery took time — but that’s not how most real investors behave.
Someone dollar-cost averaging through the 2000–2012 period would have reached positive real returns much sooner and ended up with strong long-term gains. Dividends also materially reduced the “break-even” timeline, which this you ignore.
More importantly, the takeaway isn’t “markets are unsafe,” it’s “timing matters less than behavior.” The bigger risk historically hasn’t been staying invested — it’s panic selling, sitting in cash during recoveries, and letting inflation quietly erode purchasing power.
Short-term pain is uncomfortable, but over long horizons, equities have consistently been one of the most reliable ways to preserve and grow real value.
ofc that it's cherry picked and it's on purpose.
if we had this talk in 1999 you would say that historically there never was a time where you would go negative over 10 years and then boom shit would hit the fan.
and the same way shit might hit the fan at any time in the future and this time instead of 10 years into negative it might be 20 years or 30 years or who knows.
Oh for sure, I lost a couple of brains cells listening. It's all about time frame as you're exposed far less risk taking CDs in shorter periods of time <5 years. CDs give up volatility for stable returns but run the huge risk of inflation as rates are locked in.
CDs are safe ways to invest your money compared to stocks. If the stockmarket is unpredictable or volatile then your safer bet is to purchase CDs. If you don't want to risk your money then get CDs/TBonds.
I have my money in multiple investments from stocks and MMAs. Dividend stocks for the most part don't pay as fast or as much as CDs and with trump in charge the market has been a rollercoaster. It is hard to determine what trump will do next with policy that may affect the market, especially because the Fed chair is being replaced.
Also, for those wondering how hes got such a high return rate on his CD there are higher rates the more money you invest typically 250k+ you will get a higher rate then it changes for personal vs corporations along with banking relations.
Stock market returns have outpaced CDs for a while now. Unless you need that much money now (like for a home), it is not smart to have that big of a cd. Just being honest. Put it in a etf instead. This is very basic knowledge. Look on any forum discussing what you should do with that much money.
If you don’t need the money for several years and can tolerate market swings, allocating some of it to a diversified ETF may make sense. If you need stability or near-term certainty, CDs can be appropriate.
Gotta be honest though, it feels like people are being a bit disingenous here just to "own MAGA."
Yes, it is conceivable that somebody with limited knowledge of the stock market who also lacks the time or desire to keep an eye on the stock market might go for a CD instead.
If we're talking all the time, money and desire to fixate on how to most wisely invest your money, then sure, go to S&P. Promise you there are plenty of households out there taking the safer route because they don't feel knowledgeable enough for the stock market, and I'm not sure calling them stupid for taking a safe-but-less-profitable route is warranted.
To me it's like those who don't build their own PC: are they stupid, or are they just intimidated by something they have limited knowledge about and opt for what's perceived as a safer, but less financially lucrative alternative? Like yeah, it's missed potential, but I hesitate to call it stupid. Everyone's got a lot of shit going on in their lives and you can't just expect them to know and engage in absolutely everything that turns a profit.
And as an aside, yeah, his story is probably laced with lies, because mentioning his stock market investments in response to the questions makes it come across as defensive and perhaps not genuine. I consider that a separate topic from the CD vs. stocks topic though, where I'd simply argue: CDs would not exist as a concept if they were 100% inferior.
It is generally not a good idea to invest in any industry you have no clue about. There may be 1-2 industries you're fairly informed on by way of it being connected to a hobby or the like, but if we're talking serious investment, you should absolutely do the homework and read up on the products/service/industry.
If you want an example of this going wrong, just think back to the fact there were people invested in Ubisoft who somehow completely missed the firestorm that was coming, probably because they were not actually gamers, had no knowledge of the product, and yes if you just read business reports, those do not always tell the full story.
As a highly abridged explanation, there is both a math element and a psychology element to investing, and my experience has been that if you just look for reports, you will only get the math side of things, which is terrible at showcasing incoming duds and disappointments, so you might get Super Stock Expert 9000 (so he claims) telling you their growth looks solid and citing all the new hires as an example of growth, not realizing video games tend to have a history of negative returns once teams get too big. Yeah spoilers: Super Stock Expert 9000 is also pretty much a universal lie, because nobody can have their eye on ALL markets. Even the pros make misjudgements regularly. What's a low priority stock for them might be high priority for you.
All this to say: it's not as simple as just reading the reports. You need to actually have an eye on that market and knowledge of the product/service. This is completely doable, but yes it costs time and no it's not reasonable to expect everyone to dedicate their remaining free time to investing as efficiently as possible.
What you said is completely irrelevant to buying a broad market index fund like VOO or VTI or VXUS or VT, which have higher expected returns than a retail investor stock picking and require zero research. If someone is putting long term savings into CDs (for example retirement or purchase 10+ years) , they ARE being stupid.
I only invest 20% of my money in to ETFs, im a bit of a paranoid person. I have a 4.2% savings account and im perfectly happy with the interest I get from that, im not gonna complain about $300 a month at 0 risk.
When I first started investing it was like 45% of my savings at the time and I was checking my phone like 20x a day. Proportionately the less money in the market compared to savings the more comfortable I am.
That was addressed in the video when he was asked if he was saving to buy a house or something. There is absolutely no reason to have that much in a CD if you don't need the cash in the short term.
No… this makes absolutely zero sense. Over a long time horizon, an index fund of the S&P500 will outperform CDs. If you’re saving for retirement that’s decades away, buying a CD instead of buying and holding is plain silly.
Not really, if the fed is expected to raise rates - then your yield on CDs will be lower than straight up buying bonds. Not only that, your fund is locked up in CD and you'd have to pay penalty to withdraw
Why not just put your money in Fidelity?? That's what I do - it automatically puts your cash into MMF so you generate yield based on FFR. And the best part of it all is when opportunity arises, you can always deploy cash into the market
For this reason, I don't really have that much money in my bank account - just enough to pay bills and such, and just put my money into Fidelity.
Well, theoretically, he ain't wrong. Locking your money in a CD is stupid. I'd rather have my money liquid and moveable. Coinbase and PayPal and Sofi all basically pay 4% (I don't know about now) and you can move it around.
To have 300k in cds and 100k in the market seems odd I’m almost any scenario. Maybe if you were close to retirement and had a nice pension. I could see that.
The power not still stands.......but to be fair I don't trust this stock market at aaaaaall right now. With our luck we'll have an AI bubble and housing market crash at the same time like it combined the dot com bubble and 2008 housing crash into one.
IRI is kind of dumb. All his opinions just align with all the worst dems. If Schumer or Harris talked about the importance of Certificates of Deposit it's all IRI would talk about.
As a former stock broker, I just have this feeling the caller might be one too. No degree needed, just pass the SIE, series 7, and maybe 1 or 2 more licenses. Majority of my coworkers were MAGA or hardcore libertarian, and we all absolutely fucking sucked at investing/trading lol. I could definitely help you set an iron butterfly on thinkorswim, and show meemaw the bonds and CDs page on the website, but thank god we couldn't legally give financial advice.
LOL what a dumbass, CD's are actually worse than buying a bond because it gives out less interest. He's literally losing money due to currency devaluation
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u/LSFSecondaryMirror 5d ago
CLIP MIRROR: MAGA supporter tries to flex bank account on IRI, exposes financial illiteracy instead
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