What if you bought Cash under the mattress in 1990?
Bonds & cash · Cash. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play1.0× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Cash under the mattress at the start of 1990 would be worth about $1,000 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Keeping cash under the mattress has one undeniable virtue: you will never see a red number. The $100 you hid in 1990 is still $100, give or take a nervous check in the night. Old notes remain legal tender in the US, so even the redesigned bills of 1996 and 2013 do not threaten it. There are no fees, no bank failures and no stock market crashes to worry about.
The catch is inflation, which works silently. US consumer prices rose roughly two and a half times over this period, meaning the same $100 bought only around 40 percent of what it did in 1990. The 2021-22 inflation surge alone took a noticeable bite. Add the risk of fire, theft and forgetful heirs, and the mattress turns out to be one of the riskiest places for long-term savings, merely in a form that does not show up on a statement. Every other line in this game at least had a chance of keeping up.
The lesson: The most dangerous losses are invisible ones, and inflation steadily erodes idle cash even when the number on the note never changes.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $100 | $1,000 | $19,429 | 1.0× |
| 1995 | $100 | $1,000 | $14,783 | 1.0× |
| 2000 | $100 | $1,000 | $4,626 | 1.0× |
| 2003 | $100 | $1,000 | $7,727 | 1.0× |
| 2005 | $100 | $1,000 | $5,763 | 1.0× |
| 2007 | $100 | $1,000 | $4,789 | 1.0× |
| 2008 | $100 | $1,000 | $4,626 | 1.0× |
| 2010 | $100 | $1,000 | $6,071 | 1.0× |
| 2012 | $100 | $1,000 | $5,312 | 1.0× |
| 2015 | $100 | $1,000 | $3,301 | 1.0× |
| 2018 | $100 | $1,000 | $2,519 | 1.0× |
| 2020 | $100 | $1,000 | $2,092 | 1.0× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $1,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $19,429.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Cash under the mattress is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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