What if you bought Dutch savings account in 1990?
Bonds & cash · Cash. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play2.2× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Dutch savings account at the start of 1990 would be worth about $2,250 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
A Dutch savings account is about as low-drama as finance gets. In 1990 it paid a decent rate in guilders, and through the 1990s the deposit grew modestly. In 2002 the guilder became the euro, which changed the notes but not the boredom. The 2008 crisis briefly made savings exciting in the wrong way: Icesave, an Icelandic online bank popular with Dutch savers, collapsed, and in 2009 DSB Bank failed. The deposit guarantee scheme covered most depositors, which is what it is for.
Then the European Central Bank pushed rates to zero and below. From the mid-2010s savings paid almost nothing, and around 2020 some Dutch banks began charging negative interest on large balances. At the same time, the box 3 wealth tax assumed savers earned returns they were not getting, until the Supreme Court objected in 2021. When inflation spiked in 2022, briefly reaching double digits, the real value of savings fell sharply.
The lesson: Nominal safety is not real safety: when interest rates trail inflation for years, a savings account quietly loses purchasing power.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $100 | $2,250 | $19,429 | 2.2× |
| 1995 | $125 | $1,800 | $14,783 | 1.8× |
| 2000 | $150 | $1,500 | $4,626 | 1.5× |
| 2003 | $165 | $1,364 | $7,727 | 1.4× |
| 2005 | $175 | $1,286 | $5,763 | 1.3× |
| 2007 | $185 | $1,216 | $4,789 | 1.2× |
| 2008 | $195 | $1,154 | $4,626 | 1.2× |
| 2010 | $205 | $1,098 | $6,071 | 1.1× |
| 2012 | $210 | $1,071 | $5,312 | 1.1× |
| 2015 | $214 | $1,051 | $3,301 | 1.1× |
| 2018 | $215 | $1,047 | $2,519 | 1.0× |
| 2020 | $215 | $1,047 | $2,092 | 1.0× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $2,250. 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. Dutch savings account is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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