Cash feels safe. It's quietly losing ground.
Money sitting in a savings account or a GIC looks completely safe — the balance never drops, and the number on the statement only ever goes up. But that number isn't the same thing as what the money can actually buy. Prices rise a little almost every year, so the same $10,000 buys a little less each time around. Over ten years, at a typical long-run inflation rate, that $10,000 is only worth about $7,400 in today's terms. By year thirty, it's closer to $4,000.
This isn't a fee, and nobody did anything wrong. It's just what happens to money that isn't growing at least as fast as prices are rising. The dashed line on the chart shows the same $10,000 if it had grown instead of sitting still — the gap between the two lines isn't a rounding error, it's three decades of quiet erosion.
​
Cash still has a job to do. It's the right tool for short-term needs and for a cushion you might need on short notice. The point isn't that cash is bad — it's that holding a large amount of it for a long stretch of time comes with a real cost that never shows up as a line item on any statement.