Quick gut check. If you'd stuffed ~$120k in cash under your mattress in 2000, could you buy the same house today? Let's do the math. 1/ In 2000, the median US home was worth ~$119,600. (Source: US Census Bureau) Today it's around ~$403,200. (Source: NAR/Zillow, 2026) That's about ~3.4x in 26 years. 2/ Wages grew too, just slower. SSA's National Average Wage Index: 2000: ~$32,155 2024: ~$69,847 That's roughly ~2.2x. (Source: Social Security Administration) 3/ So wages doubled, but the house more than tripled. That gap is the squeeze people feel but can't always explain. 4/ Now the part that stings more. Cash sitting still doesn't even get you the ~2.2x. $120k under the mattress in 2000 is still $120k today. Zero growth. A bank savings account barely does better, since interest rates rarely outrun real inflation for long. 5/ Compare that to the stock market. The S&P 500 started 2000 around ~1,470. Today it's around ~7,575. (Source: FRED, S&P Dow Jones Indices) That's over ~5x on price alone, before counting reinvested dividends, which pushes total return even higher. 6/ For another data point on hard assets vs cash: Bitcoin didn't exist in 2000, it launched in 2009, so it's not a fair apples to apples with the house or SPX numbers. But today it trades around ~$63,000, after making ~$126,000 ATH. 7/ Point isn't which asset to pick. Point is the pattern. Cash that just sits tends to lose ground against real, productive, or scarce assets over time. Houses. Stocks and Bitcoin. 8/ This is the whole case people make for investing early instead of waiting. Not a hot tip, just math. Time in the market is what turns "losing slowly" into "keeping pace."(Lark Davis)