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Is the average American investor getting scammed? Real estate mogul Grant Cardone believes they are.
Speaking on a podcast last year, Cardone said, “Financial literacy is not the issue in this country. Financial indoctrination is the issue. We’ve been indoctrinated to benefit banks.”
“You get money, you work your a– off and then you give it to an institution and forget that it’s there,” he said during an earlier interview with podcast host Lewis Howes. “Wells Fargo is paying you nothing, Bank of America is paying you nothing. You send it to Chase, they’re not paying you anything.”
But is Grant Cardone right? Is there evidence to suggest that many Americans are getting a bad deal on their bank balances?
The interest rate on deposits held at major banks is nearly 0%. Wells Fargo, Chase and Bank of America offer entry-level rates of 0.01% on these deposits.
Given that the Federal Reserve’s benchmark interest rates are between 3.75% and 4.00%, bank deposit rates certainly appear like a bad deal.
The national average savings rate is just 4.6% as of August 2025, while the rate of inflation sits at 3.0%. No matter how you look at it, it seems the value of your money is shrinking over time.
A survey of 8.3 million Chase customers by JP Morgan found that the median cash balance in a checking account was around $6,600 depending on income bracket, as of February 2024. That’s a lot of money in aggregate that isn’t earning much interest.
To be fair, these checking accounts are not designed for capital appreciation. Account holders generally use this cash for daily transactions and short-term needs, such as rent and utilities.
High-yield savings accounts currently offer interest rates as high as 4.21% in some instances, according to data from Bankrate.
However, Cardone argued that people are either unaware of better rates or unwilling to go seek them out. “People are unconscious, they don’t know where their money is,” he told Howes.
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Cardone’s financial philosophy echoes the words of management consultant Peter Drucker, who once said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
