Ten years ago, a coffee cost £2.50. Today it's £3.50.
So ten years ago, £100 bought you forty coffees. Today it buys you twenty-eight.
That's inflation. Your money didn't go anywhere. It just quietly buys less.
Now say you'd put that £100 aside instead.
Do the sensible thing, keep it safe in a savings account, and today it's worth about £115. More money. But coffee costs more too. So it buys you thirty-three cups. Fewer than the forty you started with.
Safe went backwards.
Buy shares in the world's companies instead, and that £100 is worth around £280. Eighty coffees. Double what you began with, after inflation.
Probably more coffee than you need – now you have options, who can you give a spare coffee to?
A share isn't complicated – it's a small stake in millions of people getting up every morning to make their own lives and their families' lives a bit better.
Some do brilliantly. Some don't. Most are somewhere between. Together, over ten years, they tend to do just fine.
And yet shares are the ones everyone calls risky. The regulator, the commentator, the fella in the gym with a view on everything.
But the safe account left you poorer. The world's companies left you twice as rich.
This was never about coffee. It's about the years you can stop working sooner. The help you can give your kids. The room to say yes to the people you love.
More wealth is more of that. Less wealth is less of it, taken slowly, while everyone tells you you're being sensible.
So don't ever let anyone convince you that shares are the dangerous choice.