There is a very simple reason why money sitting in a current account panics nobody: the balance never goes down. You open the app, you see the same number as last month, and the brain files it as "nothing moved".
The number did not move. What it buys did.
The loss is invisible because it is not denominated in euros
A share that drops 8% tells you so: the line turns red, the amount changes, you feel it. Savings eroded by inflation produce none of those signals. They wear down the purchasing power of a perfectly stable nominal amount, and no banking interface in the world shows that column.
This explains a behaviour you see everywhere: people who refuse 10% of volatility on an investment while quietly letting the equivalent melt in a current account over fifteen years. Both losses are real. Only one is visible.
What it looks like over 20 years
What matters is not your savings rate or the inflation rate taken separately, but the gap between them: the real rate. An account paying 3% with inflation at 3% makes you not one cent richer. An account paying 1% with inflation at 1% neither.
Here is what a €30,000 cushion becomes at various gaps, never touched.
Amounts in today's euros, at a constant real rate. "Real rate" = what the account pays minus inflation. A real rate of -1.5% corresponds, for instance, to an account paying 1.5% with inflation at 3%. This illustrates a mechanism, it is not a forecast: neither rates nor inflation are constant in real life.
At -1.5% a year the curve does not collapse: it slides. That is precisely the problem. Nobody wakes up one morning realising they have lost €7,800. They lost it in thirty-euro slices, monthly, over twenty years, with no statement ever mentioning it.
Where the useful cushion ends
None of this argues against holding available money. Emergency savings you can reach immediately are what stop you selling an investment at the worst possible moment or paying 15% on an overdraft. That cushion has real value, well above the return it gives up.
So the question is not "should I hold cash" but "how much". Three markers for asking it properly:
Committed spending, not income. The real need is measured in months of unavoidable costs: rent, loans, groceries, energy, insurance. Not in months of salary, which include everything you could cut temporarily without drama.
How stable your income is. A permanent contract in a hiring sector and freelance work with concentrated clients do not call for the same cushion. The second case justifies distinctly more than the first.
Whatever lands in the next 24 months. A deposit, building work, replacing a car. That money has a date, and a near date makes it structurally different from the rest of your wealth: it has no time to absorb a fall.
Whatever exceeds those three lines is no longer emergency savings. It is money waiting on a decision that was never made.
Inertia is the real subject
In almost every case one sees, excess cash is not a considered choice. It is a balance that accumulated for want of a decision: an inheritance that arrived without a plan, a bonus never allocated, an abandoned property project whose deposit simply stayed there.
That is not prudence, however much it feels like it from the inside. Prudence is an amount decided for a stated reason. The rest is a deferred decision, and deferral has a price, which the chart above measures.
Where IgniFI fits in
IgniFI separates your buckets and shows the share of your wealth that is genuinely idle, rather than drowning it in a single total. You can enter the rate on your savings accounts so their value climbs on its own, and see how many months of committed spending your current cushion really represents.
The app will never tell you what to do with the difference: that is neither its role nor its right. It simply makes visible a trade-off that otherwise never presents itself to you as a number.