We use transaction-level bank data covering 2016-2024 to study household portfolio choice within a narrowly defined asset class: liquid, short-term, safe assets. These assets are virtually identical in risk, maturity, and liquidity, and balances can be shifted between them instantaneously at no cost, yet their yields differ markedly. We document that portfolio returns rise strongly with individuals' wealth: the top decile earns on average about two percentage points more than the bottom decile by favoring higher-yield assets. Nonetheless, wealthy households still leave more interest income, worth roughly 2.5 percent of their annual consumption, on the table while the median household leaves about 0.3 percent. We show that portfolio allocations react sharply to wealth changes but only modestly to interest-rate spreads—except among the richest depositors, whose responsiveness is ten times the average. Linking survey evidence to the bank data, we show that greater financial literacy and accurate inflation knowledge are associated with stronger reallocation toward high-yield accounts. We also document that during the Covid cycle, movements in aggregate shares of low-return deposits were driven mainly by wealthy savers responding to widening spreads, highlighting the importance of monetary policy decisions for banks’ funding costs and credit supply.

We study the impact of financial advice on retirement savings. We document that advisors help cli-ents to prepare for retirement by inducing them to take advantage of tax incentives for retirement savings. We find no indication that adviser-induced contributions to retirement savings lead to nega-tive side-effects, such as reductions in other savings or liquidity constraints. Increased retirement savings are also not associated with higher profits the bank generates with clients. Hence, our find-ings point towards a bright side of financial advice. However, advisors do not in particular target clients that are at a higher risk of undersaving for retirement.

Using a panel of over 700,000 retail investors from Sweden, we examine how custodial accounts opened for children perform and how they shape investment behavior once the beneficiary becomes an adult. We find that portfolios for children, often resembling passive investment strategies, yield at least twice the annual returns with lower volatility than those of adults. Risk-taking behavior on these accounts does not differ by children’s gender in early childhood, but a significant change occurs once boys reach their teenage years, as their accounts begin to resemble the investment patterns typically associated with adult men. Consequently, during this phase, boys’ accounts underperform those of girls. Furthermore, we document that investors whose accounts were initiated in childhood consistently outperform and show less overconfident behavior as young adults compared to peers who opened accounts themselves. The gap in risk-taking behavior between men and women among these investors is also narrower. These results suggest that parents opening custodial accounts have a lasting impact on their children’s long-term financial attitudes and portfolio performance.