The moment someone starts telling me to optimize for keeping my money in a savings account a little longer for the interest as financial advice I stop listening

The moment someone starts telling me to optimize for keeping my money in a savings account a little longer for the interest as financial advice I stop listening. Maybe it's just my country (USA), but savings accounts are easily the worst place I have ever kept significant sums of money. They yield basically nothing for the depositor. You can easily beat savings accounts just by trading a single tech stock with minimal exposure. Dumb strategies like riding the climb in the day or two approaching an anticipated earnings call and selling before the actual call to avoid risk will already net you a few percent per call. If you did that once per quarter, you can achieve +10% in a year without having any special skills or knowledge while barely even exposing yourself to the market, leaving your money as liquid cash in the brokerage account the rest of the time will still destroy any savings account I've seen. Savings accounts are useful for isolating your funds from your checking account as a self-control measure. Once you're beyond struggling to save money at all and fully grown up, the utility is basically nil. They're obsolete in a world with services like E-Trade offering a checking account w/debit card that refunds ATM fees and a linked brokerage account serving as both isolation from your checking account with the ability to trade online using those funds.