I enjoy watching TED videos as I learn something new each time I’ve invested 20 minutes or even less to the speaker. For those who don’t know what TED is, you can find out more from the website.

One of the recent useful piece of information I learnt from TED was how to use Motion Chart gadget to visually present statistics. As I track banks fixed deposits and savings rates regularly, what I’ve done was to marry the publicly available statistics obtained from MAS’s Singapore Government Securities website with Motion Chart in Google Docs.

You can learn more in how you can do it via the Gapminder website. These are the folks who make the tools available to all.

We all know that interest rates are at one of the lowest points in Singapore’s history. DBS’s savings accounts for balances below $3,000 can be paying as little as 0.10%.

I’ve charted out 10 years+ interest rates for (1) banks average savings interest rate (yellow bubble) (2) banks 12 mths fixed deposits interest rates (blue bubble) and (3) 3 mths fixed deposits interest rates (green bubble).

Each bubble reflects the interest rate (vertical or Y-axis) and how it moves in time (horizontal or X-axis) from left to right. Watch the bubbles and see how interest rates have virtually fallen to rock bottom in the last ten years.

For best results, click on the “Colour” > ‘Unique’ and the “Size” > Interest on the right hand side, and also click on time on the y-axis. Click on the “play” button on the lower-left to start the graphic.

Let me know if you find this interesting and what are your ideas on how you can grow your monies to beat a 0.10% return on bank savings.

Be well and prosper.

_{»crosslinked«}