My bank statement showed $4.12 in interest for the entire year, on an account that usually holds somewhere between $9,000 and $14,000. I did the math wrong twice because I assumed I'd misread a decimal point. I hadn't.

That number sat with me for about a week before I actually did anything about it, which tells you something about how much friction there is in moving "safe" money even when you know better.

What got my attention

Treasury yields jumped to what several outlets this week called the highest level in close to two decades. I'm not going to pretend I know the exact basis point move, because by the time you read this it's probably shifted again. What matters is the direction: the 10-year note and short-term bills have both been paying real money, not the crumbs my checking account hands out.

I'd heard this before and ignored it. Rates have been "elevated" for a while now. What changed is that I actually opened my account and looked at what my cash was doing, instead of assuming my bank was being reasonably competitive. It wasn't. Not even close.

Where the money actually went

I split it three ways, mostly because I couldn't decide and didn't want to commit everything to one option on a Tuesday afternoon:

• About $4,800 into a 4-week T-bill through TreasuryDirect, because I wanted to see the process before trusting it with more
• $3,600 into a 6-month CD at a credit union I already use, locked at a rate noticeably better than my old savings account
• The rest stayed liquid in a high-yield savings account, because I still need access to some of it for a semi-regular expense (my dog's vet visits are not cheap, and not predictable)

The TreasuryDirect part was more annoying than I expected. The site looks like it hasn't been redesigned since the first Obama administration, and linking my bank account took two tries because I fat-fingered a routing number. Nothing dramatic, just the kind of friction that explains why most people never bother.

The thing nobody mentioned about T-bills

Here's what I didn't know until I started reading the fine print: interest from Treasury bills is exempt from state and local income tax. I live somewhere with a real state income tax, so that's not nothing. My CD interest, on the other hand, gets taxed at both levels like ordinary income. None of the "park your cash here" roundups I'd skimmed over the past year had mentioned that tradeoff. They just compared headline rates as if the tax treatment didn't exist.

It doesn't flip my whole strategy. But if you're choosing between a CD and a T-bill paying similar headline rates, and you live in a state with income tax, the T-bill is probably the better deal once you run the numbers for your own bracket.

Why I'd been avoiding this for so long

The honest answer is that moving money feels like work, and leaving it alone feels free. Opening a TreasuryDirect account, figuring out CD terms, comparing a credit union against an online bank, none of it is hard exactly, but it's the kind of task that's easy to tell yourself you'll do "this weekend" for eleven consecutive weekends.

What finally pushed me was doing rough math on what I'd left on the table. Call it conservative and say I had $10,000 sitting at close to 0% for a year while decent options were paying somewhere in the 4 to 5 percent range. That's real money, gone for no better reason than inertia.

What I'd actually tell a friend

Check what your checking and savings accounts are currently paying. Not what you think they pay, what they're actually paying right now, because a lot of "high-yield" savings accounts quietly drifted lower over the past year while headlines about rates kept moving around. If the number embarrasses you, there are options that don't involve touching the stock market at all: a CD at a bank or credit union you trust, a T-bill through TreasuryDirect or a brokerage that supports them, or at minimum a savings account from an online bank instead of the checking account you've had since college.

None of this is exciting. It's not going to make anyone rich. But rates like this don't last forever, and the gap between doing nothing and spending twenty minutes online is bigger than it looks from the couch.