The Real Cost of Keeping Cash in 5 LATAM Currencies (2020–2025)
Your bank statement says your balance grew. Your grocery bill disagrees.
To settle the question for the five largest Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking economies in the Americas, we pulled two official indicators from the World Bank for 2020 through 2025 and ran the arithmetic:
- CPI inflation (annual average), FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG
- Deposit interest rate (the rate banks actually paid on deposits), FR.INR.DPST
Both endpoints are on the World Bank Open Data API, last updated 2026-07-01. The real return on cash in each country and year is simply the deposit rate minus inflation.
The full table, country by country
| Country | Year | Deposit rate | CPI inflation | Real return |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇦🇷 Argentina | 2020 | 29.32% | 42.02% | -12.70% |
| 🇦🇷 Argentina | 2021 | 33.55% | 48.41% | -14.86% |
| 🇦🇷 Argentina | 2022 | 52.42% | 72.43% | -20.01% |
| 🇦🇷 Argentina | 2023 | 95.00% | 133.49% | -38.49% |
| 🇦🇷 Argentina | 2024 | 54.25% | 219.88%* | -165.63%* |
| 🇦🇷 Argentina | 2025 | 34.86% | n/a | n/a |
| 🇧🇷 Brazil | 2020 | 2.20% | 3.21% | -1.01% |
| 🇧🇷 Brazil | 2021 | 4.35% | 8.30% | -3.95% |
| 🇧🇷 Brazil | 2022 | 12.00% | 9.28% | +2.72% |
| 🇧🇷 Brazil | 2023 | 12.14% | 4.59% | +7.55% |
| 🇧🇷 Brazil | 2024 | 7.70% | 4.37% | +3.33% |
| 🇧🇷 Brazil | 2025 | n/a | 5.02% | n/a |
| 🇲🇽 Mexico | 2020 | 1.46% | 3.40% | -1.94% |
| 🇲🇽 Mexico | 2021 | 0.65% | 5.66% | -5.01% |
| 🇲🇽 Mexico | 2022 | 2.57% | 7.90% | -5.33% |
| 🇲🇽 Mexico | 2023 | 4.78% | 5.55% | -0.77% |
| 🇲🇽 Mexico | 2024 | 4.55% | 4.21% | +0.34% |
| 🇲🇽 Mexico | 2025 | 2.55% | 3.81% | -1.26% |
| 🇨🇴 Colombia | 2020 | 3.38% | 2.52% | +0.86% |
| 🇨🇴 Colombia | 2021 | 2.07% | 3.48% | -1.41% |
| 🇨🇴 Colombia | 2022 | 8.50% | 10.18% | -1.68% |
| 🇨🇴 Colombia | 2023 | 13.21% | 11.74% | +1.47% |
| 🇨🇴 Colombia | 2024 | 10.17% | 6.61% | +3.56% |
| 🇨🇴 Colombia | 2025 | 8.96% | 5.14% | +3.82% |
| 🇨🇱 Chile | 2020 | 0.86% | 3.04% | -2.18% |
| 🇨🇱 Chile | 2021 | 1.28% | 4.52% | -3.24% |
| 🇨🇱 Chile | 2022 | 8.99% | 11.64% | -2.65% |
| 🇨🇱 Chile | 2023 | 10.41% | 7.58% | +2.83% |
| 🇨🇱 Chile | 2024 | 6.07% | 4.02% | +2.05% |
| 🇨🇱 Chile | 2025 | n/a | 4.21% | n/a |
\* The 2024 Argentina CPI of 219.88% is the annual average from the World Bank; INDEC's December 2024 year-end print was 117.8%. Real return for that year depends on which window you anchor to — both are reported, and both are devastating.
What the table actually says
A few patterns jump out:
- Argentina lost ground in every single reported year. Even 2023's 95% deposit rate was 38 points behind inflation.
- Mexico lost ground in five of the six years. The deposit rate never meaningfully beat inflation.
- Brazil, Colombia and Chile had a clear 2022 trough, when inflation peaked and deposit rates had not yet caught up. Each country returned to positive territory in 2023–2025.
- Chile 2020–2022 was the worst non-Argentine run — three straight years of negative real returns.
Argentina: the deepest hole, visualized
The trajectory for the Argentine peso deposit account, 2020 to 2024:
Why the deposit insurance floor still matters
Even when the real return is positive, you are trusting the bank. Each of the five countries operates a deposit insurance scheme with a different ceiling. From each primary regulator:
| Country | Scheme | Local-currency cap | Approx. USD (mid-2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🇧🇷 Brazil | FGC | R$ 250,000 per CPF/CNPJ per institution | ~$46,000 |
| 🇲🇽 Mexico | IPAB | 400,000 UDIs per depositor per institution | ~$135,000 |
| 🇨🇴 Colombia | Fogafín | COP 50,000,000 per person per institution | ~$12,000 |
| 🇨🇱 Chile | Garantía Estatal (CMF) | UF 200 per institution, UF 400 aggregate (natural persons) | ~$8,000 / $16,000 |
| 🇦🇷 Argentina | BCRA — Cobertura de Depósitos | Statutory cap, peso and USD deposits | (limited dollar liquidity) |
The Mexican IPAB ceiling is the most generous in real terms — anchored to UDIs (inflation-indexed units), so the floor itself does not erode with inflation. Colombia's Fogafín cap of COP 50 million and Chile's UF 200/UF 400 are the tightest in absolute dollars; anyone with savings above ~$12,000–$16,000 should split across institutions.
In Argentina, the deposit insurance exists on paper, but the table above shows why that is not the binding constraint — the binding constraint is the value of the peso itself, which no insurance scheme can fix.
Why "just save in dollars" is not the answer in Argentina
A common Argentina-specific piece of advice since the 2000s has been "save in dollars." Through 2023 that was reasonable: the blue dollar (informal market rate) tracked the official rate, and a USD savings account at a local bank — or a stash under the mattress — was a real hedge.
That changed in late 2023 when the Milei government unified the official and parallel rates, then aggressively compressed the gap between the MEP dollar (the financial-market rate) and the blue. By mid-2024 the MEP/blue spread collapsed to a few percentage points, and anyone whose strategy was to ride the gap lost a meaningful slice of their position. The lesson is not "stop saving in dollars" — it is that the spread itself was the return, and when the spread compressed, the return disappeared.
The bigger lesson applies to the rest of the region: hedging into USD without thinking about the FX regime you are in can leave you exposed to exactly the regime change you were hedging against.
Three strategies that actually work
None of this is a reason to keep cash idle. Three moves reduce the damage:
1. Match duration to an inflation-indexed instrument. Brazil's Tesouro IPCA+ (NTN-B), Chile's UF-denominated accounts and bonds, Mexico's Udibonos, Colombia's TES UVR, and Argentina's CER-linked bonds are designed to track inflation. Yields vary by country, but the principal is protected in real terms. Each country's treasury or central bank publishes the current auction rates; treat the official pages as the canonical source.
2. Split across banks and across currencies. If your deposit insurance cap is below your total cash position (the typical case in Colombia and Chile), open accounts at two or three institutions. If your local currency is structurally weak (Argentina, with episodes in Brazil 2022 and Colombia 2023), keep a partial position in USD or another reference currency — but only enough that you can absorb a regime change.
3. Screen products by real yield, not headline. A "12% savings account" sounds great until inflation is 13%. The check is simple: take the nominal annual deposit rate minus expected 12-month inflation. The World Bank's real interest rate series (FR.INR.RINR) does this for you across countries, but for the next twelve months in your own country, subtract your bank's deposit rate from the most recent CPI print.
The full arithmetic — nominal rate, compounding frequency, monthly contributions, multi-year horizon — is in the compound interest calculator. Try it with the inflation assumption set to your country's latest reading and compare the real terminal value across products.
Sources consulted
- World Bank Open Data — Inflation, consumer prices (annual %) — FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG, last updated 2026-07-01.
- World Bank Open Data — Deposit interest rate (%) — FR.INR.DPST, last updated 2026-07-01.
- World Bank Open Data — Real interest rate (%) — FR.INR.RINR, last updated 2026-07-01 (independent cross-check on the deposit-vs-CPI arithmetic above).
- INDEC — Índice de Precios al Consumidor (Argentina CPI, official statistics)
- INEGI — INPC (Mexico CPI, base 2nd fortnight of July 2018)
- DANE — IPC Base 2018 (Colombia CPI, 443 articles across 38 cities)
- FGC — Garantias (Brazil deposit insurance, R$ 250,000 cap)
- IPAB — Seguro de Depósitos (Mexico deposit insurance, 400,000 UDIs cap)
- Fogafín — Seguro de Depósitos (Colombia deposit insurance, COP 50,000,000 cap)
- CMF Chile — Garantía Estatal (Chile state deposit guarantee, natural persons only)