My Lola Lined Up Every Month. I Checked My Time Deposit from a Coffee Shop.

This morning I opened my mobile banking app to check a time deposit — two months in, rolling automatically, earning interest I don’t have to think about. Outside, someone was ordering an iced coffee. A delivery rider was double-parked. And there I was, sitting in the middle of ordinary Manila noise, watching a number quietly grow. That’s when I thought of my lola.

The Biscuit Tin She Kept Everything In

She had a passbook from the 90s that she wrapped in plastic and stored inside a biscuit tin — the rectangular kind that used to hold butter cookies, the ones we’d repurpose for everything except butter cookies. Every month, she lined up at the bank just to see her balance. Not to move money. Not to invest. Just to see what was there. That was the whole transaction: proof that something still existed.

I don’t know what interest rate she was earning back then, but I know it wasn’t much. And I know she earned it the slow way — through patience, through lines, through the particular Filipino discipline of treating the bank like a government office you respect but don’t enjoy. She never complained about it. That was just how saving worked.

What Changed, and What Didn’t

What I’m doing now looks nothing like that. I started with digital bank savings accounts at around 3 to 4 percent — which, compared to the 0.125 percent most traditional savings accounts still offer, felt almost suspicious. Then I moved into short-term time deposits, rolling them over to keep things liquid. On top of that, I bumped up my Pag-IBIG contributions to take advantage of the 6.6 percent dividend — mostly for the long term, the kind of return you plant and try not to dig up.

Friends ask if it’s safe. I tell them the same thing every time: it’s PDIC-insured, most of it lives in your phone now, and the only genuinely hard part is not touching it. That last part I say lightly, but I mean it completely.

The Infrastructure Was Never the Problem

The tools are real. You can open accounts from a mall, from an app, from your sofa on a Tuesday night while watching something you’ve already seen. The friction that used to exist — the forms, the lines, the passbooks wrapped in plastic — most of that is gone. And I don’t want to be precious about it, because easier access to saving is genuinely good. But I also don’t want to pretend that removing the friction removes the difficulty.

Because the hard part was never the bank.

It was always the decision to leave the money alone. To not treat a time deposit like an emergency fund. To not convince yourself that a new phone, a trip, a version of yourself that costs more than you currently earn, is worth breaking the roll for. My lola stood in line every month, and that line was inconvenient enough to make her think twice before withdrawing anything. Now the money is three taps away. The discipline has to come from somewhere else — somewhere inside, which is a much less reliable location.

The Number Grew While I Wasn’t Looking

Sitting there in that coffee shop, I realized I was earning more interest on that quiet deposit than my lola probably saw in a quarter. That’s not a brag. It’s more like a strange feeling — the kind that sits between gratitude and guilt and something that doesn’t have a clean name yet.

She did everything right within the system she was given. I’m doing the same, just inside a different system. The biscuit tin is now an app. The passbook is a push notification. And the line she stood in every month has become, for me, a habit of simply not opening the wrong menu.

Maybe that’s the inheritance she didn’t know she was leaving. Not the amount. Just the instinct to set something aside and let it sit.

A BantayDaily personal essay by Juno dela Cruz.