What do people do with a super duper huge boatload of money that they want swift access to?
Say a guy wins 100 mil in the lottery. He wants to keep the cash as liquid and quickly available as possible but safe. So investments and bonds are out. FDIC limit is only 250K per account. Opening up 400 bank accounts doesn’t seem feasible.
You could try a money market fund.
Also, I am no financial expert, but that sounds like too much cash. I’m sure even a professional poker player does not need more than a shoebox or two full of $100 bills at any one time.
It depends on why someone would insist on quick access to more than a couple million. If it’s for maintaining portfolio flexibility, there are investment-fund options that allow relatively rapid sale and purchase of assets. If it’s for maintaining the option to impulse-buy a yacht that won’t fit under a bridge, it’s easy enough to get a bank to put up the funds if you have the assets to insure that they’ll get paid back.
I suppose you don’t mean physical cash but a readily accessible liquid investment? You can, of course, put it in a bank account; you won’t get FDIC protection for the amounts above 250k, but that doesn’t mean your money isn’t safe at all - it is still just as safe as your confidence in the viability of this bank. I doubt you will find an investment that offers both the liqudity you want plus the added security of FDIC coverage for the amounts you’re talking about; the money market funds that have previously been mentioned are very liquid but they’re not FDIC-covered either (disregarding extraordinary crisis ,easures such as an FDIC-equivalent Treasury guarantee for money market funds in 2008 - this has since expired).
In a previous career step I was employed by a central bank that provided staff member accounts. My money there was even more secure than FDIC-covered deposits since it was a claim on a central bank, which cannot run out of cash in the currency it can itself create. That’s about as safe as it can even theoretically get, and I kept joking about that. But that was, of course, a rather peculiar situation.
I sometimes ponder this question. In the scenarios I dream up, the idea is that I don’t want to commit my money to any one thing in specific until I’ve done my research. As such, the most obvious idea is a checking account with a 500 million dollar balance, or whatever the after tax amount is for winning a large Powerball jackpot. Then once I have a system set up to keep track of my investments, then I would start doing so. I dislike the idea of someone else managing my money, which is why I tend to gravitate to the checking account with a large balance solution.
ETA: This does bring up the follow up question of how the really wealthy make their investments. Do Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have an Etrade account where they buy and sell their own stocks? Do they have to mess with telling some kind of wealth manager they want to sell enough stock today to have a spare 500K in cash, which they then want transferred to such and such checking account, presumably because they have more than one?
Money market fund, if you really wanted to keep it close to cash and very safe. US Government money market funds only invest in short-dated government bills, and so are extremely safe and extremely protected against market movements. I think a savings account would be a bad idea – you’re exposed to the bank, and that won’t be as safe as the US Government.
The US isn’t the only country with banks. Swiss banks are renowned for offering the kind of service you’re looking for.
There’s a thing called a Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service that lets you deal with only one bank but have money spread around various FDIC insured banks so you’re not exceeding the $250,000 insurance limit at any one bank.
That said, I doubt I’d worry too much about money in excess of $250,000 at any of the three or four largest, too-big-to-fail banks. On the other hand, you can certainly do better than crappy bank interest rates by investing the money properly.
Why not? I don’t see any reason why Bezos and Musk couldn’t trade on whatever type of account Etrade or whatever bank sets up for ultra-high net worth individuals (people with over $30 million in liquid assets).
The main issue for those guys is that because they are officers and primary shareholders in multi-billion dollar corporations, there are regulatory and tax considerations. In fact, I would imagine the main challenge the extremely wealthy face is keeping track of the various diverse investments and setting up the various corporate structures required to minimize your tax burden.
You need a bit more than Quicken at that point.
Sure. But let’s say we’re talking about someone who has no experience with the stock market, or whose only experience is having a 401k through their employer that’s managed by someone at Charles Schwab or Merrill Lynch. Let’s say that person just hit the Powerball. How are they going to know which investments are the proper ones? They would have to do their research first, which takes time. In the meantime, my solution would be to park the money in a regular bank account.
I got the impression that the OP was asking about the longer term, as opposed to “until I figure out which investments are best and who can be best trusted to manage them”.
Definitely and depositing the money in my bank account is what I plan to do when the money I’m expecting from an African prince arrives later this month. Just trying to decide if I should deposit the check at the ATM or wait for the teller, just to see their eyes bug out.
So, in case any of you really do come into a lot of dough, you’re definitely better in a money market account. If nothing else, you’ll get more than 0.05% interest, and for amounts above $250k, it’s safer than a bank account.
To answer the OP, the answer really is a money market account for anyone who has a large cash position.
Not quite correct. It’s $250K per account holder. If you have a joint account with a spouse, you are each insured for $250K. If you add beneficiaries to the account, each of them are insured for that amount. We are selling our house soon, which will bring in somewhere north of $600K. We added a beneficiary to our present account yesterday so that the entire amount will be covered.
It does not really matter how high the guaranty is, if a big bank fails again, the losses in the stock market will be enormous (remember Lehnman Brothers?), the State will have to intervene to the tune of scores of billions to keep the system afloat, many other banks will follow the first one down the drain and money will no longer be the same, so it will be irrelevant how many deposits were guaranteed and up to what limit: you (the account holder) will lose out. The only important thing is that there is a credible guarantee from the State: a safeguard for the whole system, not how high this guaranty is.
But if you have your money invested in well diversified stocks, the stocks still belong to you, even if the bank where you store them goes bust. The stocks will suffer big losses too in such a situation, of course, many corporations will go bust in such a scenario, but the others should recover on average in the medium to long term, and liquidity in the big exchanges (NY, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Paris, London…) will never be a problem, or we are all really screwed. If the situation turns that bad, no matter what you did to protect yourself will be of no use: that is Armageddon level. Apart from that extreme scenario invested and well diversified money (many sectors, many countries, many companies, many currencies) is safer than in a current account protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
But if you have 100 million invested, you only need a couple of hundred thousands for a while to stay liquid. Leave the rest invested and hope the market recovers. If you have enough assets the bank will provide liquidity when you need it, rest assured of that.
Now I wonder what a guy like you is planning that you ask that kind of questions: 100 mil? Hmmm… seems out of character for a LEO. You are not looking for an accomplice, are you? 
Well, not all that is necessarily stuff they can move around and/or sell easily, since it’s majority ownership stakes in large companies.
So for the stuff that’s NOT tied up in Amazon/Tesla/Boring Co./SpaceX, they more than likely have some sort of capital management company who manages all that for them, and they probably have guidelines on it, like “Keep no less than $25k in my checking account at all times.” and the like, so that day-to-day, they never actually have to worry about money, and in the long term, they’re probably giving high level guidelines like “Don’t invest in Blue Origin” or something like that, and then letting the pros handle the actual nitty-gritty of the investments. More than likely they have a periodic review of the capital managers’ performance, and decide to renew their contract with them or not.
For ultimate safety (but not always rapid liquidity) learn how to cache your dough.
"How to Bury a Cache:
The part about writing down where you cached the cash is important although tricky - what if someone finds your description, or if you hide the piece of paper and forget where it is. 
I once read an article in a survivalist magazine about caching your weapons in case Nancy Pelosi or someone equally evil from the government comes for them. Generally good advice, but there was at least one instance of a guy who squirreled away weaponry and never found it again. 
*I keep hoping that my gardening endeavors will one day lead to my digging up a literal buried treasure on the property. So far, all I’ve uncovered is a bunch of hundred-year-old bricks and an antique perfume bottle.
By the time you are in the tens-of-millions stage, you can afford to pay a manager (or more likely, a company) a few tens of thousands a year to handle ALL your finances. It will be cheaper than the hundreds of thousands in legal bills arguing with the IRS if you miss some detail somewhere. At the 100-million stage, you can afford a full time manager whose job is to make sure you have what you want when you want it. If you tell him “I may get bored tomorrow and walk around downtown handing out $100 bills” they will arrange for the wads of cash you specify, plus the Uber to take you downtown and back. Plus, they arrange for the flights to Tahiti on private jets, the fresh avocados every morning with toast, flying in Kobe steaks, hiring and firing butlers and cooks, Chateau Laffite '49, etc. A few hundred thou a year is peanuts. (Old joke “Sir, your son lost $500,000 gambling in Vegas last year. How long can you allow this?” Thinks for a while, replies “About 245 years…”)
It must be a completely different lifestyle when the relative expense of a first-class ticket to anywhere is the equivalent of us buying a Starbucks.
A different way of looking at it is to consider how much you need readily available for “Mad Money”. $1M a year is $20,000 a week.
Another consideration is - why would you need readily available cash? When Bezos buys his yacht or pays Rotterdam to move a bridge so he can get it out of harbour, he has the bank wire them the money. The ship is probably bought through some complex transaction where he finances it and makes monthly payments (or his business manager(s) do) rather than actual cash outlay. Even with extravagant outright purchases, it all is done in bank transfers not pallets of cash. If you have the money in non-liquid form, the bank is happy to advance funds using that less liquid form as collateral. Anything can be arranged - for a fee.
Any massive sums, you will have to trust someone or some company (companies?). The FDIC is for the average Joe (hence, the moderate amount). If you want it in gold or cash and stash it yourself, then you will probably have to spend a small fortune on security. I imagine after the first 50 calls, the local police force will get tired of chasing off fortune hunters digging (or blasting) in your extensive estate.
I imagine the cheapest sort-of-liquid stash would be expensive diamonds kept in a Safety Deposit Box - but then, you have the problem of selling the right amount of gems when you want more liquidity.
I should also point out a lot of billionaires don’t actually have it all in liquid cash. Musk, for example, just got a huge amount of stock options due from years and years ago. This counts as actual income. He decided to sell those rather than lose the options, thus generating over $10B in income tax this year. (But you won’t hear Bernie Sanders congratulating him). But generally, like Bezos or Gates or Buffet, most likely their huge net worth is actually stock that they got at the ground floor, and now worth hundreds of times more than before. they can’t sell it without collecting capital gains and paying taxes on it - but what they can do is the “loophole” of using it as collateral for loans to finance any lifestyle choices.
If you own $30B in stock, but your cost of living is only (!) $50M a year, you can hock a lot of stock before you have to convert any to actual cash. A $100M mansion and estate mortgaged at 5% is “only” $5M a year, trivial for a guy with $50M to blow every year.
As I understand it, people at this level or higher might establish a family office, which is basically a small investment company that does nothing but invest your money.