Have you taken a look at the interest rates on your savings accounts recently? Right now, the majority of savings accounts offered by the big four banks come with base rates of just 0.05%.
That means that if you had $1 million sitting in one of these accounts, you would only earn interest of $5,000 a year.
Because of this, I continue to believe that it is better to put your money to work in the share market, rather than leave it to earn just paltry interest in an account.
If I had $5,000 in a savings account and no immediate use for it, I would consider investing it into one of these ASX shares:
Appen Ltd (ASX: APX)
The first ASX share to consider investing $5,000 into is Appen. It is the global leader in the development of high-quality, human-annotated training data for machine learning and artificial intelligence. Its team of 1 million+ crowd-sourced workers allows the company to collect and label high volumes of data used to build and improve artificial intelligence models for some of the biggest technology companies in the world. This includes the likes of Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple.
Due to the growing importance of artificial intelligence and machine learning and Appen's leadership position in its field, I believe it is well-placed to capture the increasing demand and deliver strong earnings growth long into the future.
Pushpay Holdings Ltd (ASX: PPH)
Another ASX share to invest $5,000 into is Pushpay. It is a donor management system provider with a focus on the faith sector. Pushpay's innovative solutions simplify engagement, payments, and administration, allowing users to increase participation and build stronger relationships with their communities.
Pushpay has been growing at a very strong rate in recent years and FY 2020 was no exception. In FY 2020 the company delivered a 39% increase in total processing volume to US$5 billion and a 33% increase in operating revenue to US$127.5 million. Pleasingly, this strong growth is expected to continue in FY 2021, with management forecasting its operating earnings to double. After which, it is aiming to capture a 50% share of the medium and large church segments in the future. This represents a US$1 billion revenue opportunity.
