If you’re working hard and saving money, you’re on your way to building meaningful wealth — but you’re not there yet. Unfortunately, thanks to inflation, your hard-earned and carefully saved dollars and cents will not hold their value. To keep up with the steady decline in the purchasing power of money, you’ll need to put your savings to work. You’ll need to earn interest.

But how? What’s the best way to turn your money into more money? Here are the options that you need to know about.

Open a savings account

Bank accounts are places to store your money, but they can also be opportunities to earn interest. While checking accounts tend to have low interest rates, savings accounts can offer better yields. And while these rates tend to lag behind those of stocks and other investments, virtually no risk is involved. A savings account is a good place to put money that you can’t afford to lose or simply don’t want tied up in less liquid things.

Invest in stocks and bonds

One of the simplest and most effective ways to earn interest on your savings is to buy stocks and bonds, or funds (like mutual funds and ETFs) that contain stocks and bonds. You can take a lot of different approaches to the stock market, but long-term retirement savings are almost always best placed in a diversified portfolio that offers slow and steady growth. With that said, you may have enough cash on hand to take some risks and tackle some more aggressive growth opportunities. Just remember that, when it comes to investing, risk and reward tend to come in proportion to one another.

Assets, currencies, and commodities

Stocks and bonds aren’t the only things that you can buy with your money. You could also buy a house, which would give you a valuable asset that — with care and with the cooperation of the real estate market — could increase in value over time. Or you could buy precious metals like gold, swap your money for foreign or digital currencies, or even invest in collectibles or antiques.

As with stocks and bonds, all types of options exist for folks with different levels of risk tolerance. If you’re interested in an aggressive and risky strategy, you may want to look into what cryptocurrency to invest in. The fast-moving market for cryptocurrencies is full of speculators and risk-takers, some of whom make a great deal of money in a short time.

Savings bonds and term deposits

If you don’t like the idea of risking your money in investments that could generate losses instead of interest, then you may be interested in fixed income investments. As the name implies, these sorts of investments are very up-front about what you’ll be getting: Generally, you’ll be putting in a certain amount of money at a certain time, then getting a certain amount back at a specified later date. All of the details will be set before you pay up.

And term deposit rates can be quite attractive, especially to those who are looking to wind down their risk (such as those close to retirement, who don’t expect to be in the market long enough to enjoy a recovery after riding out a potential recession or crash). Savings bonds work similarly. Barring a collapse of our whole financial system, you will know exactly what you are getting back on your investment.

Earning interest is essential for retirement, so find the solution that suits your goals and risk tolerance and start making money with your money.