What's the safest possible thing that I can do with my money?

The best thing you can do with your money is invest it in yourself of your children, if you have any. Go to school, get new training, start a business, etc. After that, the next best thing to do with it is to eliminate your debt (excluding mortgage). Typically people have formulae for determining how much savings you should spend to pay down debt, but I've read your comments on Mefi, and I think you'd be a happier person if you just eliminated all of any credit card debt, car payments, etc. you have outstanding. Barring those things, here's the basic story: Your money in a savings account is insured up to $100,000, but earns little interest and may actually result in your losing money to inflation. CD's pay more, but you can't touch your money for the duration of the CD. Bonds are safe, but you have to know which ones to buy, what to watch out for, etc. And bonds fluctuate in price. The rule of thumb is that the more interest, or yield, something offers, the more risk is involved. Interest is essentially what is exchanged for you risking your money. Also, low-risk=low-reward. But you sound like you want something extremely safe, so I'm not going to preach to you about S&P 500 long term blah blah blah. Gold and commodities are not so good, because while a 2 year chart looks great now, a 2 year chart 2 years from now might look like a nightmare. Gold lost $100/ounce since Monday, about 10%, did anybody call that? So not exactly a rock solid investment. You want safe, here is safe: What you really want is some kind of short term bond mutual fund (the "short term" refers to the kind of bonds it holds). Mutual funds are great because you can put in and take out your money whenever you want, unlike bonds and CDs. I would recommend this one from Vanguard (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/rk?s=VFSTX). It has a decent yield (which is sort of like interest) and also can appreciate in value. This particular fund has had one down year in the last 24 years, and that year it was only down 0.08%. In the alternative, you can get a fund that invests in inflation-protected treasuries (TIPS), like this one from Vanguard (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=VIPSX). These two funds are very much buy-and-forget. You talk about the economic turmoil, VFSTX fluctuated less than 1% from oct to jan (when the shit really hit the fan) and VIPSX fluctuated by no more than about 4%. They are very very safe, but won't appreciate much, but that sounds that would be okay for you. Keep in mind that these funds also pay you interest along the way, which is typically reinvested, so the charts you see on yahoo, that track price only, don't show you the full story. When you pick a mutual fund, however, you need to be very careful because different fund comapnies fund often charge expenses, loads and fees, which are basically ways for the fund company to take your money out of your investment. http://vanguard.com/has built its entire company and every one of the hundreds of funds they manage on the principle of no load, and rock-bottom expense ratios. All of the money I cannot afford to lose for the rest of my life I keep there. This is not a slick Wall Street operation - Vanguard will collapse when the world ends, not a moment sooner. The people who started and who ran that company are very old-school personalities - they personally live frugally, invest very conservatively, and their business model is based on lifetime relationships with their investors, not on clever financial wizardry. You don't see Vanguard people on TV as much as Warren Buffet because these people aren't the type to have publicists. This is the place where your crusty great-grandfather who grew up in the Depression would keep his money. Slow and temperate. They also offer very low-cost financial advisory services, which you might need if/when you ever get married, have kids, etc and don't feel like trying to figure out how to buy life insurance. On a psychological note, though, I would encourage you to read http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671015206/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. The book is not really about personal finance, though it does discuss it a little. What the book will do is reset your social attitudes about money and wealth, and how wealth is accumulated. I think you'll really like this book.

If you are worried about the future value of the US dollar, you should move some of your savings into other currencies (I'm assuming that any kind of stock-based investment is going to be too risky for you). I was going to link to a couple past questions about saving cash in Euros, but then I realised one of the questions was yours (the other one is http://ask.metafilter.com/85338/How-do-I-invest-in-Euros#1261291). You can buy ETFs for a http://finance.yahoo.com/lookup?s=CurrencyShares. While the amounts that you invest in the ETFs are obviously not FDIC insured, so you expose yourself to some risk, you also greatly decrease the risk associated with changes in the value of the dollar. You could also use a foreign currency savings account in the USA (which would be FDIC insured), but the rate of return would likely be lower than inflation (see the other question linked above for a little more about Everbank). Carefully selected foreign government bonds would arguably be safer than the ETFs, but wouldn't be practical unless you had a lot of money. Opening savings accounts in other countries would be far too difficult. So the short answer is to either accept the suboptimal performance relative to inflation of, for example, Everbank or to accept the risk of an ETF.

For starters, there is no way the FDIC can fail. If every bank in the US failed, the federal government can print out as many $100,000 bills as it wants and distribute them however it wants. Not that you could buy much with $100,000 in that situation. The smartest bet is, as Pastabagel said, investing in yourself. The next safest bet is investing in the Federal government's debt, because they can always print more money, and minimizing taxation. The next safest bet and almost certainly the best hedge against anything that might happen in the world is diversity geared towards tax minimization. Personally, I'm tend towards prognostication more than a lot of people and I'm betting on further devaluation of the dollar through broad commodity indices and ADRs in a couple of companies that I'm a bit of a sweet heart of. It's not smart investing but I feel god about what I'm doing and I'm only doing short term speculation with a fraction of my assets.

1) It is conceivable for the FDIC to fail; however, such a failure would probably require that the US Federal Government be in such horrible shape that losing your savings account would probably not be your most serious concern. 2) US Savings Bonds are arguably safer even with the FDIC, though I'd still prefer a sub-$100k savings account. 3) A high-interest savings account. No guarantee of actually avoiding any of the above, but definitely the safest way of keeping things in dollars and not falling too far behind inflation, or even staying ahead of it a bit. 4) You could always buy a bunch of gold, I suppose. Though that's far from perfect.

If you did have over $100,000, a good place to put your money is in a Massachusetts bank. The state offers insurance for the amount over the FDIC limit. http://www.salemfive.com/aboutUs/fdic_dif.html (from the bank I happen to use for my checking, despite living in Seattle -- their http://www.salemfivedirect.com/ not only offers an interest rate comparable to many "high yield" savings accounts, but reimburses all ATM fees).

As others have said, if you're trying to plan for the FDIC failing, you might as well build a bunker and start hoarding bicycles. Things would have REALLY bad for that kind of a situation to come up. Normally to beat inflation you have to make a bet one way or another. You have to bet that the stock market is going to go up or that it's going to go down. You have to bet that dollar is going to appreciate versus the euro or depreciate versus the euro. You have to bet that gold prices are going to go up or that they're going to go down. Whenever you make that kind of bet, the risk is of course that you might be wrong and lose part of your investment. The protection you get from the government on savings accounts is pretty much the closest you're going to get to a free lunch.

Really, the answers depend on what your goals are. Are you saving for retirement in, for you, what, 40 or 50 years? Then "I want no risk" is essentially synonymous with "I want to be completely fucking broke when I am old and watch in bitter envy as my friends who just dumped money into index funds without thinking go on another cruise while I open another tin of cat food in my fleabag one-room apartment." 3) What's the safest, most risk-free way for me to save money and not get killed by inflation and the tanking US dollar? Over a long time horizon? Probably to dump your money into some sort of very broadly diversified mutual fund and resolve never to look at what it's doing from one week to the next. The probability that after 40 years you would have been better off putting your money into risk-free accounts is infinitesimal.

Depends on the financial advisor. Mine set me up with a bunch of mutual fund choices which over the past 9 months turned my $100k rollover into $89K, amd falling. And he was charging me 1% annually for this service. Last week I fired him.

Does the FDIC insure money that's not in U.S. dollars? I know that the CDIC doesn't.