Seriously folks: do you really expect this young man to play the market and win? What is the end goal of any investment? To use that money to either 1) live off of (good luck anybody not born with the last name of Gates) or 2) to retire early, retire well. Anybody who claims the first rationale has no business being here (and probably has platoons of highly-paid financial advisors growing their assets for them). For the rest of us, i.e. the slave-wage-earning middle of the country, the goal for our investments should be reason #2: retire early, retire well.
If that's the case, then what is the best possible thing you could do with that money, if you're a poor student with no real income to speak of? Put ALL of it (and more, every month if possible) into a Roth IRA. I know that one of the requirements was money you could access easily, but if that's the case no investment scheme outside of a savings account will allow you to take the money out without some form of penalty/cost/fee. We all know that the earlier we start, the better off we are. I wish every day that I had started investing in a Roth IRA when I was in my early 20s. The miracle of compound interest means that I wouldn't be playing catch-up nearly twenty years later. Not only does that money get to grow an average of ten years longer than when most people start seriously putting money into a retirement fund, but that money when it comes out is TAX-FREE. The best I will be able to do my pathetic IRA is grow it for half the time and earn the joy of paying income tax on it when I do start taking it out.
Anybody out here who is seriously telling this student to invest in stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, real estate (are you kidding me???), gold, silver, oil or adamantium, consider if you would have taken the same advice if you were staring at a retirement age of 70 with less than $100,000 in the bank.
And no, I am not a financial consultant or broker or anybody else from the investment community. I'm just a middle-aged guy who sees what his options might have been if he'd only started earlier in life to save.
Peace.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously folks: do you really expect this young man to play the market and win? What is the end goal of any investment? To use that money to either 1) live off of (good luck anybody not born with the last name of Gates) or 2) to retire early, retire well. Anybody who claims the first rationale has no business being here (and probably has platoons of highly-paid financial advisors growing their assets for them). For the rest of us, i.e. the slave-wage-earning middle of the country, the goal for our investments should be reason #2: retire early, retire well. If that's the case, then what is the best possible thing you could do with that money, if you're a poor student with no real income to speak of? Put ALL of it (and more, every month if possible) into a Roth IRA. I know that one of the requirements was money you could access easily, but if that's the case no investment scheme outside of a savings account will allow you to take the money out without some form of penalty/cost/fee. We all know that the earlier we start, the better off we are. I wish every day that I had started investing in a Roth IRA when I was in my early 20s. The miracle of compound interest means that I wouldn't be playing catch-up nearly twenty years later. Not only does that money get to grow an average of ten years longer than when most people start seriously putting money into a retirement fund, but that money when it comes out is TAX-FREE. The best I will be able to do my pathetic IRA is grow it for half the time and earn the joy of paying income tax on it when I do start taking it out. Anybody out here who is seriously telling this student to invest in stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, real estate (are you kidding me???), gold, silver, oil or adamantium, consider if you would have taken the same advice if you were staring at a retirement age of 70 with less than $100,000 in the bank. And no, I am not a financial consultant or broker or anybody else from the investment community. I'm just a middle-aged guy who sees what his options might have been if he'd only started earlier in life to save. Peace.