Thanks for your reply. It may surprise you, but I know a bit about personal finance. I’ve got a retirement plan, a few properties, and have day traded the stock market for the past 8 years. I’ve also spoken to quite a few financial professionals.
To be honest, I feel that no one, including financial planners, knows what’s going to happen. We are in a wacky time with the debt/money supply increasing as it has in the last few years, and there a wide range of possibilities from deflation/depression/default to inflation/hyperinflation that could happen.
It’s clear I need to make my own decisions. Getting some advice from others on FR doesn’t make me a credulous simp who will whatever anyone says. FREGARDS
Glad to learn you are on top of your finances. Since you didn’t disclose the extent of your financial knowledge in your post, I assumed that you know little to nothing about investing.
If you don’t need the money for seven to ten years, then I would dollar cost average the money into conservative mutual funds over a twelve to eighteen month period. I like the Vanguard Wellesley Fund for income and dividends and the Vanguard Total Stock Market EFT Fund (VTI) for diversified growth. The big concern about any fund that is owned outside of a retirement fund is the possible increase in the tax rate in dividends if Congress can’t get its act together. Good luck.
I recently completed my third ungrad degree, this time in business w/an accounting major. I got into this exact conversation with my Advanced Accounting prof. He said he pulled all his money out of the stock market and put it into a money market account until the economy/market becomes sane again. I had already done the same thing.
My money market account pays only nominal interest, but it sure behaves a lot better than my stock market portfolio was doing. I hate roller coasters.
I also had (in 2005) had gotten my real estate license in order to start flipping real estate. Then the real estate market adjusted.
These are crazy and unprecedented times.