> low to medium risk areas and average 10 - 15% per year.
Where can I get this return reliably at "low risk"?
Where can I get this return reliably at "low risk"?
... or not. Your situation may call for something else. Any specific suggestions people give you will likely sound unnecessarily specific and perhaps arbitrary, unless you have spent a lot of time learning about the modern investing landscape -- you really need to do that for yourself.
And how to do that? Especially for those of us in Europe?
That's one thing I can't get my head around. The ecosystem seems filled with scammers and financial advise salesmen, and my "scam alert" is running on constant overdrive whenever trying to look for any current and actionable educational material.
- https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started_for_non-US_i...
- (book) The Simple Path to Wealth by J. L. Collins
- (Podcast) ChooseFI
It really depends on your goals and starting point. Avoiding management fees is one of my priorities as well as direct visibility of my accounts and numbers (all offered via Vanguard directly). There are a lot of great, free information sources. Some are directed at people who are paycheck t paycheck and need to start setting like $100/month aside while digging out of debt. Others focus on middle class style employer retirement plan+personal savings like for a down payment on a house. Others focus on those willing to toss thousands on what becomes a bet on the market and YOLO it (not recommended).
I started by just looking at Vanguard funds and using open/free tools to understand terminology and get a grasp of the history or background like lessons learned.
>> an average appreciation of 13% last year, which is not sustainable for this area but still indicative of the overall trend.
not sustainable but indicative of the overall trend? What does that even mean?
I don't recall anyone saying anything about participation @ $100 / week, so don't be flippant. The comment was made about low risk at 10-15%. If you had $100/week to spend, I'd put it in a drip and buy pharma stocks because there are many paying a sizable dividend, but I'm not your broker so get your own advice.
Per your website, you live in Washington state. Rocky Mountains and west are generally very desireable areas to live in, and WA has no income tax.
But you can look all the way from Maine to the Dakotas, down to Oklahoma, and then of course the poor gulf coast states and easily see that real estate is a terrible investment in those areas outside of a few urban areas. Especially in the heavily debt laden rust belt states with undesirable weather and shrinking economic prospects.
The challenge I have is remembering to actually care about it and do the trades, life gets too busy and before I realize it a month has gone by.
But whenever I'm on top of it, 1% gains have been very easy over the past decade, I'm rarely in the market for more than a few hours. But I risk having a pile of cash to trade with I suppose, the dollar could crash.
If you do +1% per month you're already +12%/yr, I consider 12%/yr the minimum acceptable yield for any kind of investment given how easy it seems to be to DIY.
2. Market returns vary greatly from decade to decade, so we shouldn't necessarily expect this 14% rate of return to continue. (Most obviously, there were no recessions in the past decade, which is unusual.)
Secondly, pretty much any reputable ETF (or combination of ETF's) can quite easily achieve this over 30 years.
Be advised that they are not designed to be held over more than a day, although with the current bull market, they have not actually been hit by the decay factor inherent to all leveraged ETFs.
Other higher-risk ETFs would be things like solar/wind sector ETFs (e.g. TAN, FAN, PBW, IQCLN, QCLN, etc.) or bleeding-edge biotech (e.g. SBIO).
I'm sure there's SOME ETF that managed to do 15% returns over a 30 yr period, but that's just selection bias after the fact. It doesn't mean that ETF would do well this year, or next.
Vangaurd is predicting low growth of 3-4% over the next decade.
Vanguard's predictions of 3-4% over the next decade mean that if you do a straight dollar calculation you'd be closer to ~7%, because that 3-4% number includes inflation, once again.