Investment Options For 50k

Investment options for 50k

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If you don't have an emergency fund yet, at least $15,000 should go into a bank savings or money market account that's highly liquid, so you can withdraw it quickly. That money is your safety net in case of job loss or other unforeseen disasters.


If you have an emergency fund, if money won't improve your career path, then you're ready to think about how to invest the money in a way to make it grow.

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The first lesson of investing is: start early in order to maximize the impact of compounding over time. Compounding means earning interest on top of interest, which will maximize your long-term wealth.

For example, if you want to retire at 65 and reasonably expect a 6% annual return on your investments, then you'd have over $729,000 at retirement if you start at 20, without adding another cent to your savings.

If you start at 40, you wouldn't even make it to $230,000 by 65, and that's not enough to retire on.

That's an enormous difference, and it shows that how long you invest can be more important than how much you invest.

If you're wishing now that you'd started earlier, don't waste time on regrets -- just get started today! It's better than getting started tomorrow.

Our Top Picks For Short Term Investments

Short-term investing -- day trading, picking stocks and timing the market -- seems really exciting from the outside, but the superficial excitement conceals the fact that most retail investors lose money with short-term investing. FutureAdvisor believes in long-term investing, and multiple academics with Nobel Prizes support the approach as well:

  • 1990: Harry Markowitz wins the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on portfolio choice, which was used in creating Modern Portfolio Theory.
  • 2013: Eugene Fama wins the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for research which laid the foundation for building Modern Portfolio Theory.

History has shown that cash has not been a good investment, losing about 2% a year in real terms, while US historical averages show stocks have returned a 6% return. So holding a portfolio with a greater weighting to stocks rather than cash will earn you a better return.

Time Period Annual Real Return for Stocks Annual Real Return for Gold Annual Real Return for Bonds
1871-2001 6.80% -0.10% 2.80%

Annual Real Returns from: Stocks for the Long Run, by Jeremy Siegel

If you've decided to invest your money rather than keep it in cash, then the next question to answer is: what kind of account should I invest it in?

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The answer will depend on whether or not your employer sponsors a retirement account for you and matches your contribution.

If they do, the first thing you should do is invest until you get every dollar of matching funds to your 401k, because matching funds are a 100% return, and you won't find that often in life.

Once you've exhausted the matching funds, maximize your contribution to your Roth IRA, which is $5,500 per year.

After the Roth, go back to your employer-sponsored 401k, and invest any extra dollars you have.

The Top 16 Best Low Risk Investments With The Highest Returns:

Currently, the most you can contribute per year is $18,000. Maxing out on your retirement funds will take care of almost half the decisions you need to make.

The reason you should maximize your yearly contributions to your IRA and 401k is that they are tax-deferred accounts, which means your investments can accumulate interest, and then accumulate interest on the interest, without incurring taxes on those gains until you retire.

That accelerates how fast your wealth grows.

When investing $50,000, it's also important to focus on avoiding churn (buying and selling), as well as minimizing what you pay every time you buy and sell a security.

The latter is called your trading commission, and it can add up to real costs that sabotage your returns.

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At FutureAdvisor, we use commission-free investments wherever possible, which cuts the costs eating away at your portfolio.

We work to eliminate commissions wherever we can. That said, low expense ratios (the percentage of your assets you pay to invest them in a fund per year) are also important, and they are measured separately.Numerous studies show that the less you pay a fund in investment fees, the better it performs.

Tax-loss harvesting can be a useful contributor to returns with a $50,000 portfolio.

Tax loss harvesting can enable you to offset capital gains or realize a loss to potentially reduce your investing tax bill.

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Tax-loss harvesting doesn't necessarily impact your investment strategy, because when an asset is sold for tax purposes an asset which closely tracks it can be purchased in its place.

With a $50,000 portfolio, you want to use Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) to diversify as broadly as possible.

Investment options for 50k

Owning every share in the S&P 500 would be very expensive if you bought stocks individually, but with an ETF that tracks the S&P 500, you can own the index through a single security, broadening your portfolio without having to monitor hundreds of individual stocks. ETFs are highly liquid, low-cost investments.

Investment options for 50k

Liquidity means they trade on the stock exchange when the market is open (you can get in and out of them easily), and they usually have much lower fees than mutual funds.

ETF Annual Fee
Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (Ticker: VOO) 0.05%
iShares Trust Core MSCI EAFE ETF (Ticker: IEFA) 0.14%
iShares Core MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (Ticker: IEMG) 0.18%
Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF (Ticker: BND) 0.08%

Your investing strategy should include stocks that generally show superior long term returns historically (this will probably include companies will small market capitalization and low price-to-book ratios). It should also include instruments to de-risk the portfolio such as bonds, Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) and real estate.

How to Invest 50K This Year | Retire a Millionaire (Start with 50,000)

While the stock market can be risky, investing for the long term and holding asset classes that may help offset its ups and downs can help manage risk. If you have $50,000 in a brokerage account or IRA, you can link it to FutureAdvisor now to get a free analysis and step-by-step instructions on how to balance it for long-term growth.

To recap, here are the best steps you can take to secure your financial future:

  1. Fund an emergency account that will allow you to live without income for a couple months.
  2. Consider "investing" in yourself or your family by using the money on education.
  3. Invest for the long term by appropriately capturing any matching funds from your employer, and maximizing contributions to your Roth IRA and 401(k), in that order.
  4. Keep trading fees low by seeking out low-fee ETFs for equities and bonds.
  5. Harvest investment losses to offset your taxes.
  6. Diversify your investments to spread your risk widely - that strategy could save your wealth, and it's backed by Nobel Prize-winning research!

    Investment options for 50k

    FutureAdvisor can show you how for free.