Best No-Effort Investments?

Quote from ny153 : i am sorry to disappoint you but there is no "no effort" investment. Free cheese is only in the mouse trap.

At what point did I say 'no effort'?

Thanks for all the input everyone. I decided to go with a Roth IRA life cycle fund. Pretty good returns (~5-7% in the past 5 years, ~6% past 10), and it's easy to set up auto deposits from my banking accounts. I set it up with Vanguard, they have awesome customer service!

Quote from cbtexan04 : Thanks for all the input everyone. I decided to go with a Roth IRA life cycle fund. Pretty good returns (~5-7% in the past 5 years, ~6% past 10), and it's easy to set up auto deposits from my banking accounts. I set it up with Vanguard, they have awesome customer service!

Great job on deciding on the life cycle fund, however, DO NOT choose the fund based on its past performance. Past performance does not guarantee future performance. I believe you should decide your risk tolerance and choose the appropriate matching fund.

Let me put it to you this way. You are young and have time to learn the stock market. If you are smart and good with numbers, you can't afford NOT to spend time learning the stock market. Why don't you put in a little effort to make your money work for you, and you can retire earlier or with a better standard of living? A little investment in time now can pay off many times over in the long run.

Find a new new dentist office/practice and loan them a few grand for marketing but ask for a certain return back on your money. Pretty no-effort way to get a good return.

OP, I'd suggest buying silver coins. They're about $34/ea right now.

Quote from cbtexan04 : I'm a 22 year old in grad school (Computer Science), and I just got married. Therefore, I don't have the time to sit down and get messy with stocks/etc.

You have no choice but to spend some time studying personal finance so you won't make really bad decisions or hold wrong assumptions. You won't choose the very best investments, and it's a waste of time to try. Choose reasonably good investments -- no sales commissions, low overhead costs (expense ratios), that let you cash out any time (no contracts or redemption fees). Investing in a bit of everything isn't a bad way to go, and you can do that with target mutual funds or fixed allocation funds (balanced funds like Wellesley Income or Wellington, or Fidelity's 4-in-1).

Quote from cbtexan04 : Traditional savings accounts are terrible. No benefit in that. CDs are meh.

Don't assume that, because 0.7% APR in a savings account is still better than 0.0% for cash stuffed under the mattress, and safer.

Quote from cbtexan04 : I was thinking that mutual funds/Roth IRAs are the way to go. With a Roth, I could take the money out at >5 years in the case of an emergency, yet still get ~4-5% interest/yr. Is there anything I'm missing?

You'd better check the track record of such investments because the stock market lost half its value from about mid 2007 to early 2009. OTOH it's almost doubled since then. Of course you'll always know exactly when to sell high and buy low, right? Check the volatility (standard deviation) of various investments, and don't rely only on the graphs that show what $10,000 has grown to but also the graphs showing annual gains and losses.

Actually with Roth IRAs you can take out your contributions at any time, without tax or penalty. Only withdrawls of profits before age 59.5 are taxed.

Read the John Bogle and Burton Malkiel books. Ignore CNBC. Watch http://www.WealthTrack.com online or on PBS.

Quote from cbtexan04 : I decided to go with a Roth IRA life cycle fund. Pretty good returns (~5-7% in the past 5 years, ~6% past 10),

Past returns are no reason to assume a fund is good or bad. You really have to be careful here because some funds advertise being #1, but reached that position only by taking big risks or betting on one particular sector that did unusually well. Look at one of the hottest fund families of the 1990s, Janus: It ran a balanced fund (typically a mix of bonds and conservative stocks) that was #1 among balanced funds only because it bought a lot of risky tech stocks, and its bond portfolio was actually just average.

Quote from B9FYwspP8J85 : Let me put it to you this way. You are young and have time to learn the stock market. If you are smart and good with numbers, you can't afford NOT to spend time learning the stock market. Why don't you put in a little effort to make your money work for you, and you can retire earlier or with a better standard of living? A little investment in time now can pay off many times over in the long run.

Wherer would you suggest I can learn abouts stocks. I've been flirting with the idea, but I think its time I take some action.

Check out the bogleheads wiki
http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page

And the Bogleheads Guide to Investing is a very good read
http://www.amazon.com/Bogleheads-...+investing

Your local library probably has the bogleheads books available to check out.

The bogleheads style matches what you're looking to do.

Quote from thepoet : Where would you suggest I can learn abouts stocks. I've been flirting with the idea, but I think its time I take some action.

The two Peter Lynch books, One Up On Wall Street and Beating The Street, might be a good starting point. That's not to say you'll actually beat the street (i.e., do better than index funds) by following his advice, but Lynch is one of few money book authors (actually co-author, with John Rothchild) who's actually done it, unlike the vast majority of others, all who are less modest than Lynch.

The most highly recommended books about investing are by Warren Buffet's mentor, Benjamin Graham: The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis.

Another highly recommended book is How To Make Money In Stocks, by William O'Neil, which describes CANSLIM, his method of investing. But keep in mind that O'Neil (publisher of the Investors Business Daily newspaper, ran two mutual funds, the O'Neil Fund, which was liquidated in the late 1970s (not due to overwhelming success), and the New USA fund, another underperformer that was taken over by another fund. The New USA fund was run according to the principles taught in How To Make Money In Stocks. And I'm not saying O'Neil touts his CANSLIM system to get people to buy his Daily Graphs information service, not at all.

Winning The Loser's Game, by Charles Ellis is about investing but is loosely based on a book about golf that said unskilled golfers shouldn't try to play like pros. IOW don't try fancy, difficult stuff, and stick to the easier stuff.

Everybody knows someone who lost a job or a huge chunk of their retirement savings. Most people are just holding on to huge savings accounts that blow your mind at 1.0% interest.Everyone is afraid of the stock market.But by phone call and reading news paper is sufficient to earn money here we don't see any
effort.

I'll tell everyone here what I tell everyone in every other investing-related thread - MOST people do worse than the market by trying to pick their own stocks. Some do better, but this is NOT in any way related to knowledge. The people consistently beating the market are not beating the market because they spent more time reading investment books and learning about various industries, it's because they have good intuition about how a sector will do in the future, or whether a stock is likely to go up or down throughout the day (if they're a day trader).

So what should you, the 'average' investor do? Index funds. Index funds attempt to 'track' the market, meaning that in general an index fund will do about as well as a particular market.

If you invest in an index fund, on average you will do better than people that pick their own stocks. Yes, you can read all you want about the stock market, and different industries, and investing strategies, and what all of the technical indicators mean.. but at the end of the day, knowledge really won't help you pick better stocks. Going with an index fund puts you ahead of the guessing game, and gives you a lot of diversity without the effort of trying to pick hundreds of individual stocks.

Quote from heavylee : OP, I'd suggest buying silver coins. They're about $34/ea right now.

OP would be down 8% in 8 days if he would have bought at your suggestion.

Quote from thepoet : Wherer would you suggest I can learn abouts stocks. I've been flirting with the idea, but I think its time I take some action.

Look up investor blogs and stock market message boards, learn from the real pros. Stay away from big name media such as cnbc and marketwatch, those are garbage. start with investopedia and stockcharts.com. Read everything you can, and follow the stock market daily.