Investing - my journey
One of my goals is to generate enough investment income to pay my bills. Thanks to the internet, I have found better opportunities for returns over the years. I want to share some of the ones I use and have benefited from.
I do max my 401K and below is how I invest for non retirement assets..
- Open a mutual fund only account at https://investor.vanguard.com/home/
Use their systematic investment tools to buy some of their low expense mutual funds on a weekly basis with no transaction fees. I go with 5 funds and contribute 100$ to each per week to :
- LifeStrategy Growth
-500 Index Admiral Shares
-International Growth
-Emerging Markets Select Stock
-Mid-Cap Growth Index Admiral
I never touch this money. It is on auto pilot.
I no longer buy individual stocks.
Any additional money I want to invest in the stock market I use betterment.com to buy into US Total Stock Market to benefit from their tax harvesting tool
https://www.betterment.com/tax-loss-harvesting/I took out all the equity on my primary home via a HELOC from Chase. I pay <4% interest and generate an average of 12% returns by investing ~5-10K per deal on multiple real estate crowd funding platforms. I make a good 8% extra spread on about 250K of investments.
The best one I like is Realtyshares (20+ investments) http://realtyshares.com due to decent minimums and the number of offers available.
realtymogul.com is a close second (5+ investments) due to its high level of deal due diligence but requires more higher minimums.
I have also tried out ifunding.com (2 deals) and peerrealty.com (3 deals). My peerrealty offerings have not returned much capital but overall I am able to generate 12% returns on my cash.I invest in startup companies using www.fundersclub.com
After 12 years of disciplined investing I have about 550K in retirement assets and 1mm+ in non retirement assets. I track my wealth and spending using www.mint.com
And to add on crypto. It is 2.5% of my assets now.
I would recommend not allocating more than 10% of your capital on alternate assets.
I know it is always hard to time the market and folks encourage holding crypto forever.
The approach I take is to sell my crypto once I make 20% of return using limit orders. As soon as I sell I create a new limit order to buy at 10% price discount to price I sold my crypto. I repeat this checking my portfolio once a day and on average have found myself making an extra 25% return with this strategy.
The other thing is I rotate into only alt coins that are established like litecoin when they have not appreciated enough relative to bitcoin.