This advice for is for my girlfriend specifically. She makes 200k per year but has exactly no investments of any kind outside of 50k in the bank. Excuses for this are a leach of a boyfriend drained her resources for 10 years and she likes expensive stuff.
I’m obviously hesitant to recommend individual stocks in case they lose money for her, and we are at market highs. I’m thinking a basket of dividend paying ETFs is the way to or to invest in certain sectors like communications and real estate. Or rock solid individual stocks that pay a nice dividend, like ATT at 7% yield.
She has about 40k to invest and she would invest most of her bonus which will be about 50k. And then steadying buying going forward, as well as reinvesting a dividend.
Any other ideas or links to investing for dummies type websites?
Then, just pick a target date later in the future. I’ve been thinking of changing mine. I may retire around 2030, but I have a fund chosen for 2035. But this is in my Roth account, the last $ I would use. Thinking maybe I should change it to 2040 or 2045. I may not live that long, but, hopefully the money won’t be used anyway.
Definitely Total Stock Market Index like VTI and throw in a few bond ETFs like AGG or BND. FFNOX can be a good alternative as it is 85% stocks, 15% bonds if you are looking to be aggressive, 70/30 If you are trying to catch up but either your time horizon or risk tolerance is less. Such a portfolio (70/30) would have lost about 40% during the great recession, probably 65% during the Great Depression.
70/30 has been an aggressive portfolio our family has used for years even in retirement. But that’s with 2-3 years of emergency savings.
Time horizon and risk tolerance matters. If her $50k became $30k or $15k if we had another Depression, is she the type who would simply sell and not invest or could she see it as a sale? Of course in 1929, it dropped 84% and took 25 years to recover while the real estate bust was a 57% drop and took six years to recover. I could be wrong but hope this helps. A target 2040 fund could be good if she has some time (10+ years) before she retires.
AT&T might have a high current dividend but the company is on the decline and having problems. Dividend is not secure.
And idea is to invest in country ETFs like ERUS and ICOL.There is another for Singapore. Many stock markets are much better values than our is at the moment. Then reinvest all dividends.
What you say is true. However, their poor customer service drives off customers. It took 20 minutes to get a human rep on the phone when there were billing issues with my corporate account. Not having the time to waste with their monkey business, I switched providers long ago. So did a lot of business owners I know. Comcast is so much cheaper and better service.
They switched the Turner employees to some crap dental plan and now the employees are mad as hornets.
