Microsoft Corp Apple Inc Amazon.com Inc Facebook Inc A Berkshire Hathaway Inc B Alphabet Inc Class C Alphabet Inc A Johnson & Johnson Visa Inc Class A Procter & Gamble Co
It has always blown my mind that the answer for "retirement" now is to put your money in the online casino.
As a father of two young kids, the last thing I want to do is contribute to the erosion of any sense of privacy my kids may have in the future. Using Facebook as a tool for retirement is just as dumb to me as using Facebook for anything else.
Facebook is Facebook because they have an app that people love to use, and that gives them the power to sell and control placement in the communication between friends and acquaintances back to those same communities. They're not powerful because of their share price.
Index invest away. I have Facebook blocked at my router but I still own them via index funds.
Money isn't everything.
You're also not obligated to buy an ETF -- you can create your own "index" without much effort. The OP's $80k would let them do that, were they so inclined. Maybe not all 500 in the S&P, but a lot.
Your second answer goes completely the other direction. The answer suggests to time an investment in real estate, the least liquid investment with the highest transaction costs a typical investor could buy.
No one knows what housing market will be like 180 days from now, no matter how many times they're interviewed on CNBC.
I like your first answer better.
no one should just buy a foreclosed home without thorough preparation
When you are buying a typical real estate the cost of title search and title insurance are usually part of the settlement process and are included automatically, you don't have to do anything, all gets done for you.
The problem is that with foreclosures that they often are sold via auctions where you don't get to inspect the home, you have to pay cash upfront, getting title insurance is not so given either. Plus you have to do it all yourself. All serious issues.
Foreclosure is a slow, slow, slow process even at the best of times. People can avoid paying their mortgages and still be living in a property for many years. If you're imagining something that covers a significant amount of property that will take even longer.
BTW I just lost out on buying a house, the market is still there but it is much lower.
Mass unemployment will cause problems for many, but at the same time lots of countries are essentially forbidding evictions and that has to have a somewhat balancing action for the short-term. How well that will hold up is an open question, and nobody knows the answer.
Even if OP splits it into smaller, dollar-cost-averaging purchases they'll still be able to get VFIAX without a problem.
Lots of large companies are going to do big layoffs to survive. Many others are going to dump their entire workforces when they go under entirely. Large industries like travel and tourism and entertainment and gambling and the related services for same are going to get scaled back for years. Money for the non-wealthy (and by wealthy I include pretty much everyone who knows pointer math or web programming, as even having $-20k in assets if you're able to make $100k+ puts you far better off than most) is going to become harder and harder to come by. I expect this to result in a lot of evictions when the courts reopen, and lots of foreclosures about 3-6 months after the layoffs peak in 3-4 months. All of the figures I am guessing at here are +/- ~10 weeks and are sketchy guessing at best, because who the fuck knows what's going to happen the rest of the year with any potential second or third waves of disease, or governmental closure orders, or even the outbreak of another world war.
It sounds like you have savings and income. Personally, with all of this uncertainty, I'd guard both as carefully as you can. Millionaires can afford to take bigger risks right now, normal people with nest eggs generally cannot, as it's not certain that the jobs will be as plentiful or high-paying in the next ten years as they were the last.
If in doubt, stick with the index fund, and just "set it and forget it". If you want to get more actively involved (or if you don't plan to change cities much and don't already own a home), real estate is almost always a good long term investment as well.
My advice would be markedly different if you were asking about $8M or $800k and not $80k, but $80k isn't a ton of money these days (I'm guessing it's less than a year of your gross income) so I personally would go lower-risk for the first few hundred k before ramping up the potential for higher returns.
Alternately, wait for the housing market freefall that is scheduled to hit about 180 days from now, and buy a foreclosure or two.
EDIT: Cosigning the above recommendation about maxing out a Roth IRA each and every year as well, and of course maxxing out any company-matched 401(k) options.