Getting serious about my money from a 25 year old

Hi everyone !
Great to see the wealth of experience I hope to tap into from these forums.

I support myself and my partner on an income of $80,000 (no kids yet) but we do have a rental property that we own (we are currently renting elsewhere for cheaper). I was thinking that since the economy is so turbulent, it would be a good time to pick up some shares for cheap and keep them as a long-term strategy (3 years+). I have created a watchlist and just watching mainly staples and business that have grown to asian regions as well. Is stocks the way to go at the moment ?

Should I be looking at anything else ? We have no other debt except for our mortgage and study debt of about 80k for my partner that will only kick in a couple of years, he has gone back to law school.

 

I think they offer much better value right now than property.

That said, I'm not convinced that stocks have HUGE upside over the 3 year timeframe, but they will probably perform relatively well versus other investment classes, with the exception maybe of local bonds (but that only over the short term ie within 12 - 24 months) as I suspect over the 10+ year time frame stocks at this level will markedly out perform bonds.

On the flip side I'm quite certain property will have LITTLE upside over the 3 year time frame, and will probably only offer mediocre returns over the 10 year timeframe.

All just my opinions of course, which are worth exactly what you paid for them.

 

stocks are good. mcdonald's cola amatil

 

Hi Meeta,

I can only give you my personal opinion here.

When you mentioned investing in stocks, what kind of strategy were you planning to use? Invest in the major blue chip stocks and then hold them for the long term in order to get dividend returns?

I dabbled for a bit in stocks, but still prefer property. I agree that property can be risky, but I think it's only very risky for those who invest in properties for capital gains or for negative gearing, whereby you rely very much on the market and your skill to pinpoint hot properties.

I'm an active positive cashflow property investor, so I tend to go for properties that are very likely to give me cashflow from the moment I purchase it, and which will give me very high cash-on-cash returns. This relies more on the numbers that are available today to prove to me that it can and will make me money. I also prefer properties because of the leverage factor.