If you had a hundred grand cash in your pocket...

[Siege]

...And you were looking for something to invest it in, what would you do?



Assume getting additional financing is not a problem.

100 000 in swiss bank with 10% interest.
You cannot touch the money for 10 years.
In 10 years you will have 200 000 bucks.
From there on, of your 10% interest send half to your checking account for you, half back into your swiss account.
20 years from the start you will have 300 000 bucks.
30 years 500 000 and so on.

[Barrister]

...And you were looking for something to invest it in, what would you do?



Assume getting additional financing is not a problem.

100 000 in swiss bank with 10% interest.
You cannot touch the money for 10 years.
In 10 years you will have 200 000 bucks.
From there on, of your 10% interest send half to your checking account for you, half back into your swiss account.
20 years from the start you will have 300 000 bucks.
30 years 500 000 and so on.

No bank in the world pays 10% interest.

[Jacob]

There are Swiss Bank accounts that give 10% interest p.a.? Which accounts are these?

[frunk]

Simple interest no less, not compounded.

[Barrister]

No, I've been saving for years. Investing here and there in the market and stuff. My original plan looks less good, so...

This is my not-to-be-in-stocks money. I have another sizable chunk in that already that I trade with. This was supposed to go in some rental property or something like that. At this point I'm tired of chasing real estate that isn't coming on the market and I want to do something.

Any of you assholes starting a business? Feel a super awesome creative desire to make sausage? Does real estate in your three-horse town just happen to be at a promising juncture? Do you have a great idea for a new microbrew?

Life does not reward work. It rewards risk. Brainstorm.

Rather than invest yourself in a business (or in real estate) why not just invest in a nice REIT or two?  I know you said "not in stocks", but a REIT isn't the same thing as a stock.  Or similarly, invest in some nice dividend-paying preferred stock (which isn't quite the same as common stock).

[Caliga]

a REIT isn't the same thing as a stock

[Camerus]

Otto, do you know what's the skinny on property management companies?

They can make sense, the more work you do personally for your rental business the more profit you make. Property management makes sense for basically three sets of investors as I see it:

1. Individuals who own a single property in addition to their residence that they would like to rent out, but have no means of maintaining. An example I've seen is basically a woman we know who is in her mid-60s, whose very elderly mother requires care and the woman decides to move in to her mother's house to take care of her. This leaves her own home vacant, and she decides to rent it out to generate income while dealing with end of life issues and such with her mother. As a mid-60s widow with no handyman skills or energy to deal with it, paying on average 10% of her rental revenue to the property management company to handle all the details makes sense.

2. Entry to midsize real estate investors who don't have enough time to manage their own properties and who can pay the property management fee and still generate a profit. This would technically be us, but we've gone another route that keeps our profit margins healthier. Generally the more properties they own the more likely you can pay for property management and still make an acceptable profit. People like my first example are just looking to generate a small amount of income and probably own their rental property outright (not really ideal for real estate investing, it's better to finance as much as possible vs own everything outright) whereas people in this category most likely have financed the purchase of 1-10+ properties.

3. Larger players. A lot of these are actually "real estate developers" who build huge condo or apartment projects. They don't want to be land lords of any one property for very long. With condos they usually sell as many condos as they can to start, and then will use a property management company to rent out the rest as they find buyers over time. Since these players are primarily in the business of developing real estate they aren't interested in holding any properties for long or managing them. When they build large scale rental developments their goal is to find a company that is in the large scale rental business to buy the whole complex from them. Sometimes these relationships can get to be "incestuous" you see a lot of times big property developers may have an ownership group that also owns a separate property management group and then one of their firms is a customer of the other. They also usually tend to make each individual development its own stand alone business and etc.

Thanks Otto.  I asked because I would fall into the first category (I live in China most of the year).  Seems a potentially viable option for the future.  I'm weighing my options as I have no benefits of tax shelters for retirement stock investments as a non-resident, so that is one reason why real estate might potentially make more sense for me.

[Barrister]

a REIT isn't the same thing as a stock

hmm... A quick investigation shows this might be a cross-border thing.  In Canada a REIT is not incorporated - it is a trust.  As such there is no stock - instead you buy units in the trust.

But maybe US REITs do in fact have stock.

[DGuller]

If I had a hundred grand cash in my pocket, I would be furiously trying to figure out where the rest of it went. 

[fhdz]

You could fund my work as an artist. Can't guarantee a return though

On a more serious note, I've thought several times about owning/operating an interior/exterior painting business which also does mural work. I could also use it as a venue for other commissioned artwork too - i.e. paintings on canvas, mostly - but the bread and butter at least at first would be straight-up paint crew work.

[Ed Anger]

If you need a car repo guy, I can do it.

I need to bulk up and get a chain for my wallet tho.

MAH MULLET

Fuck that noise.  That shit's more dangerous than bail bonds. 

MAH ACKOORA

No shit. Nobody's Caddy is worth bleeding out from a stomach wound.

Fine. I'll assemble my own crew.

[CountDeMoney]

Fuck it, MiM. 
Shave off $25K, blow that on a trip to one of LA's swankiest suite hotels, hook up with one of the high-end escort operations that's off the grid, bang the porn stars you've always wanted to bang and do all the coke you've wanted to do over a 4 day booze- and Viagra-fueled weekend and then invest the other $75K, which is still a nice, solid, round number to work with.

Money is temporary, but memories last forever.

[Caliga]

But maybe US REITs do in fact have stock.

There's no maybe about it. I own stock in both REITs directly as well as ETFs that hold (mostly) REITs.

[Phillip V]

Adopt a child.

[Admiral Yi]

One interesting investment option I read about in the Economist is peer to peer lending (it might have a different name).  When I first read about it a long time ago I thought it was sort of like microfinance: "lend me $200 so I can buy a used bike to deliver newspapers."  Turns out the majority of it is credit card consolidation loans.  People go on these sites to refinance their 18% balances at 14%.