Jul 02 2008
Keeping your money valuable
What do I mean? Well, this means keeping up with inflation. I have talked about this in the past, and frankly never gave advice on how to do it exactly. Right now everyone in the stock market is getting hammered, commodities are through the roof, and gold is going up. Inflation, official numbers is about 4%..give or take. According to the original method to calculate inflation your looking at about 12 to 13%. Either way returns of 12 or 13 percent are unrealistic and 4 percent is hard to fins as well. So what would I do?
Well, this is what I am going to do. I am going to have a diverse investment strategy. This is something you could doo with a few hundred bucks, so don’t say your too broke to do anything. For just 21 dollars , right now you can buy a Silver Eagle, a US government backed Silver coin, that retains value as the dollar drops in value. If you have the money you can get a 1/4 ounce Gold Eagle for 259 dollars . The reason I like precious metals, is that they are not over bought like oil is right now. Plus gold has gone up 21% in the past 12 months. 21% interst sounds good to me. Also, with gold, you always have something of value. Platinum 1/10 an ounce Eagles are going for 225 and Palladium Maple ounces are going for about 509. These are all good choices as Platinum went up 16 dollars an ounce today, Palladium went up a dollar and change an ounce, but gold and silver were down a little bit.
The second ivestment I suggest is CD’s with at least 4% return rate. You can find a coupl of 2 year CD’s that have an over 4% return at bankrate.com . If you put money into a CD every month, you should always have money maturing after 2 years has passed, and there fore it will likely be liquid then. However, it takes 500 dollars minium to open most CD’s at bankrate.com. If you don’t have at least 500, ING direct has 60 month CD’s at 4% and shorter term CD’s at lower percentage rates. The minimum to open a CD is like 1 dollar.
Or you could pick up a few foreclosed on properties, fix them up and rent them out for a couple thousand. I found several houses in need of rehab in Detroit for under a thousand dollars. It might be worth the work it you can get back enough to pay the taxes and make a tiny profit.
