Any Investors in the House?

Paging @billt01

The Motley Fool is a useful website that has a lot of educational material.  I've never participated in their forum but it is my understanding that they have one.

John Bogle's work is good as well - and fairly easy to read.

Both of them point out how the investment industry is out to get your money and one of the biggest factors to determine how much money you'll have in the future is that it is inversely proportional to how much money you give them in transaction fees, annual expenses, etc.

waterfront property, you get to enjoy it the whole time before selling. renting out a beach front is getting pretty expensive as well, especially the airbnbs

ive had a boat for 33 years and its been  a better investment than my mutual funds i like the boat. unlike most, ive never bought the bigger and then bigger boat though.

I have several relatives who are heavily invested in rental properties. Almost all of the renovations are done in family, they could tell you the price of a new toilet or shower to the nearest nickel. My Dad never owned more than 3 rental properties and one was a trailer in the backyard that was usually occupied by relatives down on their luck. As they say about land, God isn’t making anymore of it. To really profit from it you have to put in the sweat.

@dbCooper offered some great advice above.  However, I'll suggest that playing around with some individual stocks can be a good exercise and lead to a great outcome.  It's about the only place where the math is in favor of the individual small investor.

A mutual fund manager can't just make a portfolio of 5-10 trusted blue chips and then 5-10 more risky stocks that were purchased based on some good market analysis.  They have to own hundreds of stocks.  so when one stock goes up 10-fold, it barely impacts the mutual fund because it only makes up 0.5% (or whatever) of the fund.  When that happens to an investor with only 10 stocks their portfolio essentially doubles.  

If you pick 5 stocks and 2 of them go completely bust and 2 of them just keep up with the market average, but 1 of them goes up 10-fold, on the surface it is easy to not think of that as a "win" - 2 losers, 1 winner, 2 average.  But if you invested the same amount in each one - let's say $1000 - and this occurred over a 5 year period such that the average ones went up 50%, you would turn $5000 into $13000 while the market average would be $5000 became $7500.  

I did something of this sort starting in the late 1990's when - based on Motley Fool recommendations - I bought $2000 of AOL.  It went to $6000 fairly quickly so I sold off $2000 of it and bought some Amazon.  In 2018 I sold the Amazon for $89k and used it as the down payment for a beachfront condo.

With that said, I'm not the guy who says he goes to Vegas and wins money every time.  Frankly, selling Amazon (instead of some of my other holdings) in 2018 wasn't the best move.  It has more than doubled since then and my other holdings haven't.  And over the years I've bought a lot of stocks of companies that went belly up and many that have underperformed the market.  At this point I've gotten so busy with work and other things so that I can't really pay as much attention as is needed to deal with some of the riskier plays so I have sold off everything that isn't a blue chip conservative holding.  

My point is, OP, after you have educated yourself, if you want to dabble in individual stocks, don't be afraid to do it - but recognize that it is a time commitment.  The reason you have to commit the time is that making the decision to buy is easy.  It's much harder to decide when to sell.

A good S&P 500 index fund is going to be a pretty simple way to build wealth over the long haul. It has extremely low fees and has a proven track record.  Don’t panic and stay the course. Always pay yourself first and you’ll retire in a good place.