I'm looking for advice and/or some good reading to help my wife and I decide where to put our money. We are at the point where we can start throwing a decent percentage of our income for investing, and I'm becoming convinced that it could be worth it to only invest up to the match in our qualified retirement accounts, and then put the rest in non qualified brokerage account. The biggest reason: liquidity is very attractive to us.
I see some major expenses coming up in the next 5-20 years that we would not want to access our emergency fund for. Here are some of the things I'd imagine us access this proposed brokerage account for:
1) we both have old cars over 200k miles
2) we own an old house, 150 years old. Seems to be in good shape, but you never know
3) 2 young kids, so college is more the 15-20 year range, but I have my reservations with 529s ( a. I don't think college is a required route for everyone, b. I don't want to create a disincentive for us to minimize college expenses as much as possible because we have savings set aside that can only be used for education)
4) we are unsure where we want to go with our financial future. My wife likes that idea of having rental properties, while I'm okay with that, but I also don't want to have multiple mortgages. For us to save the required money to buy outright, it would probably be smart to have compound interest help us out.
5) Kind of like reason 4, but I like the idea of having access to money to take advantage of opportunities as they come. We both have a lot experience and success in retail and restaurants, so it may be nice to have our business someday, or buy real estate if there's a deal that comes up... however the opportunity takes form, I like that idea of having the freedom to not let it pass by.
As far as retirement, if we continue to go up to the match, we have enough to have a comfortable "traditional" retirement, so its not like us accessing this brokerage money would be taking away from our retirement per se.
Thanks for your thoughts