House sold: invest the total sum or...?

[JanFromBelgium]

Hey gang,

I presume my topic has been treated before, but as English is not my mother tongue, I can't find any topics relating to my question, probably due to my poor search terms...

Question is: my wife and I have sold our house and have a 300K euro lump sum to give a good home. We both have a stable income and don't need this cash for a long time. I am tempted to just put it with the rest of our investments, being a 60 % in iShares Core MSCI World UCITS ETF (IWDA), the remaining 40 % in Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI). Would you recommend to put the whole sum at once into these indexes, or would it be better to spread this out in time (for instance over a period of 10 months, 10 % of the amount invested per month)?

Any leads, suggestions are more than welcome with these relative newbies :)

greetings,

Jan

[nereo]

Hello there

The terms you are asking about (so you can do your own searches) are "Lump-Sum investing" and Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA).

In brief, lump sum investing beats out DCA the majority of the time. 
Two things you might want to read:

JLCollins: http://jlcollinsnh.com/2014/11/12/stocks-part-xxvii-why-i-dont-like-dollar-cost-averaging/

Vanguard's analysis: https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&ved=0CDIQFjADahUKEwivtM_I3-fIAhUH7R4KHWwxC9A&url=https%3A%2F%2Fpressroom.vanguard.com%2Fcontent%2Fnonindexed%2F7.23.2012_Dollar-cost_Averaging.pdf&usg=AFQjCNEi6-z4J8iGXyxgShxjAWaGqsKXdw&cad=rja

[Radagast]

Like Nereo said, you are mostly likely to do best by investing it all immediately. I would favor the world index IWDA, instead of VTI, because the US is (likely) expensive relative to the rest of the world right now.

Why do you even have VTI? IWDA is already 60% US stocks, and 9 of its 10 largest holdings are the same as VTI. This puts 75% of your stocks in the US, which seems strange for a non-American. Not necessarily bad, just odd. Most people bias towards their home country/region.