Hi Everyone!
This will be my first post ever here so glad to meet you all!
I recently received a large-ish lump sum in the form of a bonus at work. However, I plan to spend it within the next year (I will be going back to school to get a MS). Putting it in the stock market doesn't seem exactly smart to me, but I hate to put it into a high yield savings only earning 1.4%. Any thoughts on this? My feeling is the answer is to just put it in the savings account, but I was wondering if there were more creative ideas out there.
Thanks,
wilson2095
No matter what you do, once you go outside of a bank account you are increasing your risk of loss in the short term. Over many years it's a much better decision to invest the money in higher paying assets (stocks, bonds) but over 1 year nobody can guarantee you a greater gain than 1.4%.
In any case, if you really want to, you could do a diversified portfolio of VTSMX (Vanguard Total Stock Market Fund) and VBMFX (Vanguard Total Bond Fund) in perhaps a 50/50 or 25/75 split and hope for the best.
It also depends on how much money we're talking about here. If it's $10k, it won't make much difference either way. If it's $50-100k, then yeah it could be worth it.