Hi all, first time poster so apologies if I'm out of place.
As a simple background, I've just started working out of college at a 50k/yr salary position which offers 401k and profit sharing. Through the blessings of my father I am also debt-free, and I currently have around 100k in the bank. My father always worked very hard to provide for us. His mantra was "I take care of my kids." and it extended to the rest of our family and to the people he knew as well. It was this caring nature that has put me in such a very fortunate position already, and I want to make the most of it and not waste this great gift that he has given me.
My intent is to take 50-80k from the bank and invest it now to get the dividend ball rolling. In addition, I receive 1.5k every two weeks from my job which is direct deposited into my bank account. I am working on shaving my living expenses down to that 50-75% range (so about 750-1500 a month), so that I can be feeding most of my salary into my investments and reinvest 100% of the dividend as well. Depending on how much I can invest, how much more I make in years to come (my employer and I had discussed pay-raise options during my interviews), and how efficiently I can live while still being healthy and happy, I think it shouldn't be hard to retire from regular work before I'm 35 (or in 11 years). By then I want to be living off of about 1k a month and continue investing any higher dividend, so that I can continue to raise how much I have. In this way, the amount I can actually spend should increase, allowing me to make payments as needed for discretionary spending as needed.
My problem is that I'm just so overwhelmed by everything that is investing. Finances were never very interesting to me before, but in response to MMM I've been trying to get more into it by studying different terms and reading articles on Investopedia. I have also been slowly working through the blog, and just recently an NPR story once again brought that word to my mind: Vanguard. I understand the concept, and why they're a strong investment choice, but it seems almost too easy, you know? I'm the type who easily succumbs to analysis paralysis, and when 10's of thousands are on the line you can be darn sure that I'm right well scared stiff. The fear of losing my investment money in a faulty decision is very real, and I just don't know if I can invest so much so freely into one place. Even if indexes do build against the whole of the market, I find the notion of investing all of it with one enterprise rings too much of 'putting all your eggs in one basket'. Is there real reason for my worry, or am I blowing it out of proportion? And how much of my plan is reasonable overall?