Author Topic: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?  (Read 9170 times)

TypicalVillain

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What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« on: March 16, 2015, 05:58:33 PM »
For those that put most of their retirement $$ in indexes, do you put some fraction in other investments? I personally put about 80-90% in indexes (always maxing out target retirement fund in Roth IRA and then in taxable vanguard account with the same allocation). But I like having some extra for more speculative endeavors. Even though they are riskier, I like having something to work on. These are what I'm doing:
  • individual stock plays - a few biotechs and other stocks
  • p2p investing with LendingClub (just getting started with that)
  • crowdsourced investing
What about you? I'm always looking for new ideas. I'm interested in crowdsourced real estate but it's currently only limited to "accredited investors" and so far I don't qualify :(
« Last Edit: November 27, 2017, 03:43:27 PM by TypicalVillain »

GGNoob

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #1 on: March 16, 2015, 06:32:20 PM »
My wife and I each have a spending budget. Using Mint, anything we don't spend rolls over into the next month. My wife likes to spend hers every month on clothes, shoes, etc. I don't have much I want so just last week I was trying to figure where to invest my money. I thought about Loyal3 since it would be easy to send $50 or $100 a month to it and have it 100% invested. But I also wanted to try out Robinhood and invest in whatever stocks I felt like. But then I started thinking how I don't know anything about stock picking and how I'd prefer not to lose most of my money. I also wanted 100% of it invested and liquidity. So I ended up with Betterment. It's not "fun," but this way my spending money is fully invested and working for me until I find something big I want to spend it on. It also then allows me to make small deposits and I can buy/sell whenever I want without worrying about short term trading restrictions.

The rest of our money is invested in mutual funds, mostly index with the exception of Vanguard Wellesley and Wellington funds. Someday I'd like to invest in Lending Club again as it was fun with good returns while I tried it out for a couple of years.


2Birds1Stone

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #2 on: March 16, 2015, 07:01:59 PM »
My wife and I each have a spending budget. Using Mint, anything we don't spend rolls over into the next month. My wife likes to spend hers every month on clothes, shoes, etc. I don't have much I want so just last week I was trying to figure where to invest my money. I thought about Loyal3 since it would be easy to send $50 or $100 a month to it and have it 100% invested. But I also wanted to try out Robinhood and invest in whatever stocks I felt like. But then I started thinking how I don't know anything about stock picking and how I'd prefer not to lose most of my money. I also wanted 100% of it invested and liquidity. So I ended up with Betterment. It's not "fun," but this way my spending money is fully invested and working for me until I find something big I want to spend it on. It also then allows me to make small deposits and I can buy/sell whenever I want without worrying about short term trading restrictions.

The rest of our money is invested in mutual funds, mostly index with the exception of Vanguard Wellesley and Wellington funds. Someday I'd like to invest in Lending Club again as it was fun with good returns while I tried it out for a couple of years.



Why did you pull out of Lending Club? If you don't mind sharing.

GGNoob

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #3 on: March 16, 2015, 07:53:41 PM »
Why did you pull out of Lending Club? If you don't mind sharing.

I liquidated my taxable account to pay for a business investment. Shortly after, I discovered Boglehead's and read a few books. I then invested our Roth IRA's at Vanguard and wanted our taxable account to be more liquid to use for emergencies. I also didn't want to be paying 25% tax on the interest income. So I probably won't do the taxable again anytime soon due to taxes and liquidity. I know you can sell notes and I did it fairly quickly, but I don't want to have to deal with that when I need money the most.

I'm thinking someday, if Lending Club is still around, I'll roll over a 401k into a Traditional IRA at Lending Club. Once I have one to roll over that is and it may be a while...

Louisville

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #4 on: March 18, 2015, 11:08:52 AM »
In 2003 I opened a Sharebuilder account and bought four ETFs based on water/water delivery infrastructure, etc. Water is the new gold, blah-blah-blah. I haven't added any new money in a while. It's done just a tiny bit better than the US market at large. Maybe, as water resources become more strained, they'll do better. This is way less than 1% of my total retirement investments.
ETFs:
CGW
FIW
PHO
PIO

sabertooth3

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #5 on: March 18, 2015, 01:32:32 PM »
I like to dabble in options trading. Of course, this is on a very small scale and never, ever using margin.

Retire-Canada

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #6 on: March 18, 2015, 01:45:00 PM »
What about you?

100% invested in index funds and mutual funds.

I don't really have any "fun" money when it comes to investments.

-- Vik

Jags4186

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #7 on: March 18, 2015, 01:54:27 PM »
I have 90% of my portfolio in S&P500 index or TSM index.

10% of my portfolio is in LEXCX--the Voya Corporate Leaders Trust.

21 stocks held permanently long which I can follow and they do all the reinvesting for me. After expenses and over 80 or so years it has beaten the S&P 500 by 0.12%.  Boring but gives me some stocks to actually follow.



Mississippi Mudstache

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #8 on: March 18, 2015, 04:42:07 PM »
I'm holding 2.5% of my portfolio in my company's stock, because I believe it is undervalued by about 20% at the moment. That's about as exciting as I get with my investments.

Dodge

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #9 on: March 18, 2015, 06:38:17 PM »
Maximizing my chances to profit is by far my most "fun" investing activity :)

Therefore, I put my "fun" money in:

VTSAX - Total Stock Index Fund - 3798 stocks including Apple, Microsoft, and Google  https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0585&FundIntExt=INT

VTIAX - Total International Stock Index Admiral Shares - 5812 stocks including Toyota, Nestlé, and Samsung
https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0569&FundIntExt=INT

VBTLX - Total Bond Market Index Admiral Shares - This fund is by far the most fun! 7120 bonds including Mortgages.
https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0584&FundIntExt=INT#tab=1

That's right, it's a fun hobby of mine to call up my mortgage-carrying friends when I receive a bond payment, and thank them for the spending cash for the month :D  Even better, when the rest of the market is running around like a chicken with their heads cut off, look at the CRAZY 15 year ride this fund has taken me on (blue line)



Yea, watching this fund puts a smile on my face every time.  Pretty much everything else is almost statistically guaranteed to earn me less money than the 3 funds above...not exactly my definition of fun. :)

theoverlook

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #10 on: March 19, 2015, 01:54:30 PM »
I had some money I'd generated by selling old possessions.  I was unlikely to do anything productive with it so I opened a brokerage account at Vanguard and bought some Shell stock.  We'll see, if it underperforms the market, it probably won't underperform it as much as a motorcycle or vintage car would have, which was my other likely purchases.

It's been kind of fun, so I might do more.  I have a motorcycle I rode once last year.  I'll sell it this spring, maybe that'll be another chunk of shares in something.

All of our regular savings go to index funds.

Gone Fishing

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #11 on: March 19, 2015, 03:11:18 PM »
I buy fruit, nut, and berry plants.  Probably around $100-$200 a year.  Getting a small dividend now, but hoping for more as they mature! 

sol

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #12 on: March 19, 2015, 03:17:27 PM »
Outside of my regular index fund investments, I buy ETFs for kicks.  Instead of more vtsax, I dabble in craziness like vwo, vt, and vde.

The recent run in US stocks means this little bit of dallying has cut into my earnings, but in the long run I think it still might pay off.

Vertical Mode

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #13 on: March 19, 2015, 03:26:18 PM »
I buy fruit, nut, and berry plants.  Probably around $100-$200 a year.  Getting a small dividend now, but hoping for more as they mature!

Probably the tastiest dividends around! ;-)

My investment "fun money" goes to... more VTSAX. As the 'stash grows, I might be tempted to follow Dodge's lead by throwing some bond funds into the mix. We'll see.

mostlyeels

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #14 on: March 19, 2015, 03:38:51 PM »
I buy fruit, nut, and berry plants.  Probably around $100-$200 a year.  Getting a small dividend now, but hoping for more as they mature!

That's great!  I have a dwarf mandarin and dwarf lime; after about 3 years the lime is giving me some nice fruit.  The mandarin is still too young, though I can't wait -- love mandarins.

Although I'm entirely in individual companies rather than indexes I don't really have any "fun money" investments, but now I'm considering putting 5% into an unlisted company that looks like it should do well in the 5-7 year timeframe.  In a way it's not really fun money since I've researched it as much as any of the other companies, so it's not like I'm putting my money in there and then "whee" it went up, or "boo" it went down.  Maybe I'm not fun enough? :)

FLBiker

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #15 on: March 20, 2015, 01:17:13 PM »
I buy fruit, nut, and berry plants.

Ha!  I love growing food!  My favorite things are stuff that are hard to find at the grocery store -- katuk, jaboticaba, jujube, etc.

In terms of actual investments, I do a bit of lending club (~.5% of my portfolio) but with the taxes I'm kind of losing interest.

My big fun investing "regret" is that I didn't dump a couple grand into BitCoin a few years back.  I set up an account with Dwolla and everything.  Owell!

Financial.Velociraptor

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #16 on: March 20, 2015, 01:26:35 PM »
I like to make bearish bets on the volatility indexes with 'extra/fun' money.  I have done well with long dated puts on UVXY.

eddieryan

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #17 on: March 20, 2015, 06:34:05 PM »
Aside from passive index funds there are only two individual stocks I own: Organovo and IBM. The real "fun" money goes to investing in horse racing. While many degenerates throw their money away making unintelligent wagers, there is actually a class of well informed money going into pari-mutuel pools. After reading 35 books on handicapping, I truly believe well educated and disciplined handicapping can yield consistent, tidy profits.

Vilgan

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #18 on: March 22, 2015, 09:47:08 AM »
Every once in a while, I'll see something that has had a run of bad news and prices seem lower than logic should dictate. When I see that, I'll throw a small % of my portfolio into it. The most recent example of this is I bought a chunk of RSX (Russian ETF) at $14.09. I also made plans to buy more if it hit $12 and $10. Other examples would be BP cratering to 27 in 2010 and BAC cratering in late 2011. I don't see something that seems extreme enough to act on very often tho so most of the time I just put everything into the standard index funds.
« Last Edit: March 22, 2015, 04:11:16 PM by Vilgan »

MarciaB

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #19 on: March 22, 2015, 12:09:22 PM »
I opened an account at Sharebuilder and buy dividend growth stocks. I've been following several big bloggers on this topic and find it really fun. And I get a kick out of the dividend days for my little portfolio.

I also like the fact that dividends are taxed at the long-term capital gains rate, that will come in handy during the ER years when my income is nice and low.

johnny847

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #20 on: March 22, 2015, 12:57:30 PM »
Before I decided to go 100% indexed, I contemplated buying a small amount of the ETF IPO. It buys shares of companies that just went public, and then sells them a fixed amount of time later (I forget how long this window is)

Peacefulwarrior

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #21 on: March 22, 2015, 01:35:33 PM »
Basically a post only to get people to click the affiliate link in your signature. How scummy.

TypicalVillain

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Re: What do you do with your "fun" investing money?
« Reply #22 on: March 22, 2015, 04:27:30 PM »
Every once in a while, I'll see something that has had a run of bad news and prices seem lower than logic should dictate. When I see that, I'll throw a small % of my portfolio into it. The most recent example of this is I bought a chunk of RSX (Russian ETF) at $14.09. I also made plans to buy more if it hit $12 and $10. Other examples would be BP cratering to 27 in 2010 and BAC cratering in late 2011. I don't see something that seems extreme enough to act on very often tho so most of the time I just put everything into the standard index funds.

This is an interesting strategy. I did that myself, picking up some energy funds. The stock market does tend to over-react to immediate crises. The real question is of course whether people are dumping stock (etc) for a good reason? I guess if it's a company that still has good revenue streams, but just has short-term changes to the economics of their industry (e.g. falling oil prices are certainly temporary, since nothing fundamentally has changed) then maybe it's a good idea.