Investing experts, what to do with $6k cash?

Exchange traded fund. Mutual fund share traded like a stock. The price of the share may be lower or higher than the actual Net Asset Value of the fund.

Can be good cause there is less tax effect and you can buy/sell anytime during the day, not at the 4:00pm NAV calc. Usually ETF's underperform though. Also you have brokerage fees.

 

Also how does it work with selling mutual funds?

Say you have $15K in holdings in Vanguard 500 index. Does it matter what time of day you sell them?

 

great thread!!!! i need all the help i can get with investing advice!

 

all those other options are nice.... but if you play an insturment, say guitar...
buy an old 60's gibson or real fender, for about $2000-4000 and you can still play it and pretty much have garenteed return

 

Most of the things you can do at this age are common sense:

Buy what you can pay for not what you can get credit for;

Don't spend a lot on furniture because your taste/requirements will change when you buy a house/get married;

Find a discount broker and put a little away each month (putting say $1,000 a month into an ETF is an excellent idea).

Since many folks your age have graduate school ahead of them it would be really hard to save too much for that enormous expense.

My $0.02

 

"buy an old 60's gibson or real fender, for about $2000-4000 and you can still play it and pretty much have garenteed return"

Where can you buy a vintage Gibson or Fender for 2-4k ???
New crud costs that much!

Collector guitars are like collector cars, The very desirable ones are Very Expensive.
The others are a dime a dozen.

Take the 6 grand and go on a vacation, see things that you would otherwise never be able to see, Invest in giving yourself some wonderful memories.

 

there are many for that price, they may not be perfect but there are many, i dont know the name of the paper but it is a bi-monthly paper only on vintage guitars, kinda like the hemmings motor news for guitars, its always at borders or barnes & noble in there newspaper section,

a while back i helped a friend get a 72' fender strat from the same mag, 3200$ with very little wear and tear and all it needed was a new neck pickup...

ill try and find the name of the paper...

 

Here's a tip.......Put half away in a medium term (10 years or less) Treasury and keep it until it matures (so that at least you didn't lose $3000 of your principal).
Play pretty hard with the other half in the stock market (e.g. RYTNX - goes up 2% if the S&P goes up 1%, but goes down 2% if the S&P goes down 1%).

Also, never take a tip......

 

A 72 Strat while a nice guitar, is not the same thing as a 59 Gibson Les Paul, 56 Gibson ES-5, or a 50 Fender Broadcaster.

The same way a 77 308GTB, is not the same as a 61 250 GTO.

The 308, and the 72 strat are not investor pieces,
while the GTO and the 50 Broadcaster are.