How to invest 100k
"How to spend the money is up to you. That includes spending money on your house. (This is a safer way to look at it than an ""investment"". Not that it can't ever be treated as such, but that doing so often makes it easy to justify bad decisions and overspending on the house.) So with regards to the mortgage: So if it's not a monstrously huge deal, you might prefer to avoid default. Now,  how to invest the rest while waiting to spend it, now..." "Your question is listed as ""How to invest 100k"", not how would I find someone without a hidden agenda - so I'll answer that: It depends. I believe the best choices available are essentially as follows: If you are looking to pay for your childrens' college, it might be nice just to put the money in a Roth IRA and have that done right off the bat. If you disciplined enough to keep the money invested in some type of stock indexed fund, that might be good - the stock market has often outperformed almost every other form of investment over the very long haul. But if you could see yourself tapping it for things, then you might not want this. Another option is to put the money against your house. If that doesn't pay it off, refinance the remaining portion into a lower rate for less years. Obviously this knocks down a huge portion of the interest (duh) and gives you a nice cash flow you can use for investing. Also, the money you've put into a primary residence is pretty safe. I believe in some cases, safe even from bankruptcy. But as you've noted, being underwater on the home you are essentially throwing that money away in some way or fashion. And really, all in all, houses are terrible investments. You never really get your money out of your primary home, unless you downsize. The money is essentially ""saved"" without an equity line. This is a good choice if you're not disciplined. Your choice depends on: Of course, you can do any combination of these things and as Dave Ramsey is apt to remind his listeners and callers: you ought to have your emergency fund set before you do any of these things." The best way to invest in college for your kid is to buy an investment property and rent it out. You might think I am really crazy to ask you to you to buy a real estate property when everyone is running from real estate.  Go where others are running away from it. Look where others are not looking. Find out the need for a decent rental property in your city or county and start following the real estate market to understand the real activities including the rental market. I would say follow it for 6 months before jumping in with any investment.  And manage your property with good tenants until your kid is ready to go to college. By the time your kid is ready for college, the property would have been paid off by the rents and you can sell the property to send your kid to college.
"Theory of Levered Investing Borrowing in order to increase investment exposure is a time-honored and legitimate activity.  It's the optimal way to increase your exposure, according to finance theory (which assumes you get a good interest rate...more on this later).  In your case it may or may not be a good idea.  Based on the information in your post, I believe that in your case it is not a good idea.  Consider the following concerns. Risk In finance, reward comes with risk and in no other way.  Investing borrowed money means there is a good (not small) chance that you will lose enough money that you will need to pull significant wealth from your own savings in order to make up the difference.  If you are in a position to do this and OK with that possibility, then proceed to to the next concern.  If losing a lot of money means financial calamity for you, then this is a bad idea.  You haven't described your financial situation so I don't know in which camp you fall.  If the idea of losing, say, $100K means complete financial failure for you, then the strategy you have described simply has too much risk. Make no mistake, just because the market makes money on average does not mean it will make money, or as much money as you expect, over your horizon.  It may lose money, perhaps a lot of money. Make sure this idea is very clear in your mind before taking action. Rewards Your post implies that you think you can reliably get 10%-12% on an investment. This is not the case.  There are many years in which a reasonable portfolio makes this much or more, but on average you will earn less. No ones knows the true long-term market risk premium, but it is definitely less than 10%.  A better guess would be 6.5% plus whatever the risk-free rate is (currently about 0%).  Buying ""riskier"" investments means deviating from the optimal portfolio, meaning you took on more risk than is justified by how much extra money you expect to make.  I never encourage people to invest based on optimistic or unrealistic goals.  If anything, you should be conservative about how you expect things to go.  And remember, these are averages. Any portfolio that earns 10%-12% also has a very good chance of losing 25% or more.  People who sell or give advice on investments frequently get you charged up by pointing at times and investments that have done very well.  Unfortunately, we never know whether the investments and time period in which we are investing will be a good one, a bad one, or an unexciting one.  The reality of investing is...well, more realistic than what you have described. Costs I can't imagine how you could borrow that much money and only have an annual payment of $2000 as you imply--that must be a mistake.  No individual borrows at a rate significantly below 1%.  It sounds like it's not a collateralized loan of any kind, so unless you are some kind of prime-loan customer, your interest rate will be significant.  Subtract whatever rate you actually pay from 6.5% to get a rough idea of how much you will make if things go as well as they do on average.  You will pay the interest whether times are good or bad. If your rate is typical of noncollateralized personal loans, there's a good chance you will lose money on average using the strategy you have described.  If you are OK with taking risk with a negative expected return, consider a trip to Las Vegas.  It's more exciting. Ethics I'm not one to make people feel guilty for doing things that are legal but of questionable morality.  If that's the case and you are OK with it, more power to you. I'm not sure under what pretense you expect to obtain the money, but it sounds like you might be crossing legal lines and committing actual crimes (like fraud).  Make sure to check on whether what you intend is a white lie or something that can get you thrown in prison. For example, if you are proposing obtaining a subsidized education loan and using it for speculation, I could easily see you spending serious time in prison and permanently ruining your life, even if your plan works out.  A judge and 12 of your peers are not going to think welfare fraud is a harmless twist of the truth. Summary I've said a lot of negative things here.  This is because I have to guess about your financial situation and it sounds like you may have unrealistic expectations of the safety and generosity of investing.  Quite frankly, people for whom borrowing $250K is no big deal don't normally come and ask about it on StackExchange and they definitely don't tend to lie in order to get loans.  Also $18K a year doesn't change their quality of life. However, I don't know.  If $250K is small relative to your wealth and you need a good way to increase your exposure to the market risk premium, then borrowing and investing may well be a good idea." So a interesting note is that this doesn't seem to take into account cost of living arbitrage OR investments. The reason it's so good to make that money isn't so you can spend it on sports cars and cheap (read: expensive) women. If you invest you can put away like 50k/year, which will probably net you at least 5% return per year (more if you're risky) . So you make 100k for like 5 years, put away 250k and get like 20k from doing nothing. Typically labor is a company's largest expense. So, when a company receives tax cuts that doesn't translate to more hiring. Long term, if the company expands it might, but it could also choose to invest in a better or different products, maybe more efficient business processes, or invest in overseas operations. Additionally, labor has a diminishing value... just because we could hire more people to make more things doesn't mean we should.   Side note: In many states, the largest employers are the state/local governments (schools, public services, etc), and healthcare providers.  This tax cut is great for people that are already invested, or high income earners because it lowers the overall tax brackets and aligns capital gains to those. So say I had a million dollars invested and earned a yearly 10% dividend return, I'd earn 100k in dividends and pay 25% as income tax. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonynitti/2017/07/13/what-will-the-trump-tax-cuts-mean-for-your-wallet/  However, something like 50% of all Americans are invested in the stock market. Only the top 10% average investments close to a million in investments (example above)... and 38% of all investments are owned by the 1%... Source: http://www.npr.org/2017/03/01/517975766/while-trump-touts-stock-market-many-americans-left-out-of-the-conversation  Tax cuts, while popular, wouldn't ever help stimulate consumer spending, esp. considering the amount of consumer debt that exists (~1 Trillion?). What these tax cuts would do create more debt for tax payers. You buy a $100k sport car, but don't buy any insurance. You take a curve too fast and jump out just in time to see your car go off a cliff, like a chase movie. The value went from $100k to zero in seconds. Where did the $100k go? You really have asked two different questions here: I'm interested in putting away some money for my family Then I urge you to read up on investing. Improving your knowledge in investing is an investment that will very likely pay off in the long-term - this can't be answered here in full length, pointers to where to start are asset allocation and low-cost index funds. Read serious books, read stackexchange posts, and try avoid the Wall Street marketing machine. Also, before considering any long term investments, build an emergency fund (e.g. 6 months worth of your expenses) in case you need some liquid money (loss of job etc.), and also helps you sleep better at night. What things are important to consider before making this kind of investment? Mainly the risk (other answers already elaborate on the details).  Investing in a single stock is quite risky, even more so when your income also depends on that company. Framed another way: which percentage of your portfolio should you put into a single stock? (which has been answered in this post). If after considering all things you think it's a good deal, take the offer, but don't put a too great percentage of you overall savings into it, limit it to say 10% (maybe even less). So a interesting note is that this doesn't seem to take into account cost of living arbitrage OR investments. The reason it's so good to make that money isn't so you can spend it on sports cars and cheap (read: expensive) women. If you invest you can put away like 50k/year, which will probably net you at least 5% return per year (more if you're risky) . So you make 100k for like 5 years, put away 250k and get like 20k from doing nothing. Most ETFs are index funds, meaning you get built in diversification so that any one stock going down won't hurt the overall performance much. You can also get essentially the same index funds by directly purchasing them from the mutual fund company. To buy an ETF you need a brokerage account and have to pay a transaction fee. Buying only $1000 at a time the broker transaction fee will eat too much of your money. You want to keep such fees way down below 0.1%. Pay attention to transaction fees and fund expense ratios.  Or buy an equivalent index fund directly from the mutual fund company. This generally costs nothing in transaction fees if you have at least the minimum account value built up. If you buy every month or two you are dollar cost averaging, no matter what kind of account you are using. Keep doing that, even if the market values are going down. (Especially if the market values are going down!)  If you can keep doing this then forget about certificates of deposit. At current rates you cannot build wealth with CDs. Here is an excellent article on the 7-Day yield and how to calculate the interest you would receive. So if you invested $1000 for 30 days: (0.0001 * $1000) / 365 ~= $0.000274 per day. Multiply by 30 days to yield $0.008 in interest.