Advice on low-risk long-term strategy for extra cash?
I can think of three things you might do: Talk to a fee-only adviser. As the comments suggest, this would only be one or two sessions to lay out what all you have, establish what you want it to do, and write a plan that you are comfortable carrying out yourself. What do your 401k and Roth IRA look like? If you mean for this money to be long-term, then your retirement portfolio might be a good place to start. I don't currently own them, but one of my personally hobby horses is I-Series Savings Bonds, commonly called I Bonds. Even in the current low interest rate environment, they are a good deal relative to everything else out there. I summarized this more fully in my answer to another question. You can invest up to $10,000 per SSN per year, and the interest rate is the sum of a fixed rate plus a floating rate based on CPI. Currently the fixed rate is 0%, but the floating rate is better than what you can get from most other cash-like instruments. Congratulations on being in such good financial state.  You have a few investment choices. If you want very low risk, you are talking bonds or CDs. With the prime rate so low, nobody is paying anything useful for very low risk investments.  However, my opinion is that given your finances, you should consider taking on a little more risk. A good step is a index fund, which is designed to mirror the performance of a stock index such as the S&P 500. That may be volatile in the short-term, but is likely to be a good investment in the longer term. I am not a fan of non-index mutual funds; in general the management charge makes them a less attractive investment.  The next step up is investing in individual stocks, which can provide very big gains or very big losses.  The Motley fool site (www.fool.com) has a lot of information about investing overall. Look at a mixture of low-fee index funds, low-fee bond funds, and CDs. The exact allocation has to be tailored to your appetite for risk. If you only want to park the money with essentially no risk of loss then you need FDIC insured products like CDs or a money market account (as opposed to a money market fund which is not FDIC insured). However as others have said, interest rates are awful now.  Since you are in your early 30's, and expect to keep this investment for 10+ years, you can probably tolerate a bit of risk. Also considering speaking to a tax professional to determine the specific tax benefits/drawbacks of one investment strategy (funds and CDs) versus another (e.g. real estate). "So, you have $100k to invest, want a low-maintenance investment, and personal finance bores you to death. Oooohhh, investment companies are gonna love you.  You'll hand them a wad of cash, and more or less say ""do what you want.""  You're making someone's day.  (Just probably not yours.) Mutual fund companies make money off of you regardless of whether you make money or not.  They don't care one bit how carefully you look at your investments.  As long as the money is in their hands, they get their fee. If I had that much cash, I'd be looking around for a couple of distressed homes in good neighborhoods to buy as rentals.  I could put down payments on two of them, lock in fixed 30-year mortgages at 4% (do you realize how stupid low that is?) and plop tenants in there.  Lots of tax write-offs, cash flow, the works.  It's a 10% return if you learn about it and do it correctly. Or, there have been a number of really great websites that were sold on Flippa.com that ran into five figures.  You could probably pay those back in a year.  But that requires some knowledge, too. Anything worthwhile requires learning, maintenance and effort. You'll have to research stocks, mutual funds, bonds, anything, if you want a better than average chance of getting worthwhile returns (that is, something that beats inflation, which savings accounts and CDs are unlikely to do).  There is no magic bullet.  If someone does manage to find a magic bullet, what happens?  Everyone piles on, drives the price up, and the return goes down. Your thing might not be real estate, but what is your thing?  What excites you (i.e., doesn't bore you to death)? There are lots of investments out there, but you'll get out of it what you put into it." You can buy dividend stocks, just buy and hold. you will get cash or extra stock every quarter. You can also sell covered calls on your dividend stocks, this will give you even more cash. you can also... actually this rabbit hole goes very deep. just stick with my first sentence.
"Buy term and invest the rest is something you will hear all the time, but actually cash value life insurance is a very misunderstood, useful financial product. Cash value life insurance makes sense if: If you you aren't maxing out your retirement accounts, just stick with term insurance, and save as much as you can for retirement. Otherwise, if you have at least 5 or 10k extra after you've funded retirement (for at least 7 years),  one financial strategy is to buy a whole life policy from one of the big three mutual insurance firms.  You buy a low face value policy, for example, say 50k face value; the goal is to build cash value in the policy. Overload the policy by buying additional paid up insurance in the first 7 years of the policy, using a paid-up addition rider of the policy. This policy will then grow its cash value at around 2% to 4% over the life of the policy....similar perhaps to the part of your portfolio that would would be in muni bonds; basically you are beating inflation by a small margin. Further, as you dump money into the policy, the death benefit grows. After 7 or 8 years, the cash value of the policy should equal the money you've put into it, and your death benefit will have grown substantially maybe somewhere around $250k in this example. You can access the cash value by taking a policy loan; you should only do this when it makes sense financially or in an emergency; but the important thing to realize is that your cash is there, if you need it.  So now you have insurance, you have your cash reserves. Why should you do this?  You save up your cash and have access to it, and you get the insurance for ""free"" while still getting a small return on your investment. You are diversifying your financial portfolio, pushing some of your money into conservative investments." What is a good resource to learn about options trading strategies? Options are a quite advanced investment form, and you'd do well to learn a lot about them before attempting to dive into this fairly illiquid market. Yale's online course in financial markets covers the Options Market and is a good starting point to make sure you've got all the basics. You may be familiar with most of it, but it's a decent refresher on lingo and Black-Scholes. How can I use options to establish some cash flow from long standing investments while minimizing capital gains expenses? This question seems designed to get people to talk about covered calls. Essentially, you sell call contracts: you let people buy things you already have at a price in the future, at their whim. They pay you for this option, though usually not much if the options aren't in the money. You can think of this as trading any return above the call option for a bit of extra cash.  I don't invest with taxable accounts, but there are significant tax consequences for options. Because they expire, there will be turnover in your portfolio, and up front income when you take the sell side. So if you trade in options with close expiration dates, you'll probably end up with a lot of short-term capital gains, which are treated as normal income. One strategy is to trade in broad-based stock index options, which have favorable tax treatments. Some people have abused this though to disguise normal income as capital gains, so it could go away. Obviously the easy approach is to just use a tax advantaged account for options trading. An ETF might also be able to handle the turnover on your behalf, for example VIX is a series of options on S&P500 options. A second strategy I've heard of is buying calls and puts at a given strike price. For example, if you bought Dec '13 calls and puts on SPX @ 115 today, it would cost you about $35 dollars. If the price moves more than 35 dollars away from 115 by DEC '13 (in either direction), you've made a profit. If you reflect on that for a bit, you'll see why VIX is considered a volatility index. I guess I should mention that shorting a stock and buying a put option at the market price are very similar, with the exception that your loss is limited to the price of the option.  Is there ever an instance where options investing is not speculative? The term 'speculative' is not well defined. For many people, the answer is no. It's very easy to just buy put options and wait for prices to fall, or call options and wait for prices to rise. Moreover, the second strategy above essentially gives you similar performance to a stock without paying full price. These all fall under the headline of increasing a risk portfolio rather than decreasing it, which I figure is a decent definition of speculation. On the other hand, there are ways to use options minimize risk rather than increase it. You can buy underwater options as portfolio insurance, if your portfolio drops below a certain amount, you still have the right to sell it at a higher one. And the Case-Schiller index is run in part, on the hopes that one day there might be a thriving market for real estate options (or futures). When you buy a home or lend money to someone to buy one, you could buy regional Case-Schiller options to protect you if the regional market tanks. But in all of these cases, it's required for someone else to take the opposite trade. Risk isn't reduced, it's traded around. So technically, there is a speculative element to these as well. I think the proper question here is whether speculation is present, but whether speculation can be put to good ends. Without speculators, the already very thin market for options would shrivel faster. An extra payment on a loan is, broadly speaking, a known-return, risk-free investment. (That the return on the investment is in reduced costs going forward instead of increased revenue is basically immaterial, assuming you have sufficient cash flow to handle either situation.) We can't know what the interest rates will be like going forward, but we can know what they are today, because you gave us those numbers in your question. Quick now: Given the choice between a known return of 3.7% annually and a known return of 7% annually, with identical (and extremely low) risk, where would you invest your money? By putting the $15k toward the $14k loan, you free up $140 per month and have $1k left that you can put toward the $30k loan, which will reduce your payment term by $1k / $260/month or about 4 months. You will be debt free in 14 years 8 months. You pay $14,000 instead of $16,800 on the $14,000 loan, reducing the total cost of the loan by $2,800, and reduce the cost of the $30,000 loan by four months' worth of interest which is about $175 (so the $30,000 loan ends up costing you something like $46,600 instead of $46,800). By putting the $15k toward the $30k loan, you cut the principal of that one in half. Assuming that you keep paying the same amount each month, you will reduce the payment term by 7 ½ years, and will be debt free in 10 years (because the $14,000 10-year loan now has the longer term). Instead of paying $46,800 for the $30k loan, you end up paying $23,400 plus the $15,000 = $38,400, reducing the total cost of the $30,000 loan by $8,400 while doing nothing to reduce the cost of the $14,000 loan. To a first order estimate, using the $15,000 to pay off the $14,000 loan in full will improve your cash flow in the short term, but putting the money toward the $30,000 loan will give you a three-fold better return on investment over the term of both loans and nearly halve the total loan term, assuming unchanged monthly payments and unchanged interest rates. That's how powerful compounding interest is. "In most cases of purchases the general advice is to save the money and   then make the purchase. Paying cash for a car is recommended over   paying credit for example. For a house, getting a mortgage is   recommended. Says who? These rules of thumb hide the actual equations behind them; they should be understood as heuristics, not as the word of god. The Basics The basic idea is, if you pay for something upfront, you pay some fixed cost, call it X, where as with a loan you need to pay interest payments on X, say %I, as well as at least fixed payments P at timeframe T, resulting in some long term payment IX. Your Assumption To some, this obviously means upfront payments are better than interest payments, as by the time the loan is paid off, you will have paid more than X. This is a good rule of thumb (like Newtonian's equations) at low X, high %I, and moderate T, because all of that serves to make the end result IX > X. Counter Examples Are there circumstances where the opposite is true? Here's a simple but contrived one: you don't pay the full timeframe. Suppose you die, declare bankruptcy, move to another country, or any other event that reduces T in such a way that XI is less than X. This actually is a big concern for older debtors or those who contract terminal illnesses, as you can't squeeze those payments out of the dead. This is basically manipulating the whole concept. Let's try a less contrived example: suppose you can get a return higher than %I. I can currently get a loan at around %3 due to good credit, but index funds in the long run tend to pay %4-%5. Taking a loan and investing it may pay off, and would be better than waiting to have the money, even in some less than ideal markets. This is basically manipulating T to deal with IX. Even less contrived and very real world, suppose you know your cash flow will increase soon; a promotion, an inheritance, a good market return. It may be better to take the loan now, enjoy whatever product you get until that cash flows in, then pay it all off at once; the enjoyment of the product will make the slight additional interest worth it. This isn't so much manipulating any part of the equation, it's just you have different goals than the loan. Home Loan Analysis For long term mortgages, X is high, usually higher than a few years pay; it would be a large burden to save that money for most people. %I is also typically fairly low; P is directly related to %I, and the bank can't afford to raise payments too much, or people will rent instead, meaning P needs to be affordable. This does not apply in very expensive areas, which is why cities are often mostly renters. T is also extremely long; usually mortgages are for 15 or 30 years, though 10 year options are available. Even with these shorter terms, it's basically the longest term loan a human will ever take. This long term means there is plenty of time for the market to have a fluctuation and raise the investments current price above the remainder of the loan and interest accrued, allowing you to sell at a profit. As well, consider the opportunity cost; while saving money for a home, you still need a place to live. This additional cost is comparable to mortgage payments, meaning X has a hidden constant; the cost of renting. Often X + R > IX, making taking a loan a better choice than saving up. Conclusion ""The general advice"" is a good heuristic for most common human payments; we have relatively long life spans compared to most common payments, and the opportunity cost of not having most goods is relatively low.  However, certain things have a high opportunity cost; if you can't talk to HR, you can't apply for jobs (phone), if you can't get to work, you can't eat (car), and if you have no where to live, it's hard to keep a job (house). For things with high opportunity costs, the interest payments are more than worth it." "There is a site that treats you like a fund manager in the real market, Marketoracy, http://marketocracy.com/. Each user is given 1 million in cash. You can have multiple ""mutual funds"", and the site allows use to choose between two types of strategies, buy/sell, short/cover. Currently, options are not supported. The real value of the site is that users are ranked against each other (of course, you can op out of the rankings). This is really cool because you can determine the real worth of your returns compared to the rest of investors across the site. A couple years back, the top 100 investors were invited to come on as real mutual fund managers - so the competition is legitimate. Take a look at the site, it's definitely worth a try. Were there other great sites you looked at?" "There isn't really a generic options strategy that gives you higher returns with lower risk than an equivalent non-options strategy. There are lots of options strategies that give you about the same returns with the same risk, but most of the time they are a lot more work and less tax-efficient than the non-options strategy. When I say ""generic"" I mean there may be strategies that rely on special situations (analysis of market inefficiencies or fundamentals on particular securities) that you could take advantage of, but you'd have to be extremely expert and spend a lot of time. A ""generic"" strategy would be a thing like ""write such-and-such sort of spreads"" without reference to the particular security or situation. As far as strategies that give you about the same risk/return, for example you can use options collars to create about the same effect as a balanced fund (Gateway Fund does this, Bridgeway Balanced does stuff like it I think); but you could also just use a balanced fund. You can use covered calls to make income on your stocks, but you of course lose some of the stock upside. You can use protective puts to protect downside, but they cost so much money that on average you lose money or make very little. You can invest cash plus a call option, which is equivalent to stock plus a protective put, i.e on average again you don't make much money. Options don't offer any free lunches not found elsewhere. Occasionally they are useful for tax reasons (for example to avoid selling something but avoid risk) or for technical reasons (for example a stock isn't available to short, but you can do something with options)." "I would say that you should keep in mind one simple idea.  Leverage was the principal reason for the 2008 financial meltdown.  For a great explanation on this, I would HIGHLY recommend Michael Lewis' book, ""The Big Short,"" which does an excellent job in spelling out the case against being highly leveraged. As Dale M. pointed out, losses are greatly magnified by your degree of leverage. That being said, there's nothing wrong with being highly leveraged as a short-term strategy, and I want to emphasize the ""short-term"" part.  If, for instance, an opportunity arises where you aren't presently liquid enough to cover then you could use leverage to at least stay in the game until your cash situation improves enough to de-leverage the investment.  This can be a common strategy in equities, where you simply substitute the term ""leverage"" for the term ""margin"".  Margin positions can be scary, because a rapid downturn in the market can cause margin calls that you're unable to cover, and that's disastrous. Interestingly, it was the 2008 financial crisis which lead to the undoing of Bernie Madoff.  Many of his clients were highly leveraged in the markets, and when everything began to unravel, they turned to him to cash out what they thought they had with him to cover their margin calls, only to then discover there was no money.  Not being able to meet the redemptions of his clients forced Madoff to come clean about his scheme, and the rest is history. The banks themselves were over-leveraged, sometimes at a rate of 50-1, and any little hiccup in the payment stream from borrowers caused massive losses in the portfolios which were magnified by this leveraging.  This is why you should view leverage with great caution.  It is very, very tempting, but also fraught with extreme peril if you don't know what you're getting into or don't have the wherewithal to manage it if anything should go wrong. In real estate, I could use the leverage of my present cash reserves to buy a bigger property with the intent of de-leveraging once something else I have on the market sells.  But that's only a wise play if I am certain I can unwind the leveraged position reasonably soon. Seriously, know what you're doing before you try anything like this!  Too many people have been shipwrecked by not understanding the pitfalls of leverage, simply because they're too enamored by the profits they think they can make.  Be careful, my friend." non-conventional tip. reach out to another firm's risk manager and offer to buy them lunch in exchange for general tips. maybe even give them a call and introduce yourself. I did this when i landed myself in alternative investments - came from mutual funds world which is highly automated to ai world which has a lot of room for growth.