Investment Products
Last updated December 19, 2024
Many investments could help you achieve your financial goals.
The table below includes the major investment categories:
stocks, bonds, real estate, gold and crypto.
Although we've included them in the table, gold and crypto are
not recommended by all advisors.
This is for a reason—they don't generate earnings or cash flow.
As such, they are impossible to price and can have extreme volatility (price fluctuation).
Although assets like Bitcoin have
performed extremely well, they've also had
boom and bust cycles that completely broke many investors.
We included historical annual returns, but realize these are not an indication of future performance.
We averaged over feedback we received from experts to provide
expected annual returns over the next decade (as of December 2024), included in the table.
Please realize such predictions are notoriously inaccurate—it seems
no one can predict such things reliably. Higher
expected average returns typically go hand-in-hand with higher risk and/or volatility.
Notice the rightmost column, which provides a recommended upper limit on how much many experts recommend
investing in each category.
This article contains a simple, high-level
discussion of many of these asset classes.
| Category | Fund | Historical Annual Returns | Expected Annual Returns (next decade) | Max Recommended Allocation |
|---|
US Stocks |
VTI |
11% |
4% |
80% |
International Stocks |
VXUS |
9% |
7% |
50% |
Real Estate |
VNQ |
9% |
5% |
25% |
20+ Year US Treasury Bonds |
TLT |
5.5% |
2% |
40% |
7-10 Year US Treasury Bond |
IEF |
4% |
1% |
35% |
Treasury Inflation-Protected Bonds |
VTIP |
<1% |
1% |
15% |
Gold |
IAU |
11% |
1% |
10% |
Cryptocurrency |
BTC |
>300% |
N/A |
5% |
Please click here for a more complete list of investment options.
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