Hey, I recently sold my dipshit company for $5m cash and I have spent some money buying real estate only about $400k (an office for myself, for 200 and commercial unit (not rented out yet)) and invested another 500k in stocks/bonds (with my inv broker). I am having a hard time finding good RE brokers who can find other properties for me (they all send me the same MLS listings, no private deals) and my investment broker is only able to provide me with 4-5% return, my own portfolio of 300k is doing better then his and I am new at this. So I am wondering, what practical advice anyone can give me so I can safely invest this money to beat inflation and live off of this for the rest of my life. Should I invest more of it into stocks? Should I buy a strip mall? or a strip club? :P I need practical advice investing, most stocks I have looked into for blue chip companies yield around 3%? and I would not want to put all of my money into stocks to make $150k a year off of $5m, with 1% being inflation and being taxed on that. Any sites/books/ideas let me know, I am thinking of doing a real estate course myself just so I can look at my own listings and invest properly into real estate.
edit: I am hoping the investments can be somewhat passive so I can focus on a new startup. I am in Ontario, Canada.
edit: I am 23, not married, no children :)
So good news and bad news, good news is you have choices, bad news is commercial real estate is (by some estimates) the next thing to go into the crapper).
Lets say you had $5M clear to work with. Yes, the 2 - 4% "return" is currently 'safe' money (which is to say treasury bill equivalents) so take $2M and buy a treasury bill 'ladder', these things are sold by the government quarterly and you can buy them at all maturities, so you split $2M equally into 40 parts, buy 10 year T-bills with their 3.5% return and you end up with about $70,000 a year (in the US at least) which is tax free. (So that is like having a salary of $110K/year before taxes.)You buy a place to live and if you want, you create another income stream to cover the taxes for that place.
At that point you've insured you're not going to go homeless or hungry and you are left with between 1.5 - 2 million to be a bit more speculative with. Putting .5 - .75M into equities is a reasonable way to capture that growth and it gives you a way to augment some of your return. If you want to just "participate" then buying index funds on the S&P 500 can do that with minimal hassle.
If you go the Angel route you can invite people to tell you how they are going to change the world and sponsor some of them. I suspect you will learn a lot doing this, but I would not expect it to be particularly profitable.
You can find another niche, create a company to fill that niche, build it up and sell it too.
Oh and I don't think you want a 'broker' what you want is a Financial Advisor (There is a separate certification for them, they don't trade stocks directly so they generally have less conflict of interest when it comes to fees).
Sounds like a nice problem to have, hope you do better than the Californians (the Lottery here has depressing statistics about how some very large percentage of lottery winners have lost it all in 18 months, sad really).