Ask HN: You have $35,000 how do you invest it?

15 hours agoby asim

It's an arbitrary number, but large enough to be meaningful. But here's the deal, you can't say you'll put it in an index fund, you can't say you'll put it in stocks, you can't say it'll go into crypto, you can't say it'll go into startups, you can't go on holiday, you can't pay off your debts, you can't renovate your home, pay your rent or mortgage. You can't put it in treasuries or a high interest rate savings account. Essentially you have to take this money and grow it by some other means. What do you do with it? How do you invest it?

Go!

Elevator pitch: It's not well known that the diesel engine in a diesel locomotive does not mechanically drive the wheels to make the train go, it turns a generator that supplies power to electric motors that turn the wheels. I'd like to build a better hybrid by replacing an EV's battery with a (towable) generator. ~$5k for SmartForTwo EV with an 84kW motor would be my choice. The generator needed is unknown so budget an electrical engineer for $10k or so and that leaves $20k for the generator. (The towable requirement is only in case the research proves to be a failure I could still sell electricity to my neighbors in a grid-down situation :) Production targets would be busses, 18-wheeler tractors, Cybertrucks... If we could attain a multiple of current mpg at decent speeds it would be a startup.

7 hours agoby goodthink

Machine tools.

A lot of people complain that China has made manufacturing cheap but they forget that manufacturing tooling is itself manufactured. These days you can construct a small factory for less than it costs to commute to one.

I'd probably also upgrade the machine I use for ML.

9 hours agoby msgodel

I would put it in a mattress. Because

  We must do something
  This is something
  Therefore we must do it

Is poor decision making, preservation is a very good way to handle wealth, and I don’t have a good idea.

Sure, I have lots of dubious ideas…$35k will buy a nice synthesizer, but wealth is not needing to grow your money and being wealthy is the ability to wait for appropriate investments.

6 hours agoby brudgers

What works for me may not be a priority to others but the freeze dried food I purchased in the last few years has more than doubled in value. I could sell it and / or I can eat it. There is no volatility in the foreseeable future. It will be at least 97% the nutritional value and taste for the rest of my life and the lives of my family members. It's value only increases in war-time. It is protected from future biological warfare contaminants that may get into the food supply. It can not be zeroed out by network hacks. It is much harder to steal than cash or digital currency. It does not require the internet. It can be sold, traded or bartered locally even if the concept of money ceases to exist. That is good enough for me personally.

12 hours agoby Bender

I know you said "you can't say startups", but I'll interpret that to mean "startup" as meant by SV types. Given the restrictions you list, the only investment that would interest me is funding my own small business.

9 hours agoby JohnFen

I’d probably use the money to build a small physical asset that serves a community — something like a coffee stand, a laundromat, or even a village solar charging station. Something low-maintenance, low-tech, and useful.

But honestly… I’m currently helping build a classroom in rural Tajikistan, where kids walk 5 km to school every day. Not exactly a revenue-generating asset — unless you count hope, literacy, and the occasional "thank you" as ROI.

So yeah, maybe not the most lucrative investment, but probably one of the most fulfilling

13 hours agoby nodirvaliev

Real estate. always.

35k is enough for a down payment on a small apartment. If you have a job, you can usually get a loan from most banks.

With good preparation and patience, you can cover all your costs by renting out your property and generate a monthly profit.

11 hours agoby MasihMinawal

In the past? Take some time off, do some reading, attend a couple college courses, fart around and see where the winds take me. Now? I would probably buy a bunch of musical equipment and start a music production company. But, in reality, I am attempting to acquire a business so this would make for a down payment on a loan.

13 hours agoby squircle

Create a mini-cat shelter. I don't know about growing the money, but you will have a lot of cats.

10 hours agoby admissionsguy

Buy gold bullion.

12 hours agoby The-Old-Hacker

HIMS AND HERS

8 hours agoby maxcomperatore

Food.

15 hours agoby midzer

The question is how active so your want to be with this? If you just want to buy something and sit on it and then sell it down the road for a decent amount of profit, you didn't exclude commodities, and while they wouldn't be my first choice of what to invest into (aka don't do this, this is not financial advice), but gold is a very traditional one that has appreciated enough in the past couple of years so as to not be totally ridiculous an investment. Assuming that $35k isn't a large fraction of your portfolio, that is. Diversification is the name of the game, so something not in the stock market that shows some history is enough to consider under the confines of this question.

But seriously, if there were some secret investment vehicle that wasn't so secret so as to actually be a secret, and that wasn't a scam half the time, people would know about it and talk about it as a real option. There's a reason that index funds in the stock market are the default advice for non-professional investors. If you're an active investor and have access to good deals, there are good deals out there, but not if you only have $35k. If you do have access to secret private equity deals, that would be investing into companies, but for the most part, ones that aren't start-ups.

Back to the question of how active you want to be with the money though. If you want to quit your day job and be actively doing something with the money, there's things you can buy and then maybe fix up, and then sell for a small profit. do that enough times and you've made a tiny bit of profit. At that price point, used cars that need work come to mind. How much you'd net isn't going to be all that large, and there's a large investment in tools and of time into it, but there's that. Getting a car and renting it out on Turo/Get around might be viable, or driving for Uber/Lyft but that's not a hands off money generator.

7 hours agoby fragmede