Where Would You Invest $5,000?

I hope you all had a fantastic weekend and an amazing Christmas. I pretty much took the whole week off which was amazing but means that I have a lot to catch up on!

One of my biggest goals for 2014 is to get started investing in the stock market. I just recently finished up Jason Kelly’s The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing which has helped me to clarify some of my investing plans for the New Year.

I’ve also kind of lucked out in the practice area.

My $5,000 Investing Practice

A natural gas pipeline is being run through my county. One of my family members, who I am very close to, owns a bunch of property that the company wants to run the pipeline through. Translated – he is receiving a large sum of money for “leasing” his property to the natural gas company.

So, with my interest in investing I asked him if he’d let me invest $5,000 in the stock market for him and he went for it! Happily, went for it!

Okay now I’m to the point where I’m about to reread The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing so I can hash out my plan. Plus I want to do much, much more research.

Obviously, I don’t want to lose his money but he knows he’s taking a risk by investing it in the stock market. I think he’s pretty realistic.

So, now my question is where should I invest it?!? (I’m excited.)

His Investing Goals

I haven’t yet sat down with him to work out all of the details of the goals but let me tell you what I do know.

He’s set for retirement. He has a business and a ton of land worth a good amount of money that he plans to sell before he retires. He also owns two other businesses and has five rental properties. So this money is not going to be invested with retirement in mind.

Therefore my thinking is to go for slightly risky investments that could yield higher returns in a shorter amount of time.  I know I’m not going to make him rich but this is going to be some good practice for me. And, at the bare minimum I just don’t want to lose his money.

My Investing Plans

I don’t know exactly what I am going to do yet. What I do know is that I am going to take my fair share of time to perform some research and educate myself as much as possible.

My first instinct is to select five different stocks and put $1,000 each into them. I want to be very familiar with the strategies for choosing these stocks. Maybe two growth stocks and two value stocks? Dividend stocks? I don’t know yet.

If it were you and you had $5,000 to invest in anything you wanted, and it wouldn’t be the end of the world if you the lost the money, what would you do? Where would you invest $5,000?