The conventional wisdom growing up was that you needed to earn a comfortable salary in the workplace to earn money. Period. Time’s have certainly changed.
Stocks, bonds, index funds, and a variety of business ventures are just a sampling of the ways that you can put your money to work for you. The idea is to have you earning money around the clock without necessarily putting in more hours or feverishly watching the stock market.
Creating a business from scratch, investing in a franchise, or simply providing the seed money and becoming an angel investor for another entrepreneur are completely valid ways of broadening your exposure. Remember that investing is anything but gambling with your money.
Smartest Business Ideas Worth Your Investment
A lot of people still carry around the notion that investing is gambling. Both involve potentially getting a lot for a little, true, but the thinking that goes into each and the processes are totally different.
When you invest, you carefully weigh the pros and cons and pick an investment based on the potential for a high return—unlike investing, gambling is a process in which you literally have no control over the outcome. Once you make your decision, that’s it. Pure chance.
Investing isn’t like that. Choosing to invest in a franchise or allowing a hedge fund manager to put some of your money in an index fund gives you the opportunity to recalibrate down the line by increasing or decreasing your investment. In other words, traditional investment is an ongoing process.
Investing in Healthcare
There’s also a philanthropic angle to many investment opportunities in that you can help actualize another entrepreneur’s dreams by fulfilling a kickstarter request for startup funds or choosing to invest in life-saving research for novel medical treatments.
Investing in healthcare makes a lot of sense in light of the fact that disease, medical technology, and disease treatment are global industries; medicine is becoming more personalized; and, people are actually living longer.
Peer-to-peer Lending
As a private lender embracing peer-to-peer lending (a.k.a., social lending or crowdlending) you can expect more robust returns than a bank would lending out the same amount of money. The reason is that peer-to-peer lending can be conducted completely digitally and with almost no overhead.
Peer-to-peer lending also has some other advantages working to its credit. With peer-to-peer lending, you can lend money at competitive interest rates to individuals or businesses.
Another advantage with peer-to-peer lending is that you can pick and choose the people to loan your money out to, the interest rate that you earn, and the total amount of loans that you end up making.
Index Fund
You’ve probably heard that “diversifying your portfolio” is a good thing yet wondered why that is.
The answer is summed up in the fact that index funds give you broader market exposure and nearly guaranteed higher returns than a traditional exchange-traded fund since an index fund gives you an annualized average return aligned to top-performing S&P 500 companies, automatic investment, and a shorter settlement period.
Starting a Business
Some folks like to play it safe and get a reliable return on their investment spread over many years. These people are attracted to things like money market accounts and annuities that give you a safe return on your investment—that’s especially the case with fixed annuities.
Other people have more ambitious entrepreneurial dreams because they think they’re setting on the next big idea or they want to define their own rewards and working hours by being their own boss. For that, nothing beats starting your own business.
If you’re thinking about owning a business but you’re less excited about researching regulatory issues and equipment leases from the ground up, then you might want to consider purchasing an existing business through a business broker or…
Investing in a Franchise
Franchising really does a beautiful job of blending the independence and thrill of private business ownership with the security that comes with investing in a proven system. When you sign a franchise agreement, you officially get to use that franchise’s brand and operational methods. And as far as an investment, franchising is extremely straightforward.
If you invested in a fast food franchise opportunity, for instance, you would essentially be responsible for the one-time franchise fee to help offset the cost of training as well as an ongoing royalty fee.
Your franchisor should set up with respect to marketing, advertising, training, hiring, and ongoing support. Franchising as an investment can provide you with consistent rates of return.
In fact, a recent report on franchising from the International Franchise Association found that consumer spending, employment growth and output growth were all up in franchising’s biggest subindustry, quick-service restaurants. For the right investor, a fast food franchise opportunity could be a very tasty investment, indeed.