The 8 BEST INVESTMENTS to make RIGHT NOW

One supplies its Graham here. So I checked my analytics the other day, and as it turns out, nearly 60% of you watching are in your 20s, or you just lied to Google about your age when they asked you how old you were so you can get around the age-restricted content. But either way, I know a big portion of you are in your 20s. You want to make a lot of money one day, and you want to know exactly what to do and what's gonna give you the best chance of making fat stacks one day.

So if that sounds like you, welcome to the club! You came to the right place, and you clicked on the right video. Of course, I'll level with everyone watching, just so we could set some expectations about these investments. I'll be honest; most likely, this is not gonna make you billionaire yacht rich one day. I don't think any of this advice is gonna help you one day afford a private jet or be able to go shopping without ever checking the price tag of what you're buying.

But everything I'm about to mention here is very realistic. Anyone can work towards doing it. It's very easy to do. It's going to allow you to comfortably retire and maybe even afford an exotic car or two. There we go. That's the brutal honest truth, and there's not going to be any false promises about what you could expect from this video.

So with that out of the way, these are the eight best investments that you can make in your 20s that ideally you could just buy once and then keep for the rest of your life. There's nothing complicated about it. I'm gonna be going over all the details that you're gonna need to know, and then hopefully at the end of the video, I will have earned your like for the YouTube algorithm and then perhaps, if I ask really nicely, I could earn your subscription on the video if you haven't already done that yet or hit the notification bell. Just go ahead and do that really quick! It's super simple, and that helps me out a lot too.

So with that said, let's begin here. And really quick, I want to thank the sponsor of today's video; that would be Trade Coffee, but more on that later. First, we got to set up the foundation of everything you're about to do and all the money you're about to make by setting up a high-interest savings account.

Of course, I realize there are gonna be people out there that say something like, "Put Graham, the savings account is not an investment, Grant. It's bad advice! Obtaining account, losing money with information, just like an FID." However, a totally free high-interest rate savings account is really just like the building block you will need if you want to begin growing your money and making sound investments.

Here's the thing: most bank accounts just absolutely suck. They'll either cost you money if you don't maintain your minimum balance, they'll charge you a monthly maintenance fee, and will top it off by not paying you any interest whatsoever. So you may as well just get something that's not only free but also pays you a halfway decent interest rate. This is gonna be a place where you could keep your money while you wait in between investments.

It could be a place that you keep your emergency funds; you always have some spare cash to fall back on, or it's gonna be a place that you could just always keep some money because you never know—you might want to one day invest in Wirecard! Just kidding; don't do that! It's a horrible company. Anyway, getting a good savings account is where we begin, and instead of taking forever just going over a bajillion options with this and reviewing everything, I'm just gonna save you the time.

I'm gonna tell you what you need to know, and then I'll just give you a few easy recommendations that I have used myself. One: just make sure the bank has no minimum balance requirements. Number two: make sure they don't charge you any monthly maintenance fees. And then number three: make sure you get paid more than 1% in interest with no minimums.

From my experience, the best banks that meet this requirement are Ally Bank, Discover Bank, and the Capital One 360 account. All three of those are gonna be really solid options, and I'm not getting paid to mention any of them; it's just my own personal recommendation. There's gonna be a lot of other banks out there that meet that requirement, so as long as it follows that, you're gonna be good.

And it really all begins right here. The second, the next best investment you can make in your 20s is investing within a Roth IRA. And I know you guys, I sound like a broken record because I mentioned this non-stop in all of my videos, and I'm going to continue mentioning it for all the people that haven't seen those previous videos before or still have not done it. This is your sign right now! If you're watching this right now, if you haven't done this yet, here's your sign! Big flashing sign! Set up a Roth IRA, and here's why.

There. Just as a background, a Roth IRA is really just a retirement account that lets you contribute up to $6,000 a year in after-tax money, and then all the profit you make within that account is completely tax-free after the age of 59 and a half. Now, we want to make it very clear that a Roth IRA is only the account that you're going to be setting up. It's no different than opening up a checking account or a savings account, but then of course, it's up to you to make investments within the accounts that are gonna be growing over time, and that's where you begin making the real money—completely tax-free and completely legally.

For example, let's assume you're able to max out your Roth IRA with $6,000 a year and you averaged a 7% return on your money. By the age of 60, you would have $1,371,000 completely tax-free. And here's the magic of it all: you've invested $6,000 a year over 40 years. So your total investment in this is $240,000. That leaves you with $1,131,000 worth of total profit, which in any other account you would be subject to a 20% long-term capital gains tax rate, which would be costing you $226,000 in taxes.

But just by investing in a Roth IRA and then having diamond hands to never sell your investments and just hold them long-term, that saved you over $200,000! That's a Lamborghini right there! That's a free Lamborghini just for using a Roth IRA! So right now is really the best time to be opening up a Roth IRA—saving as much money in taxes as you possibly can right now and then staying the course until you're older.

And yes, this will take you a lot of time to begin accumulating a lot of money, and no, this is not anything get-rich-quick. But this is something that nearly everyone can open, nearly everyone can work towards this, and this is something that will work over time. As far as where you could go to open one of these up, you could use a company like Vanguard that has a really great track record, or you could use Fidelity or a company like Charles Schwab. There are a lot of companies out there that you could use, but whoever you want to use, just make sure they're reputable, they've been around for a long time, and they have a good customer service team that you could reach on the phone. That’s all very important to use.

The third, the next best investment you can make in your 20s is just a good ol’ index fund. This is another one of those investments that I just live by, and over the last nine years, I've just been constantly plowing money back into an index fund on the side and letting it grow. And this is what it is and how easy it is to do. An index fund is basically just like a big basket that holds a whole bunch of stocks inside of it.

Look, imagine you wanted to own each of the top 500 publicly traded companies in the United States. That would just be insanely expensive! You would have to buy 500 different stocks of different companies, and just coordinating that would be a nightmare! So instead, they have the solution, and that would be an index fund that already owns each of the top 500 companies that you could buy into for a small price of only $285.97.

And now, with $285, you get the diversification of owning 500 different companies for one really low cost. The main reason I like index funds so much is because most investors are really terrible at buying individual stocks. So going and buying an index fund just removes that from the equation, and because of that, you end up making more money. For example, it was found that the average stock market investor earned a 5.19% return over a 20-year period when the overall market averaged 9.85% during that same timeframe.

That means that the average investor only earned half of what an index fund would make over a 20-year period—not to mention all the hassle from buying and selling a stock to try to beat the average when instead you could just buy an index fund and be done with it. That's why all of the wealthiest investors alive all tell people, "Don't try to beat the market. Don't try to time your investments! Just buy an index fund, hold it a long time, and then profit."

Now, in terms of which ones I like the best, just make sure to pick something with what's called a low expense ratio. That's basically just how much you have to pay every single year for a company to go and manage that fund for you. If you do this, you just want to make sure that number is less than 0.04%, meaning you're gonna spend $4 for every $10,000 you invest, which is really good. Places like Vanguard typically have some of the best options out there, as does Fidelity and as well as Charles Schwab.

And generally, if you want a one-size-fits-all approach, you can do VT Sacks with Vanguard, you can do FZROX with Fidelity, or SWTSX with Charles Schwab. And that's it! By investing in one of these funds, you're basically investing in the entire world, and that over time, businesses are going to continue growing and expanding. This also diversifies you enough so that if something goes bankrupt, like with Hertz or Wirecard, you can be totally fine, and there's gonna be plenty of other companies to take their place.

Next, the best investment that you can make in your 20s is thanks to today's video sponsor: we've got Trade Coffee! See, as many of you guys know, I'm a big proponent of making coffee at home. It saves you money, it saves you time, and Trade Coffee fits into that perfectly. They deliver you just the right coffee right to your doorstep without needing to go to the grocery store or wait in line; it's right there when you need it.

And again, the more money you could save, the more money you're gonna have left over for all these investments I'm about to share with you. And what makes Trade Coffee different is just how they match you with a perfect cup of coffee. They begin by asking you to take a quiz about your coffee experiences—what type of coffee you use, what you usually add to it, and your overall coffee preferences—and then their algorithm matches you with the ideal coffee for you to make at home.

You can also choose how often you want to deliver it, and it's gonna be sent right to your front door, fresh from the roaster. They make it so easy that I'll never need to go out of my way to go to the grocery store and stand in line, and everything I need to do can be done in minutes from my computer. After that, you could rate your experience so that Trade Coffee can continue sending coffees you're gonna be enjoying the most.

Just to make things even better—because we all love saving money—Trade Coffee is gonna be giving you 30% off your first bag of coffee when you use the link down below in the description. So feel free to check them out down below, and then with all that money you're about to save, we could talk about the next investments here, and that, of course, would be in your 20s—investing in individual stocks.

So here's the thing: now overall, most people are probably best off not investing in individual stocks, but for those who don't mind putting in more work and taking on more risk, you can make a lot more money investing in individual stocks if you pick the right companies. Now, if you're gonna do this, I generally recommend you do it within a Roth IRA to avoid getting taxed on your profits, although it's not required. You could just as easily open up an account with WeBull using the link down below in the description, where they will give you two free stocks when you sign up on their platform and deposit $100.

See how I slipped that in there? Well, that works too! Anyway, buying individual stocks gives you a lot more control over where your money is going, and if you have a good pulse in the market, you could end up making a lot more money. For example, just this year alone, Amazon is up 50%, Tesla's up 135%, Apple is up 25%, Facebook is up 30%, Carnival Cruise is down almost 70%. That sucks!

So as you can see, if you pick the right stocks, you could do substantially better than investing in an index fund. However, just keep in mind; doing this is going to be a lot riskier, and you also have the potential of losing just as much money. But either way, with the selection of good companies, investing in the stock market in your 20s can easily be one of the best investments you can make.

Whether it be buying individual stocks or buying an index fund, just get yourself in the market, and long-term, you're gonna be really glad you did. Your next number five, we're gonna be getting into the good stuff, and this is something I could easily talk for hours about, and that would be real estate.

I really believe your 20s are such a pivotal point in your life where buying real estate could really become one of the best things you'll ever do. The reason for that is really simple: throughout our entire life, one of the biggest recurring monthly expenses we're all gonna have is going to be housing. Like it's reported that 30% to 50% of a person's income just goes to housing, and that's way too much.

But there’s a better option where you could cut that cost out entirely. You can invest in real estate, and you could save a whole bunch of money at the exact same time, and that's by doing what's called house hacking. That's what I did in my 20s, and that experience was by far one of the best things I have ever done.

By doing this, I was able to invest in real estate; I got a completely free place to live in; I was able to save a whole bunch of money as a result, and now that I've moved on to another property, I rented that one out, and now it makes me $2,500 a month without having any of my own money tied up in the deal. Before anyone is unaware of what house hacking is, this is where you go and buy a multi-family property like a duplex, triplex, or four-plex, you move in one of the units, and then you rent out the others to cover your cost of ownership.

And then all of a sudden, you get a free place to live. Now, in order to do this, it does require you to save up between 10% and 20% of the cost of the building as your down payment on the property, but if you could do that, you could leverage that for your entire life of pretty much a free place to live instantaneously. That could free up your entire housing payment, and that would allow you to save that 30% to 50% on housing that you can now save and invest towards other things.

Now, even though I'm simplifying this a lot, and there are plenty of other factors to take into consideration, like you got to have a good credit score, you have to have sufficient income, you have to have the down payments, and you actually have to find the property that generates enough cash flow for you to be able to live there in the first place for free, the principles behind it are simple.

Although yes, it's going to take some work, and I have another video that will go over everything you need to know about how to do this down below in the description, and I promise! Some of you guys have mentioned that last time, like I forgot to put the video in the description, but I promise you it's there if you go and look right now! And if it's not there, you can hit the dislike button. But if it is there, just give me a like in the video because I remembered this time! Just trust me.

But anyway, once you do this, you're gonna have a property that you own that you could live in entirely for free, and then eventually, when you move out of it, you can move on to another property, do the same thing with that, and now you're gonna have a property that spits off cash flow to you every single month. Now yes, it is a lot of work, but my experience has always been it's really worth it, and now is the best time to make that happen.

Number six, the next best investment you can make in your 20s is a side business. I seriously believe this is one of the most underutilized options that people don't take advantage of in their 20s, and I got to say that stops today. A good side business in your 20s has the potential to grow completely independently from your main source of income, and that was the best time to pursue that while you still have all the energy to work long hours without feeling burnt out.

I just want you to think of this and ask yourself the question: what do you do between the hours of 6:00 p.m. and 1:00 every single morning? I think I've heard something like this from Gary Vee, but it never really clicked with me until he said it. And all of a sudden, I'm like, "Wait a second! That's so true!" That works out to be six hours a day, or basically another full workday every single day that most people don't utilize.

If you want to get ahead, if you want to make more money, make that time count and use that time to work on your side projects or your passions that you've just never had time for. On my second channel, The Graham Stephan Show, I have probably interviewed hundreds of people at this point, and any time they tell me they don't have the time to do something, we then talk about what they do after work, after 6:00 p.m. and almost all of the time, it includes things that are not productive, like watching TV.

And immediately, it's like, "Well, there's your time right there!" Every single successful person that I have talked to uses the hours between 6:00 p.m. and midnight very wisely, and this is where most of their gains happen. Think of it a bit like working out at the gym, and I have no idea if this is true or not, but I heard that most of your gains happen after you already feel really exhausted, but you push yourself to do that extra rep or two at the very end.

Well, I think sometimes working and making more money works the exact same way. You could work all day, but sometimes it's those little last bits that you do to push yourself forward even further that really make the greatest benefit long term. As an example here, this channel used to be my side hustle. Between 6:00 p.m. and midnight every single night, I worked full-time as a real estate agent, and then after work, I would go to the gym, and then after that, I would work on YouTube videos every night until I went to bed.

I did that for two years, even though I was making only a fraction of what I made as a real estate agent here on YouTube; and then all of a sudden, the channel just really took off. And then I decided at that point to focus more time on YouTube than working as a real estate agent, and the rest is history! But that wouldn't have happened at all if I didn't utilize my nights working on something that I was really passionate about.

So I highly encourage you to work the exact same way—use some of these off hours towards your side hustle, and in your 20s, you're not going to regret it! Next, number seven, I highly recommend in your 20s to hire a good CPA and just make sure your taxes are done correctly. Now, one of the very rude awakenings you'll get is that the more you work and the more money you make, the less of it you'll get to keep.

And depending on where you live and the source of the income, it could add up to a lot of money. For example, if you're self-employed earning about $80,000 a year in California, you could end up losing about 34% of your income to taxes. That's about one-third of your income or four months of the entire year that you work for just to pay in taxes. It's a lot of money; that's no fun!

That's why it's so important, as soon as possible, to hire a good CPA who knows what they're doing and can best structure your business to take advantage of everything you're able to do. For example, maybe they'll tell you to start an S corporation, or maybe they'll tell you about deductions you didn't know existed, or maybe they'll tell you to smash the like button for the YouTube algorithm!

But seriously, I should have hired someone better from the very beginning to point me in the right direction because prior to then, like until a few years ago, I didn't have an S corporation, and I was paying way more in taxes than I should have. Like sometimes, the best investments you can make don't necessarily make you more money, but instead, they save you more money, and this is a perfect example of that!

So if you're a W-2 employee and you're making under $100,000 a year, then maybe this is something you could do yourself, and a good CPA isn't necessarily required. But once you start getting investment income, rental property income, or income from a side business, then all of a sudden a good CPA starts making more and more sense. From my experience, that's extremely important, and a good CPA, especially in your 20s, is something you're not going to regret.

And finally, the last one, number eight: the best investment you could make in your 20s is paying down any high-interest rate debt. Now, paying this down can make you money! Obviously, if you're in debt, whether it be credit card debt, student loan debt, or you have an auto loan—anything like that is costing you money.

Of course, some debt is actually good debt, like if you have a really low interest rate that maybe doesn't make sense to pay it off. Or if it's on a mortgage on rental property, that's probably good debt; it's probably better to keep that than to pay it off early. But if you have any high-interest rate debt that ends up costing you more money than it makes, then that debt should be paid off as soon as possible.

Here's my reasoning with this: when you go and invest your money, you should be able to expect anywhere from a 6% to 12% return depending on where you're investing it over the long run. And of course, to get that return, there are gonna be some years where that return is gonna be a lot less than that. On the other hand, when you have high-interest rate debt, paying down that debt is like getting a guaranteed return at whatever interest rate the debt is at.

Like if you have a 20% interest rate, you paying down that debt is like you making 20% because you're paying down what you would otherwise owe. If the debt is costing you more than 4.5%, then it's probably a good idea to try to pay it off as soon as possible. And that is because you're getting a similar return to what your investment could make you, except with paying off debt, there's no risk whatsoever; it's guaranteed.

And anytime your debt is under 4.5%, then most of the time, it just makes sense not to pay it off early and instead invest your money where you can make more than 4.5%. And those are the rare instances where keeping the debt can actually make you more money than paying it off early. So if this applies to you, and you have a debt that's costing you more than 4.5% in interest, take this as an opportunity to pay it off as soon as you possibly can, and after you're done doing that, that's gonna give you more money left over to save and invest elsewhere.

That's gonna end up making you more money. So those are my top eight investments that you could make in your 20s and exactly how to do them. With the exception of the house hacking one, that's a bit more complicated, but I'll link to another video down below in the description that goes over everything you need to know because it's a lot.

But besides that, everything you need to know with all the details should be right here. And like I mentioned, none of this is gonna be get-rich-quick. This is not gonna make you bajillions of dollars in your 20s unless your side business takes off or you make some crazy options investments on Robinhood; and what you shouldn't be doing. But this one, it's a safe, tried-and-true method of building wealth that anyone could work towards. And history has shown time and time again that over the long run, this is gonna work.

And of course, with this, the sooner you start, the sooner you set this up, the sooner you start investing, the sooner I could ask you to smash the like button for the YouTube algorithm. And of course, another thank you to Trade Coffee for sponsoring this video, and for anyone interested, the link is down below in the description for 30% off your first bag of coffee.

So with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching! I really appreciate it. Make sure to destroy the subscribe button and the notification bell. Also, feel free to add me on Instagram; I post here pretty much daily. So if you want to be a part of it there, feel free to add me there—that's on my second channel, The Graham Stephan Show. I post there every single day I'm not posting here.

So if you want to see a brand new video from me every single day, make sure to add yourself to that. And lastly, if you guys want your two free stocks, use the link down below in the description, and WeBull is going to be giving you two free stocks when you deposit $100 on the platform, with one of those stocks potentially valued all the way up to $1,400. So if you want your two free stocks, use the link down below! Let me know what your two free stocks are.

Thank you so much for watching, and until next time!