Great Ideas For $1000, $10,000 Or Even $100,000

If you have a stash of cash earning practically nothing, take a gander at the 36 ideas we present on the following pages.

We put our entire staff to work brainstorming and researching suggestions to unlock the power of your money. Some of the ideas require a small stack of bills and some would take a small fortune, but all of them are either timely (invest in a fund adept at navigating higher rates) or practical (pay off a grandchild’s student loans) or worthy of a splurge (take the family to Scotland to golf). And one or two are pretty surprising. Anyone up for cloning your dog?

KEY INVESTMENTS

$1000

Get instant diversification. For $1,000, you can own a little bit of everything with VANGUARD STAR FUND (SYMBOL VGSTX), a collection of 11 actively managed, low expense Vanguard funds. Star has roughly 60% of its assets in stocks and the rest in bonds. Within the eight stock funds, you’ll find large- and small-company U.S. stocks; fast-growing companies and slower growers that trade at bargain prices; and nearly 20% in foreign stocks. Star also holds funds that invest in short-term, medium-term and long-term bonds. Star beat similar funds in nine of the past 10 calendar years.

$10,000

Buy the Dogs of the Dow. The success of the Dogs of the Dow strategy—buying equal dollar amounts of the 10 highest-yielding stocks in the Dow Jones industrial average—waxes and wanes with broad stock market trends. Lately, it has paid to chow down with the canines. The Dogs that made the list at the start of 2016 gained 15% on average in the subsequent 11 months, and that doesn’t include an average dividend yield of nearly 4%.