How many years to turn 300K into a million in safe investments?

Question

and which safe investments would you pick?

Answer 1

I would invest mostly in mutual funds, but get the help of a broker to select which funds I put my money into. You might consider doing the same. ScotTrade (http://www.scottrade.com/ ) has very cheap commissions for online trading. You might consider opening an account there.

Answer 2

A totally safe investment is a money market account, government bonds, or a savings account. Some online savings accounts are earning around 5% these days. At 5%, it will tak you 25 years to reach $1,000,000.
Do a search for "online savings" on Google and you'll find many options for this.

If you're willing to take minor risk, you can probably earn 7-8%. I would recommend a Vanguard "Target Retirement" fund. The fees are extremely low, the investment is fairly safe and the returns are much better than a totally safe investment:
https://flagship.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsVGIClosestMatch?tosearch=target+retirement&searchtype=name

If you are in the Target Retirement 2025 fund, I would expect an average rate of 8%. That will bring you to $1,000,000 in about 16 years.

Answer 3

Well, what is your definition of a "safe" investment? Is it something as risky as Treasury bills? Treasury bonds? High-grade corporate bonds? Utility preferred stocks? Depending on your answer to the above question, your expected return in the long run will likely be between 3% and 7%. (Disregard 10-12% projections proposed above; these rates of return are achievable only by investing in common stocks, which entails considerable risk, which you, by your own admission, are not willing to take.)

Turning $300,000 into a million at 3% annual return would take a little over 40 years; at 7%, about 18 years. Note that those are nominal (i.e., not adjusted by inflation) returns. If you wanted to figure that out in real terms, you'd have to throw in an inflation adjustment...

Answer 4

It depends on twhat you mean by a safe investment. The safest would be a savings account or a government bond. If you use the rule of 72 you can figure out how long it will take your money to double at any interest rate. Divide 72 by the interest rate and that os the number of years for your money to double. If for example you ar going to get a 6% return, 72/6=12 so it would take you 12 years to double the money. At double you have $600,000 so you need to come close to doubling your money twice. At 6% return you are looking at about 22 years.

Answer 5

A safe investment would be a government bond or a bank CD. At 5% on a bank cd money will double in about 14.5 years. So maybe 20 years in a cd.

But, who knows what bank cd's will be paying 10 yrs from now?

30 year government bond is coming back,, paying about 4.75%

divide 72 by interest rate to see how many years to double. Like if you made 6%, it would go into 72 12 times so money would double in 12 years at 6% interest rate.

Answer 6

I'd agree with Richard. Mutual funds or index funds would be best.

If you invest $300,000 and don't add anymore to that, and get an 8% annual return, it'd take 15.64 years to turn it into $1 Million.

At a 10% annual return, it would take 12.63 years.

And at a 12% annual return, it would take 10.62 years.