1. Invest in yourself: The best investment vehicle to focus on is to invest in yourself and in your own future. Make it a point to invest in your education and continually learn and improve yourself. Make decisions and set goals to increase your self-worth. Invest in people who will help make you a better person. Read up on people from your contemporary life and from history and study how they acted. Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you and soak it all up.

2. Invest in assets: The second-best investment vehicle is to focus on compound investing. Investments that lead to investments. One such investment vehicle is investing in a business venture. It does not have to be a business that encompasses or leads you to your ultimate goal, depending at what stage in life you are. It can be a business that puts money into your pocket. Money that you can then use to invest in other things, that put more money into your pocket, to then invest on other things, and so on. After all, it is never too early to prepare for and plan to be an entrepreneur. You can start as early as high school or college. Ventures such as a tutoring business, a lawn care business, a lemonade stand. Anything that puts a skill you possess into practice. Something that will provide you with extra income to further invest with and afford you experience in running a business. A dry run at entrepreneurship.

3. Invest in real estate: The third-best investment vehicle is to invest in real estate. Learn how to buy your homes wisely. Focus on buying the ugliest house in the nicest neighborhood. By doing so, buying a fixer upper, you are investing in a good neighborhood, ensuring demand, but you are buying in at a cheaper price than your neighbors due to the condition of the house. Therefore, your liability (mortgage, interest expense, and taxes) will be much lower than your neighbors. Also, by being in a nice neighborhood, you guarantee an increase in equity over time if you make improvements to your house little by little through sweat equity focusing on the kitchens, bathrooms, and curb appeal (fresh paint and new landscaping). After a minimum of two years (the time threshold to be exempt from being taxed on the profit or capital gains on the sale of a homestead property or primary residence) of making small improvements to bring your house up to par with the rest of the neighborhood, your house will be more valuable, and if you look at the comparable sales in your neighborhood, your house would have also increased in value by association as well. Now, when you sell your home, you can realize that gain in the form of tax-free profit and utilize that to do the same thing over and over every two years, buying a bigger and bigger house, all fixer uppers, of course. As an example, let us say you buy an ugly fixer upper house for 300,000 U.S. dollars in a nice neighborhood where the comparable sales are between 350,000 and 400,000 U.S. dollars. During the two years that you live there, you invest 15,000 U.S. dollars to update the kitchen and bathrooms and another 5,000 U.S. dollars to paint the house inside and out plus redo the landscape. You now have a total investment in the property of 320,000 U.S. dollars. After two years, all the houses have appreciated in value about 5 percent each year (in a good market). So, now the homes are worth between 385,500 and 440,000 U.S. dollars. If you sell your house at the average comparable sale of 412,500 U.S. dollars, you potentially stand to make 92,500 U.S. dollars in gross profit that after closing cost (5,000 U.S. dollars) and sales commission (6 percent, 24,750 U.S. dollars) can net you 62,750 U.S. dollars total profit or about 31,000 U.S. dollars per year profit. Again, it is not easy to buy an ugly house and live in it while making the improvements, but it is a proven way to make a lot of money in real estate if you can handle the sacrifice involved. Whereas this example is a hypothetical, the strategy is not. I have personally utilized this strategy to my advantage many times.

4. Invest in and max out your 401K: The fourth-best investment vehicle and the best, absent all the aforementioned, is to invest in and max out your 401K. By investing in your 401K, you are taking advantage of a tax-deferred investment vehicle that can increase in value over time if you learn how to manage it properly. Even more so if your company matches your contributions. The way to manage it properly is to follow the simple adage of buy low, sell high. The stock market is cyclical, and it will always fluctuate between high and low in the long term. It will also undertake large short-term fluctuations influenced and caused by current events. It amazes me how such a simple, tried and true principle is so misunderstood or disregarded by so many. Most people are triggered by euphoria and panic. During the long-term fluctuations, when the market is high and doing good, euphoria sets in and everyone jumps on the bandwagon, and they buy. When the market is low and not doing well, panic sets in and everyone jumps off the bandwagon, and they sell. The smart thing to do, during long-term fluctuations, which requires very little knowledge of the stock market (most 401K’s offer mostly mutual funds) and if you have many years of employment left, is to buy when the market is low and sell when the market is high. You should always have a balance in your 401K account of high and low-risk investments. During large short-term fluctuations that are influenced by current events, there is an opportunity to take advantage of the panic and make a lot of money in a short period of time you if know what to look for. Most 401K plans offer all the information that you need to make an informed decision on the mutual funds you want to invest in, including price per share and historical performance over time. The key is to select a few mutual funds and become intimately familiar with what they invest in and track their performance over time. This can be easily done using free online services that track mutual fund performance. When the stock market takes a big tumble, after an unusual current event occurrence, you need to quickly see how the mutual funds you invest in have been affected. If a particularly well-performing mutual fund suddenly drops five U.S. dollars per share overnight, you have a tremendous opportunity to buy low and wait for it to recover and realize a large gain. You simply take some of the money you have in your low-risk investments and transfer them into that mutual fund that just dropped five U.S. dollars per share. It is particularly important for you to know what the mutual fund invests in to make sure it is just a panic selloff and not a major problem with the investments that make up most of the mutual fund investments. As an example, let us say that there is a highly rated and particularly good-producing mutual fund that has steadily been increasing in value for a few years and stands currently at 15 U.S. dollars per share. News comes out of a terrorist attack on an oil installation in a foreign country and the stock market drop 500 points overnight and set off a panic selloff. You look at the mutual fund and it has dropped five U.S. dollars per share overnight and it now stands at 10 U.S. dollars per share. If you move money from your low-risk mutual funds or even a safer money market fund, which, by definition, would not have dropped as much or been affected by the selloff, and you buy 500 shares of that mutual fund at 10 U.S. dollars per share (5,000 U.S. dollars), the odds are in your favor that is less than one week, when the panic subsides, that same mutual fund will recover all its losses and continue on its upward trend. If it recovers fully back to the postpanic price of 15 U.S. dollars per share, you would have realized a 2,500 U.S. dollars gain in less than one week. Whereas this example is a hypothetical, the strategy is not. I have personally utilized this strategy to my advantage many times, including during the stock market crash of 2020 as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic. When the market crashed and most people were selling their stocks at rock-bottom prices, I was doing my research and I started buying mutual funds, using money set aside in safer investments, that invested in the hard-hit cruise line industry. Their stocks had suffered catastrophic losses, and I saw the potential for a relatively quick rebound when the panic subsided. As of the time of the writing of this section, I had managed to realize a 55,000 U.S. dollars gain on our mutual fund portfolio from where it stood prior to the pandemic. Most 401K portfolios were either recovering their losses, for those who stayed in, or had cemented their losses, for those how sold out. I managed to do this without extensive knowledge of the stock market, simply by following the adage of buy low, sell high, and understanding the emotional components of euphoria and panic involved in buying and selling stocks after a traumatic event, not associated with a regular stock market inflection point. Another way to utilize your 401K is to, when you start your own firm and become the administrator of your own 401K, set up the option of taking out loans for whatever reasons without restrictions. You will have to offer that option to your employees as well. Once you have done that, you can then roll over your entire balance from your former employers account, without incurring any tax consequences, into you own plan. You now have access to a maximum of 50,000 U.S. dollars interest-free loan. You will have to set up a repayment plan, but the interest gets put back into your own account, and you are free to set up your own terms, as the administrator. This is not a hypothetical example; I have personally utilized this strategy to my advantage.

5. Invest with other people’s money: The fifth-best investment vehicle involves using other people’s money to make money for you. Such as learning to properly utilize loans, credit, and investors. When utilizing loans or credit and seeking out investors, you need to understand what the cost of the loan or credit will be, such as the terms and interest rates, and gage whether the investment will not only cover the costs, but put you in a better capital or equity position afterward. Using loans and credit is a good way to invest in things when you do not have the liquid assets or capital on hand or when your available capital or assets are being effectively utilized in other areas to increase your net worth. You should never limit your potential gains by your available liquid assets. Seek out more means of borrowed capital to invest wisely.

6. Invest in collectibles: The sixth-best investment vehicle for entrepreneurs is to invest in collectibles that appreciate over time. This is a good way to build and increase your net worth, which in turn provides you with more money to invest. Examples of collectibles include precious metals, art, antiques, and precious stones.

7. Invest in your employees: The seventh-best investment vehicles to invest in, and perhaps the most important one for your business, is to invest in your employees. When you become an entrepreneur, you must remember to invest in your employees, your company, and your brand. Train, delegate, and allow other people to work for you and make money for you. Surround yourself with trustworthy people and allow them to do their job. Make sure your staff is constantly growing and expand their marketable skills. Make them feel vested in your company and your brand. Nothing enhances a brand more than pride emanating from your staff, which is reflected onto your clients.