personally i would either keep it at ING Direct or something similar and wait for a good time to buy some cheap real estate, or if you don’t want to go that route and don’t need the cash for anything soon, consider dollar cost averaging in to the CGM Focus fund, the best mutual fund out there in my opinion (if you can stand wild swings in your account balance). the manager, ken heebner, is a stud and made 80% return last year. of course that isn’t expected to be repeated, but he is still up an annualized 37.5% for the last 5 years.