Don’t choose, do both, except home prices haven’t really corrected (yet). When and how much,dunno.

With your income, owning your own home is a no-brainer for tax and stability reasons for your kids. If you don’t, go for it.

Given that you probably already own your own home and will inherit 3 more, that’s already plenty of exposure to our local market. For that reason, I’d say focus on stocks and bonds.

My favorite stocks now are MET IRBT and KHC.

iRobot is an established pure-play and profitable robot company with pentagon contracts and I assume a nice portfolio of patents. I think it will eventually be gobbled up by a tech giant like Amazon or Microsoft for a 30-50% premium.

For your IRA, I like the taxable muni fund GBAB.

If you do want to buy property, I think City Heights will do well due to its location and amenities compared to its price. For established areas, Ocean Beach I believe has the best value. But nearly all of San Diego is attractively priced compared to rents.

[quote=gzz]My favorite stocks now are MET IRBT and KHC.
[/quote]

My vote is to put it in the stocks market if you don’t need the money for the next few years. Not a whole lot of bargains in real estate at the moment. One would expect this coronavirus thing will eventually ripple through the housing market sometime down the road.

I actually unloaded my shares in KHC today. I like KHC, but I like SLB, CSCO & BAC better at the current prices. So that’s where my $ go.

Regarding IRBT, not sure what else they make other than ROOMBA. Definitely a niche market and it’s losing ground to the made-in China knock-offs. Bought my first roomba years ago for $400+. Needed to replace it last year and ended up buying a couple offshore brands for about $120/each. The least expensive Roomba is about $250.

To OP – how about DRIPing the money equally between US & International stock funds?

10+ unit buildings these days are owned by either people who got them in ancient times or full time owners with corporate management. The market is fairly different and involves a different lending market. In the midwest this is more common because 10 unit complex can be under $500,000, and rarely go above $2 million.

Scaredy: REITs are not good investments for someone already well exposed to RE.

I actually am short SPG, a mall reit. This is as a hedge against my own local portfolio.

“Worst case” is that they go up and my much larger investment in rentals goes up too.

What could happen with spg is even if things reopen fairly soon, some of their marginal tenants won’t survive. Retail was already doing badly before Covid. A 2 month shutdown, another 2 month partial shutdown, then a recession….

The company is leveraged by about 10, so if you assume a 10% decline in the value of malls, their balance sheet is negative.

That’s an oversimplification, as they’ve taken a lot of paper depreciation losses that as of 1/2020, did not reflect the market.

Finally, they agreed to buy another mall reit for cash at a giant market premium. I read the sales agreement, and I don’t think they can wiggle out.

[quote=Ready2Invest]I wonder the same thing regarding Temecula and Chula Vista. My conclusion is people really like their bigger houses and a 50min commute is acceptable.

Compared to the bay area where people would drive/commute 2hr plus into the penisula/silicon valley, 50min seems like nothing.[/quote]
There are a lot of other reasons besides 50mi is acceptable,
1) How close to retirement
2) What will Temecula look like in 10,15 or 20 years, Carlsbad and Oceanside industrial base is growing very fast as well.
etc…

I would pick index funds or ETFs, setup a monthly or bimonthly autoinvestment plan, elect to reinvest interest and dividend , and call it a day. I wouldn’t move money into the market in one large chunk all at once. Id spread the risk out over months.

in addition, you can try one of those newer Robo-advisers that are around $30/months. I’d be curious if they are any good.