35 year old with $500,000 to invest – Buy Stocks, REITs or property in 2025?

So I received this really interesting question from a reader:

“Hi FH,

Thank you for putting out just thoughtful content. I have been reading your blog for over 5 years now. I took your REITs course when it first came out and made some good investments right after that. However, I have not been very active after that initial spurt. Life (or rather laziness) got in the way.

I am in my mid 30s and looking for some advice on how I can invest 500k cash in 2025. I would like to be an active investor, but I lack the knowledge at the moment to do it. So I am looking for some pointers on how I can get started with deploying existing capital while building up my financial knowledge. Here is the brief overview on my finances:

1. My spouse and I earn around 500k a year in combined salaries. Excluding expenses, I should be able to invest 300k per year (so ard 25k per month)
2. I own a condo (home equity around 1.2 mil)
3. Assets wise (excl property), I have
– 500k in cash
– 310k in CPF
– 70k in SRS (30k invested in Stashaway high risk portfolio)
– 85k in bonds (Tbill/Astrea)
– 40k in REITS
– 8.5k in Netlink
– 170k in stocks (40% S&P500, 25% QQQ, 15% Conoco, rest are single names like cloudflare, baba, tencent)
– 70k in Gold ETF
– 50k in angel investments in startups
– 75k in Blackrock fund (through stashaway)
– 100k in Stashaway’s India/Indonesia fund

I would like to start with a semi active strategy that is easy to execute for someone with a beginner level knowledge. Everytime I think about putting a lump sum, I cannot bring myself to do it because I am not confident enough to invest in a particular asset class. I recently did put quite a bit in Stashaway’s funds because it required less thinking. I am looking for some guidance on how I should get started in a structured way.

While I read your blog aggressively, would you be able to recommend other good resources that someone like me can use to build up knowledge?

Also – do you have a take on investing in property in Thailand, Malaysia?”

Sharing some of my high level thoughts

As is customary, I have amended the details above to protect the privacy of the reader.

There are broadly 3 questions:

1. How to approach asset allocation?
2. Any other resources to build up knowledge?
3. Is investing in property in Thailand / Malaysia a good idea?

35 year old with $500,000 to invest – Should he buy Stocks, REITs or property in 2025?

Let’s start with the big one.

It’s a bit hard to visualise the asset allocation, so I plotted a bunch of pie charts below.

Asset Allocation including property

If you include the property – this is broadly what the asset allocation looks like.

So you can see how almost 45% of the net worth is in the property, while another 25% is in a mix of CPF and cash.

Asset Allocation excluding property

The home equity does distort the picture somewhat.

This is the case for most Singaporeans, given how expensive Singapore property is – so there’s just no way around it.

Here’s the same asset allocation chart after stripping out the property.

You can see how almost 50% is a mix of cash/CPF.

Can the investor invest $500,000? How much cash to hold?

The first question that struck me was whether investing $500,000 makes sense.

Looking at the assets below, I bolded the stuff that is liquid cash in nature – which adds up to almost $965,000 in liquidity.

– 500k in cash
– 310k in CPF
– 70k in SRS (30k invested in Stashaway high risk portfolio)
– 85k in bonds (Tbill/Astrea)
– 40k in REITS
– 8.5k in Netlink
– 170k in stocks (40% S&P500, 25% QQQ, 15% Conoco, rest are single names like cloudflare, baba, tencent)
– 70k in Gold ETF
– 50k in angel investments in startups
– 75k in Blackrock fund (through stashaway)
– 100k in Stashaway’s India/Indonesia fund

Conservatively, let’s assume half of the CPF is in CPF-SA and locked up.

That’s still around $800,000 liquid cash.

Ultimately – how much cash can be invested goes back to individual risk appetite.

But I suppose the $500,000 figure from the reader is reasonable as that’s still another $300,000 liquid cash left that should be able to cover a fair bit of expenses.

How to decide – active vs passive investing?

There were a couple of key quotes in the reader’s question that caught my eye.

Bolded for emphasis below:

I am in my mid 30s and looking for some advice on how I can invest 500k cash in 2025. I would like to be an active investor, but I lack the knowledge at the moment to do it. So I am looking for some pointers on how I can get started with deploying existing capital while building up my financial knowledge. Here is the brief overview on my finances:

I would like to start with a semi active strategy that is easy to execute for someone with a beginner level knowledge. Everytime I think about putting a lump sum, I cannot bring myself to do it because I am not confident enough to invest in a particular asset class. I recently did put quite a bit in Stashaway’s funds because it required less thinking. I am looking for some guidance on how I should get started in a structured way.

And frankly, some of the statements above contradict each other.

The way that I see it –you either go all-in on active, or you go all-in on passive.

It’s very hard to do a middle ground approach where you are “semi-active”, and yet “easy to execute for someone with a beginner level knowledge”.

If you are active investing, you are literally competing with the best and brightest out there, the likes with a PHD in machine learning from Stanford (maybe not specifically but you get my point).

Even if you want to semi-active invest, the guy on the other side of your trade is most definitely taking it 100% seriously.

My views – Index or stock pick? Active, passive, or semi-active investing?

I think if you really wanted to try your hand at active investing, and yet don’t have very sophisticated knowledge / experience.

What might make sense is to split the funds up into 2 parts.

One portion is just passive indexed.

Something like the S&P500 (CSPX), NASDAQ (QQQ), or an all world fund (IWDA)

And the other portion – can be actively invested.

And then see how it plays out.

So you can start with the bulk in passive investments at first, and a small portion in active investments.

And watch the performance.

If the actively invested portion outperforms the passive portion, you can consider increasing the allocation to active investments.

But if the actively invested portion underperforms, then keep it small until the results start to improve.

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Lump sum or Dollar cost average (DCA)?

I always get asked whether to lump sum, or to dollar cost average.

The textbook answer.

Is that in a bull market (going up) – lump sum outperforms.

In a bear market (going down) – dollar cost averaging outperforms.

Of course the million dollar question – how do you know whether you are in a bull market or a bear market?

I would say generally for most people, unless you know what you’re doing, dollar cost averaging is the “safer” and “less risky” approach.

It’s also easier to sleep at night – because imagine lump sum investing $500,000 into the S&P500 and watching it drop 20% in 2 months, wiping out $100,000.

What I would add is that– US stock valuations are not cheap in my view.

Forward PE at 22 is at levels last seen in 2021 and 2000 – both of which were followed by periods of decline for the S&P500.

Hence all the talk about 10 year returns averaging 1-2%.

So I would be inclined towards averaging into this market.

How to active invest?

On how to active invest – boy really the world is your oyster.

The key here is to find your competitive advantage, and stick with it.

Some people like to focus on trading earnings results.

Some people like to focus on trading tech stocks.

Some people like to focus on technical analysis and trading the charts.

There’s just no right or wrong here.

Personally what works for me is big picture, macro related plays, so I tend to focus on that.

I try to find a broad theme that I like – for eg. Oil in 2020, AI in 2023, Crypto in 2023 and so on.

And build exposure to different stocks / asset classes around the theme to diversify away single stock risk, and ride the exposure to the macro asset class.

But what works for me may not work for you, and the key here is to find your own style.

Unfortunately there’s no shortcut to this one, you just have to keep going until you find what works for you.

You can see my full portfolio (how I am positioned) and my stock watch on FH Premium.

What other resources to learn about stocks?

I might be slightly biased on this one.

But I find Financial Horse to be a great resource (I know… fully unbiased here).

If you’re looking to build broad fundamental knowledge, the FH Courses are a great resource.

If you’re looking for more specific views, then FH Premium is a great resource with regular premium content, including the FH Stock Watch and my personal portfolio.

Alternatively Seeking Alpha has been a pretty decent resource for me as well, which sets out very varied crowdsourced opinions on US stocks.

I could caution that because Seeking Alpha is crowd sourced, the quality of the opinion varies greatly.

So you do need to apply a critical lens when reading Seeking Alpha, and make your own independent judgment whether you agree or disagree.

There’s a Financial Horse promo for Seeking Alpha here if you are keen.

Investing in property in Thailand / Malaysia?

I get this question often on whether to invest in overseas real estate.

My answer is almost always the same.

No matter how attractive it may sound on paper, in my experience, most of the time – it rarely works out well.

The 2 biggest difficulties are:

1. Property management / maintenance (when you are not in the same country)
2. FX risk

Both are self-explanatory.

Managing a property in a foreign country, simple things like trying to get a plumber to fix a leak, trying to evict a problematic tenant, trying to collect unpaid rent – these can be nothing short of an absolute nightmare.

And even if everything goes well – if the FX depreciates against you in a big way, it could really wipe out a big chunk of your gains (unless you finance the property with borrowings in the same currency – but in my experience not many people do this).

So probably 80% of the time, I would say you just take the money and invest it in more liquid investments like stocks / REITs.

And then just get a hotel or Airbnb when you visit the country.

There are exceptions of course, such as if you are very familiar with the country, or have close friends or family in country who can help you manage.

For eg. If you are Malaysian, and you plan to move back one day. Or if you have family in Thailand that you visit every few months, and have people who can help you manage the property.

All of these could change the equation materially.

But for the majority of the cases – I would say you’re better off investing the money, and just getting a hotel or Airbnb.

This post is written on 7 March 2025 and will not be updated going forward. My latest views on markets, my Stock watchlist and full Personal Portfolio, are shared on FH Premium.