Due to some changes in circumstance I will be staying in Taiwan probably long term and recently I have received some monies from a will. Due to not having some much spare money before I am not sure what I should be doing with it, I do not need to use the money soon or urgently but would like it to be safe as it came in a will to me. I opened a HSBC premier and talked to the advisor person but they kept trying to sell some insurance products which don’t seem very good and on the internet it seems they make lot of commission on these. Finally they showed some bonds but not very clear how this works. Should I try the “VIP” service in another bank or are there independent financial advisor services available in Taiwan for foreigner? In total it is about 500,000US for investing, maybe half in US$ and rest in EURO and TWD. All taxes are already settled. I want the money to be safe and earning passive money for me, I have no urgent need to use it. Where should I go?!
Just buy SPY500 & chill
Can I do this with a Taiwan bank or where should I go?
You can also open an IBKR account online and transfer the money to there after it’s open . That’s much better for investing in foreign stocks and funds generally speaking .
- How much income are you looking to generate?
- How passive?
- Are you also looking for capital appreciation?
3a) if so, target returns? - How safe are we talking about? Like treasuries safe, safe like AAA bonds, relatively safe like a broad market fund, or anything this side of 00 at roulette?
Good advice, but not going to generate much income.
- 10% per year would be nice, I could maybe think about retire!
- Maybe just interact one time per week but if it made a very big difference maybe 30 mins or 1 hour per day most days.
- I don’t know to be honest, is this different from passive income?
- I guess relatively safe for most as this was given in a will and I don’t want to squander and maybe 50,000 could be more risky but not roulette.
Yea…Say you buy a house and rent it out. The income would be from rent. The capital appreciation would be the value going up. Similarly, stocks may generate income from dividends, and the price of the stock may go up (or not, of course).
10% is a lot of income to generate from an asset. Generally, high income is going to be riskier, have lower capital appreciation (or not), or be of limited duration.
5% would also be OK! What is a reasonable expectation from medium or low risk over long time? Passive income would be nice later but now I am working so capital appreciation is also good.
How much are you paying in rent right now?
25,000NT
You could take a chunk of that as a down payment and purchase a house to both save rent and allow for capital appreciation.
Then use the remaining for other investments.
Pretend, purchasing a $10 000 000 TWD home would result in a similar monthly mortgage payment as to what you are paying now. And now that you’re leveraging, you’re using the banks money in addition to your own to profit with. Each month, instead of making someone else rich, instead forces you to put that money into a sort-of mandatory savings account.
If investing, beware of pig butchering scams. It’s where you invest into some platform, and then your value goes up but when you try to withdraw it won’t let you. It’s because their values are fake. Be wary of cryptocurrency type investments.
As for real estate, you’ll need a large chunk of money. I’m not so sure if the value will go up forever because I feel like the same factors that led to the real estate collapse in China exists in Taiwan too. Probably safer to buy an existing building than a new building that has not been constructed yet.
This but not 100%. If it was me:
- 450k in S&P outside of Taiwan
- 5k in cash here
- 20k in non-redeemable deposits in USD here
- remaining 25k blow on something fun
Like another has mentioned, proper allocation between SP500 and bonds of some sort and let it sit and let compounding do its magic. Not sure your age, but even with $500k, proper allocation, and following the 4% rule, that leaves you about $50,000NT per month with just the money you have if you want to stop working right now. You can always have a bit to have fun with gambling in stock picking, but I recommend you be comfortable with losing all of it as long term speculators generally don’t beat the market.
Please don’t buy foreign insurance growth policies or ETFs if you are American. You’ll pay more in tax prep fees than you get in ROI. huge huge headache
I did consider however the apartment I rent is worth around 25,000,000 or a little more base on advertised prices in the community. If I did buy it I would need to spend also a lot on decorating. I like this area and if I would buy I would probably buy a bigger apartment than now. Then I would have to pay the mortgage as well as giving all my cash and also property taxes I guess. I think Taiwan’s property market is a little bit risky so maybe better invest in another place.
Thank you, I am from Europe but did not like the insurance policies and also how pushy the bank people were to sell them made me think it’s a lot more for them than for me!
IME with medium risk mutual funds the OP would probably be getting more than 70,000NT in dividends per month.
But, I agree, that’s what I would do in the OP’s situation. I’m about a third of the way to being where the OP is now. I am a tad envious.