 What's up guys? It's Shane here. So when you look up investment videos here on YouTube, you generally see three types of videos. The first one is going to be penny stocks or day trading, which has been proven to be a bad investment for 98% of investors. There's only one to 2% actually end up making money. The second is going to be the financial advisors group, which are going to tell you to join their $97 a month secret group that'll tell you which stocks are best to invest in. And then the third group is my personal favorite, which is the gurus that want to sell you a $997 course. Now the reality here is most of these are complete scams and you absolutely don't need these in order to be a successful investor. And so in this video, I'm going to show you the top five safest investments that you can make. And these will allow you to get a consistent return on your money while putting minimal time and effort into it. Now, number five on the list might come as a surprise to a lot of you, which it's going to be index funds. So an index fund is basically where you buy a small part of a bunch of different companies that are in a market. So an example of this would be the S&P 500, which is basically the top 500 companies in the United States. When you diversify your money like this, it tends to go up in the long run because it resembles the market as a whole. So one year it might go up 20% and the next year it might drop 30% and then the next year it might go up 10%. But overall, since the 1920s, it has gone up on average over 10% per year. And that's 7% when you adjust for inflation. And because of this fluctuation, this is actually the least safe out of all the options on this list, because let's say you're planning on retiring in five years and right before you're planning on retiring, you know, a stock market crash like 2008 happens, well, that's going to kind of muck up your plans a little bit. You're either going to have to delay your retirement or you're going to have to sell your stocks at a lot less of what you could have gotten for them. So the trick here is it's very safe as long as you hold your investments and you have an emergency fund just in case something crazy like 2008 happens. But statistics show that most people do not take these precautions. And so when something like 2008 happens, they end up selling their investments for pennies on the dollar, and they lose a significant amount of their net worth. So that's why there's even safer options that are more recession truth. And those are going to be the next ones on the list. So number four on this list is going to be a high interest savings account like Wealthfront. Wealthfront is going to offer you a savings account that gives you a 2.57% return on your money every single year, which as far as I know is the best that's offered out of any savings account. This means if you put $100,000 in the bank, you're going to get $2,570 back the next year. And in the year after that, you're going to get even more because of compounded interest. It's also FDI insured up to $1 million, which is four times more than what most banks offer. So your money is going to be safe. So this is a perfect option, especially if you're using it for an emergency fund, you're not going to be touching that money anyway. So you might as well keep it in a savings account that has that 2.57% interest. That's exactly what I do with my emergency fund. You can also keep money in there that you don't necessarily need to use right now, but you might need to use it a few months from now. So an example of this would be if you're saving up for a down payment on a house. Now the downside to this is they can lower the interest rate at any time. And there's really nothing you can do about it. You'll just have to go through the trouble of taking your cash out. And this is also the lowest return on investment that you will get out of any of the options on this list. But it's still way better than hiding your cash under your bed or putting it in a checking account that only gets like 0,0 1% interest or something like that. So number three on the list is going to be certificates of deposit or CDs. This is another really, really safe investment you can get over 3% on. And basically this is where you make a deal with your bank where let's say you have like $10,000 and you tell your bank like, Hey, I'm going to give you this $10,000. I'm not going to spend it or take it out or do anything with it for three years. You can do whatever you want with it for three years. But I want it to get a little bit better return on investment than if I just left it in the savings account. And generally the longer you leave it in there, the better return you're going to get on it. And these are usually going to be about one to five years, but sometimes you can go less or more. And generally smaller banks or credit unions are going to give you better deals on these because they need cash more than the bigger banks do. And I contacted a few of my local banks and the best offer I was able to get was 3.2% return. And this is extremely safe. In fact, it might be the safest one on the entire list because even if the bank closes down, the FDIC will take over and they'll generally cover your expenses. You know, the only thing you'll have to worry about is sometimes you won't be able to collect on the interest if the bank closes down. Now the downside to this is that if you decide to withdraw your money early, you're going to get penalized. So if a great investment pops up in your future, you're going to have to pay a fee in order to get your money out of your CD. And number two on the list are going to be government bonds, which can still get you over 3% return on your investment. This is basically where when the government needs a loan from somebody, instead of getting a credit card like normal people do, they issue bonds and they say, Hey, I'll give you this bond and, you know, you can give me the money and I'll pay you back, you know, 3%, maybe 3.5% every single year. Now these might be the second safest option on the entire list because in order for you to not get your money back, the entire US government would have to shut down. And if that happened, we would probably have much bigger problems than, you know, worrying about retirement. There are also certain tax benefits you get from these, and you usually end up paying less in taxes than you would for other types of investments. For instance, US Treasury bonds are exempt from local and state taxes. Now there are a few cons to this. The first one is is that if inflation happens, bonds do not tend to hold up as well as say stocks do. And then another con is that the interest rates might rise beyond the value of the bonds face value, which means that you actually lose buying power when you buy a bond. Now, number one on the list is going to be municipal or corporate bond funds. So these are going to be similar to your government bonds, but they're going to be issued by either a local government or a corporation. And you can either invest in them individually, if you really believe in a company or you believe in a local government, or you can do what I recommend, which is investing in funds. And I think it's better to do it this way because you diversify your money throughout a bunch of different bonds, so that, you know, if like, let's say Detroit in 2013, they actually defaulted on their bonds. And so a bunch of people lost money when Detroit decided to do that. That honestly does not happen very often. It's very, very rare, but you should still diversify your investment just to make sure that you're not affected by that. Another great thing about these is you generally don't have to pay income tax on the money you make from these. And depending on which bonds you buy, sometimes you don't have to pay state taxes or local taxes either. Now there are a lot of options for investing in these funds, and some of the options go up to like 6% return. Those are generally a little bit more risky. I like to stay around 4% to 5% return. And this is pretty much guaranteed every single year. Now the downside to this is it's a little bit riskier than say government bonds. And then of course they still have the problem with interest rates and how they don't hold up to inflation very well. But overall, these are all really good options. And generally what people tend to do and what is recommended by financial advisors is when you're younger, you want to go a little bit more aggressive and you want to put your money into stocks. And then as you get older, you want to start putting more and more of your portfolio into bonds because they're just safer. And you basically have a guaranteed return on investment. The only way you wouldn't get your money back is if some kind of apocalypse happened. And then like I said before, if that happened, you'd have more things to worry about than just simply retiring. So I hope you enjoyed this video. And if you haven't done it already, go ahead and smash the like button, smash the subscribe button, ring the little notification bell, and go ahead and comment below your thoughts on the video. Don't go yet though, make sure to check out my videos right here. I hope you have a good day and bye for now.