Everyone wants to retire someday, and the best way to retire on time or early is to invest your money wisely. Thankfully, today there are thousands of different types of alternative investments out there.

From rugs to gold, you can pick whatever you’re interested in today and turn it into an investment tomorrow! We’d like to go over the most popular forms of alternative investments to help you on your journey to a work-free future.

What Are Alternative Investments?

Alternative investments are typically defined as investments that don’t fall into your typical categories such as stocks, cash, and bonds. This means that anything else is up for grabs when discussing alternative investments!

The Main Types of Alternative Investments

With so many different options to invest, you have to start thinking that anything you look at could be an investment. We’d like to cover the main types of alternative investments that have enough of a following to be reliable.

As with any investing though, you should do your research and ensure that you have a decent chance to make a profit. Thankfully, you are already on the way to educating yourself and investing in more interesting markets. Alternatively, you can always check out this comprehensive guide on the best companies for investment purposes.

Real Estate Investing

Real-estate investing and alternative investments are practically said in the same breath. There are so many ways to invest in real estate, so you can take as much responsibility as you’d like. Dipping your toe in the water has never been easier.

For real-estate, you have the obvious choices of buying a house, condo, or duplex, but with today’s technology, you have a few other choices also! REITs are one of the more interesting real estate investment types that have come forward.
REIT stands for real estate investment trust. With a REIT, you can invest in a larger company that manages the property and they will pay you a quarterly or annual dividend based on their profits. This means you can invest in property without actually having the burden of property management.

Other popular ways of investing are renting out different types of properties. You can always rent out the typical apartment or townhouse, but you can also buy industrial, commercial, or retail property also.

Real estate investing allows for a lot of experimentation, so give one of the investment methods a try and see what fits best for you! You never know how big real estate investing can grow, and if you can manage real estate, it has some of the largest returns on your investments.

CryptoCurrency

CryptoCurrency has to be mentioned if we’re going to talk about alternative investments. CryptoCurrency had its huge surges back in 2017 and 2018, but it has maintained a fairly healthy total market cap over 200 billion since then.

This means that enough money is floating around that you can jump in regardless of your investment size and see how you fare. CryptoCurrency trading feels a lot like stock trading because you’re effectively investing in a company's product, but a lot of people are still highly interested.

Precious Metals

Precious metals have been a solid investment choice for as long as humans have been interested in shiny objects! Kings demanded it, queens wanted it, and people hoarded it. You can invest in actual gold or other precious metals for your IRA. Try to see this ira gold transfer to know what to consider before you start investing.

Gold, silver, and platinum are still highly desired in society today. Granted we keep track of how much each ounce is, so bartering with it is effectively out the door now. With that being said though, you can go to nearly any city and find a place to buy any of these precious metals.

Once you’ve bought the raw material, you are already investing! You can hold onto your metal and sell it at a later date when prices are higher and it is in high demand.

Items of Interest

A lot falls into items of interest, but it is also one of the largest alternative investments you can get into. This is where looking around and seeing what people want comes in handy!

You can invest in clothes, art, coffee mugs, comic books, historic objects, and anything else that could grow in value. This is another quick one to get into, but you’ll need to do some research into what is going to be valuable in the future.

There is a lot of prediction required here, and it could take a long time to cash in on your idea, but some items of interest have the highest rate of return ever seen! Some comic books that cost 10 cents back in the day can go for millions of dollars today! Find something you think people will love and hold onto it because it could make you rich.

Invest in Individuals

Another great method of investing that has cropped up in the last few years is lending money to individuals. Many sites will provide different grades of investments from A to F that let you know how trustworthy a person has been in the past.

These are typically 1 to 3-year investments, but they can pay higher interest than what is typical. Lending money to individuals can be reliable and a great way to help people get their journey started!

Invest for You

With so many different types of alternative investments, you can take your pick of the litter. Do your research and find what you think you’d enjoy most. The best part is that you can always liquidate assets to move onto different investments later!

Every alternative investment mentioned here whether it’s real estate or items of interest is an option to create a brighter future for yourself. If you are interested in any form of alternative investing, feel free to check out our other blogs!