college student, parents killed in auto accident, inherited more money than i know what to do with.

The magnitude of your assets is actually ideal. Here's why:

1% of ~$10M (about what you have) is $100,000 which is a safe and comprehensive annual expenditure amount for you and your brother that will not deplete the total value of your assets as long as they are invested prudently over time. This is because the Western economic history of the last 100 years has demonstrated that any distributed long term investment strategy will have an annualized return of at least 1% over almost any short stretch of a few years and will always return greater than 1% over the medium to long term and will likely continue to do so.

If you take your time and when you are educated and comfortable just invest traditionally by having having Fidelity or you yourself purchase a diversity of long term investments like an appropriate distribution of index funds, dividend paying index funds, bonds and government bonds from Western countries with healthy economic balance sheets and healthy representative democracies you will be set.

If you did this at any time in the last 100 years you would get an average real annualized return of more than 10% over the whole time period and maybe much more.

$100,000 annually is an ideal amount to budget for a young guy and his young brother and maybe a girlfriend later.

I've been brief and will continue to be unless you reach out for more help understanding these things. Here are some important things that you will consider and which are helpful to understand.

  1. Money seems like a simple concept because buying and selling things is a simple interaction. But the nature of money is one of the most subtly confusing things in all of the natural world. Trying to understand what it means and how it moves can be a rewarding experience. It is not an exact science. Money can be freedom. Freedom to have more time for yourself, travel, worry less, experience more. It's other things and has other properties.

  2. Although it is a cliché, the phrase, "It takes money to make money" is an important monetary phenomenon to try and understand, especially for you. Things like compounding interest, inflation and why markets today are starved for yield and fearful are all things which you must consider.

  3. Humans did not evolve to be naturally effective at managing large amounts of money. To do it successfully you must be thoughtful and open-minded.

  4. Tell only advisor's and immediate family about your money and then only what is necessary. No one else. This is because interacting with other humans is easiest when everyone perceives themselves as being in similar circumstances. The more different people are, the harder it is to relate. Money makes you different in many ways.

  5. Normal people are predisposed to seek connections with others, to search for meaning and purpose. Because your circumstances have changed your perspective on these things will likely start to evolve more quickly. You could call this your moral-code or outlook on life. It will be a struggle to simultaneously fulfil your desire for meaning and maintain an open mind. There is virtue in this struggle though.

Remember that everyone hears about the suddenly wealthy who make mistakes and fools of themselves. Almost no one hears about the one's who were prudent with their wealth. This survivorship-bias for publicity will make you naturally fearful of the future but you seem like a thoughtful person so you will probably be fine.

I'm 25 and experienced a smaller and less tragic windfall than yours and have been working on these things alone for a few years. Let me know if you want more advice.

/r/personalfinance Thread