NINJA with $1.5m to invest
I have no income, no job and no fixed assets. Okay, it's not quite NINJA status as my wife is working and I recently sold an asset so have a total of $1.5m (USD) to invest. I'm looking for ideas on how best invest this for the long term.
Here's the situation. All figures in USD: * Married couple: I'm 50 and my wife's 45. * We live in Australia (rented apartment) and would like to continue living here. However Australia is expensive and moving to a cheaper country in future - even if for just part of each year - is not out of the question. Eg Thailand, Greece, Portugal, etc. After all, who knows what the world will look like in 20 or 30 years time. * No debt. * No kids or other dependants, which also means nobody who'll take care of us later on. * Wife is in a stable job earning $88k per year ($65k after tax) but would like to retire (and travel) when we can afford it. * I have long-time experience investing in individual stocks, stock ETFs and bond ETFs on stock exchanges in the US, Europe, Australia and Asia. * We currently have some of the funds invested: $160k in international stocks/ETFs/Managed funds; $30k in precious metals. The rest ($1,300k) is in cash/bonds/low-volatility funds in various currencies and ready to be put to work. * I measure performance by the average of the major currencies after inflation. Though the Australian dollar is currently significant I would like to have a fairly country-agnostic view.
My investment objective is to have a portfolio that gives good long-term growth and income (30+ years) with very low risk of coordinated, devistating losses. I like Mr Money Mustache's philosophy, perhaps with a bigger travelling budget and better healthcare.
The oft-given advice in this forum for US residents is to invest in a low-cost S&P500 tracker, and while trading individual stocks is fun a tracker like that is hard to beat in general.
Having said that, my worst investments have been the seemingly safe ones (non-US banks in 2007), while the most prosperous by far have been the unsafe ones like a risky startup tech stock at the beginning of the dot-com boom, housing when it seemed a terrible choice and bitcoin at under $1. Over the past few years I avoided US companies, US bonds and the US dollar as I was wary of the manipulated US economic recovery, but as it turned out those were the places to be invested.
Harry Browne's "Permanent Portfolio" concept sounds compelling but it's performance has not been great.
I'm considering a core-and-satellite approach: Putting a good chunk of the investment into something like the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI) for international exposure and splitting the rest between cash, bonds, precious metals and riskier gambles?
What assets, strategies and percentages do you suggest?