I'm looking for an investment that returns 5% to 10% (or more, hopefully), & still secures my principal.?

This is for my retirement fund. The more I read about retirement (lack of cash flow vs inflation, especially), the more I want to build as large a cushion as possible. I really feel for kids today (by saying kids, I mean anyone from 0 years old to mid lifers who haven't started saving yet), as there's no one actively looking out for their welfare. Social Security was a mistake, but the Feds should actively encourage people to vigorously save on their own. If I were king, I would propose mandating everyone put away at least 5%, and up to 100%, per pay period in pretax dollars. It would grow tax free and couldn't be taken out any sooner than 3/4ths of the current typical life span (say todays life span is 85. 3/4ths would be about 64 years old). Have the SSA deposit whatever each individual has had deducted net of any disbursements into whatever savings vehicle the individual wants to kick the retirement account off to a good start. Whew!! Sorry about that. I get carried away.

UMREX
UMESX
USCOX

Think about a 401k or an aggressive mutual fund. My company matches my 401k up to 3% so in the span of 2 years I've been able to save around 24k dollar in my 401k set on aggressive. A mutual fund is safe, the earning are around the middle of what you're looking for, but for a mutual fund to fail the whole market would have to crash. Good luck!

My friend is making around 11% by lenting at prosper.com. He said he never had any bad loan. ( he is not greedy, you can lent with upto 25% intrest, but high risk)

Regards,

You can get 5%+ on some standard interest bearing acocunts but the interest is taxable at year end, reducing the actual returns. You capital is as secure as anything ever is.

If you want more returns then the mutual fund route is one but you have no guarantee of a positive return each year so if this is a long term investment that's okay, if you have just a few years until retirement then it's not such a good idea. An advantage of stock based investments is that the returns are capital gains so you only pay tax when you sell them, allowing the returns to compound. Whilst the guy above is correct in saying that for you to lose all of your money there would have to be an unforeseeable event you could still end up with less than you started with even though that is unlikely over the longer run.

There are a lot of people who make money advising others on pension arrangements, You should engage one of them rather than rely on anything that you read here. The selection of which fund will depend on your situation, the fees vs returns, your personal beliefs about which markets are going to be hot over the next few years and so on.