[kelnos]

"Investing", assuming you are regularly employed, shouldn't be a thing you only do at certain rare times. You should put a part of every paycheck into whatever investments match with your risk tolerance. They way you eliminate the risk that you put a big lump sum into the market right before a crash.

[polishdude20]

I haven't been regularly investing for a few years as I've been saving up for a downpayment. Is that a sound plan?

[NhanH]

You should be investing in a low risk, high-liquidity market (treasury, money market) when saving up.

But anyway it is a reasonably sound plan for what you are doing.

[polishdude20]

Like bonds? When we talk about liquidity, aren't something like questrade ETF's for bonds like VAB.TO for example pretty liquid? I can just sell them any day fairly easily. Then again, the interest rate of my bank is probably more than that right?

[NhanH]

You can sell stock any day too, it's just not guaranteed you get out what you put in. What you needs is short-term bond so that you aren't stuck with the interest rate risk (when prevalent interest rate changes, your bond value changes too). Just to make a concrete example, if you buy VAB.TO in 2020, and you want your money now in 2024, you're currently down 20% from your purchase.

You need short-term bond (6-month, 1-month or even shorter) so that at worst you will get 100% of your money out by waiting for the maturity date. Money-market would be super short term: consider them as days-length bond.

But if we are talking about down payment money here, it's probably 100-200k something, which would translate to a few thousand dollars per year. Might not be worth your time, and definitely not worth it if you misunderstand and buy ETF bond or something like that. So yeah, keep it in a high-interest rate saving account is ok.

[polishdude20]

Cool thanks for the help!

[datavirtue]

Very few people have the luxury/privilege of investing at their risk tolerance.