6 Things To Invest in Other Than the Stock Market

The one piece of advice I have constantly gotten in my 20s is to start investing. I started dabbling in the stock market as a 21-year-old, literally after getting my first "real" paycheck. Lately, I've been on the hunt to figure out how else I can grow my wealth over time (hopefully retire early?). I've found a bunch of different investment options on the way that I never even dreamed would be an investment possibility, and some of the returns on these consistently beat the stock market. Don't believe me? Read for yourself!

1. Cars

Wait? Did I just say invest in cars? That doesn't sound entirely right, because, over the course of their lifetime, cars will lose over 30% of their value in just 3 years!

However, when it comes to classic cars - the kind you would see during a visit to Cuba or at Classic Car rallies and conventions are a big exception to this rule.

Historically, investing in cars has been the domain of the wealthy. It requires a lot of capital to be able to buy a car, fix it up, and then sell it for a premium. Car enthusiasts with cash, however, have been doing this for centuries.

How do laypeople like you and me, who do not have the access, not the capital to make such kind of a commitment jump on this trend, though? The answer is Rally. Rally is a platform for buying & selling equity shares in collectable assets. While Rally now lets you invest in all kinds of collectables and physical assets - its first investable asset were classic cars! With Rally, it is as easy to invest in cars as it would be in the stock market.

How Does Rally Work?

Rally has a beautiful app that you can sign up for that allows you to buy and sell "share" in your asset of choice, quite similar to how you would trade a company!

They actively manage their investments. This means that the source, verify, and acquire the most valuable items from collections and individuals all over the world, and turn them into a company - don't worry they handle all the paperwork as well! These companies are then split into equity shares and are offered to investors via their platform. After 90 days since the "Initial Offering", investors can buy or sell their shares in-app.

Currently, Rally is US-centric, but with their newest round of funding, they should be expanding to other countries across the world!

2. NFTs

NFTs have lately taken the world of cryptocurrency and digital assets by storm after a digital artist known as Beeple sold his artwork for a whopping $69 million at a Christie's auction.

Beeple's artwork, "The First 5000 Days" sold for $69 Million
Beeple's artwork, "The First 5000 Days" sold for $69 Million

But what even are NFTs? NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. I don't know about you, but when I first heard those words my first reaction was, "huh?".

"Non-Fungible" in the most basic terms, means something that is unique and cannot be replaced. Currency, for example, is fungible because, for every $10 note, there exist millions of other $10 notes. The famous "Mona Lisa" painting is, however, non-fungible because you can't replace it with anything else in the world and expect to receive the same thing.

These NFTs are based on the premise of blockchain, which means that they can be authenticated and verified. The first company with a licensed marketplace was CryptoKitties. CryptoKitties was started by Dapper Labs in 2017, and at one point over 15% of the Ethereum transaction made where to buy or sell CryptoKitties.

While it was originally intended as an engaging game, CryptoKitties also presented itself as a lucrative and secure investment opportunity. Cats have ranged anywhere from $5 to well over $300,000!

Marketplaces like Nifty Gateway are great to find digital art collectables whose value might appreciate.

How to Invest in NFTs in 2021 - A Complete Guide
It’s 2021 and you’ve started your journey as an investor. Cryptocurrency is on a booming bull run, and all of a sudden there’s a new buzzword in town. NFTs have become all the rage ever since an artist called Beeple sold his for 69 million dollars. What just happened? Beeple’s

3. Artwork

Historically, artwork investments have been the per-view of the wealthy. However, with the rise of fractional investing, platforms like Otis and Masterworks are creating space for investors like you and me to invest in this age-old form of investment. What is fractional investing you ask? Fractional investing simply means that instead of buying a whole piece of art that can cost upwards of millions of dollars, these platforms buy the artwork for you. They then divide the value of the artwork into issuable "shares", much as you would do in the stock market, and then issue these shares to art "shareholders" like you and me!

Why is this an enticing investment space? Because historically, Blue chip artwork has outperformed the stock market! It is also a really good way to diversify your investment portfolio and minimise risk because even if the stock market crashes (which it tends to do periodically), the artwork will often still go up in value! However, bear in mind that while the artwork is a good and stable source of income it is not a "get rich quick" investment. You will likely need to hold your investment for a long period of time - sometimes even a decade.

How To Invest in Fine Art in 2021
The crypto market is in a bull run and the stock market has seen historic gains in 2020, most people would not be looking at other sources of investment in 2021. However, rest assured, the current state of affairs is far from the norm. Historically, artwork investments have been the

4. Social Media Accounts

Social Media is all the rage these days. With TikTok and Instagram taking the world of content marketing by storm, it is more important than ever to have a platform and following to promote any business. With a big following, comes traction, and traction directly translates to revenue. Social Media accounts with a big following can generate hundreds and thousands of dollars of revenue per month and are sold for millions of dollars.

How legal is this? To be honest, not very. Most social networks prohibit the buying and selling of accounts, but that doesn't stop the existence of an entire marketplace that enables this. YouTube is perhaps the only giant that allows account trading in the open (as of writing this). Social Media brokers are a thing, and some have earned over $120,000 flipping Instagram accounts.

Platforms like Viral Accounts and Fameswap make it easy for laypeople like you and me to buy and sell social media accounts. The average sale price on these websites seems to be $30 per 1000 followers. Is this the path to riches we've been neglecting this whole time?

Valuation of social media accounts is a murky territory with room for some big flips, given the fact that most people do not know how high to value their accounts. It's all about educating yourself about the profit per post, and then investing accordingly!

5. Farmland

In a world of digital assets that reap huge profits, investing in humanity's oldest invention seems a bit... counterintuitive. However as long as the world keeps spinning, people will need food to survive, and farming isn't going anywhere. In fact, technological advancements in farming have made processing more efficient and reduced waste - making farmland a very lucrative investment.

Most people reading this probably don't have enough cash to shell out to buy entire farmlands. This is where new technology and platforms like FarmTogether come into the picture.

With FarmTogether, you can partly own a real fan, without a load of managing or operating it yourself. In return, you get both cash payouts from the farm’s income, as well as your share of capital gains when the farm is sold. Win, win!

Investments generally start in the range of $15,000 to $50,000 per transaction and target a 3-7% cash yield and an annual IRR of 7-13%.

6. Wine

If you're like me, you probably thought the wine was just for drinking. And it is! Well, mostly. Did you know that Wine comes under the worlds 10 most popular collectable assets, and has been traded among the wealthy for centuries? Virtually inaccessible to retail investors in the past, wine has slowly and surely been democratised by the presence of the internet and the tech boom.

You've probably heard of the adage, "To age like fine wine" - which goes to show just how old wine has been considered valuable for time immemorial. The most expensive bottle ever sold was a 73-year-old bottle of French Burgundy, sold in 2018 for $558,000. Can you even imagine the cost per sip?

So how does one go about investing in this seemingly lucrative asset class? You buy a wine bottle yourself! If you want to buy and resell bottles yourself (which I don't really recommend for beginners), you can do this using one of three options - wine auctions, wine brokers, and wine stock exchanges. However, for those of us less savvy with the logistics of this, there are some emerging options available (thank you technology).

If this seems entirely inaccessible to you, don't worry - we have you covered. Vinovest is a platform that lets you invest in wine and takes care of all the logistics for you. With minimum funding of $1000 for their standard package, you can get started investing in wine in no time! The best part? If you ever decide that you want to drink your investment, you can do that too!