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Douglas Greenberg’s Top Four Alternative Investments

Douglas Greenberg Discusses Enhancing Your Portfolio With Alternative Investments  

Getting started in alternative investments provides you with numerous new ways to build your portfolio. You may have heard of real estate as an alternative investment and certain exchange-traded funds (ETFs), but the world of investing offers far more than that.

You do not need to have a high-income earning career to take advantage of most of these options. Typical starting investments range from $500 to $1,000. You will not need your broker either since most of these options take place in an app or on a website, says Douglas Greenberg, President of Pacific Northwest Advisory. You set up your account and conduct the trades yourself.

Alternative investments do not replace your investment portfolio bonds, stocks, or mutual funds. Instead, they provide a way to enhance your portfolio with passive income that can lead to larger or more frequent payoffs.

Douglas Greenberg’s Finds Alt Investments for Everyone
  • Art Investing: Crowdfunding enables you to invest in fine art without knowing art or having the funds to purchase a Van Gogh or Kandinsky, says Douglas Greenberg. Use a website like Masterworks to find fine art expected to increase in value and buy shares in it. Masterworks buys and sells the art; you earn proceeds based on your fractional shares ownership.
  • Real Estate Shareholder: You do not need to purchase a house to invest in real estate. You can use Fundrise to purchase shares in a real estate purchase. Unlike purchasing stock on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), you do not need to purchase shares in commercial buildings. Fundrise lets you purchase percentage ownership in a single-family dwelling or duplex, etc. The property could get flipped or rented, explains Douglas Greenberg. Either way, you make money from it.
  • Peer-to-peer Lending: You can easily launch a peer-to-peer investment by using the website Lending Club. The site requires that you make a $1,000 deposit, but you can make many small investments from the deposit. The minimum loan is $25. Just as a bank makes money on loans through the interest paid, you make money making peer-to-peer loans, Douglas Greenberg said. You can combine real estate and loan to your peers by using a site such as PeerStreet that crowdsources real estate loans.
  • Cryptocurrency: This option scares some individuals, especially if they have no experience in currency trading, also called FOREX. FOREX provides a good foundation for trading cryptocurrency or by using the buy and hold method (HODL) preferred by many crypto investors, Douglas Greenberg says. You might find Bitcoin a bit pricey of an entry point for cryptocurrency, although COVID-19 has contributed some volatile days to its trading. If you buy on the low days, you may be able to build wealth since it has logged a 2017 record high of about $19,000 per Bitcoin. Your better plan would be to purchase Litecoin, Miota, or another altcoin with a strong fintech background and a well-developed blockchain. If you still hesitate to join Coinbase and conduct your own trades, you can invest in an ETF that includes cryptocurrency or blockchain technologies among its portfolio.
Douglas Greenberg’s Getting Started Tips

Perhaps you have yet to save $500, but you dream of building wealth. You can do more than dream, said Douglas Greenberg. You can do it. Start with an app like Stash or Acorns that allows you to save micro amounts using a method called roundups. A roundup rounds each purchase you make on a linked debit or credit card up to the next whole dollar. If you purchase a coffee for $2.12, the roundup withdraws $3, paying for the purchase with $2.12 and placing the 88 cents into your micro-savings account that becomes a micro-investment account once you save $5. These tiny deposits add up quickly, and their investment with the other users’ micro-investment accounts builds your wealth more quickly than traditional methods.

Jump right in if you already have the $500 or $1,000 to start, says Douglas Greenberg. Many of the alternative investment methods provide a much safer manner of investing since they allow you to spread your money across many opportunities.