To add some more detail, you could consider this to be three pieces of advice, in increasing order of specificity:
First, if you want to invest your savings to make more money, you should strongly consider the stock market, since it tends to grow faster than other investments. But you should be aware that the stock market sometimes goes down, so you might lose money. So you should think this over and decide if it’s what you want to do.
Second, if you invest in the stock market, you should go with index funds. Index funds try to match the market, rather than trying to beat the market, which allows them to have lower fees and expenses. It’s very very hard to beat the market, and if you try to (e.g., by picking stocks or investing in an actively managed mutual fund) you’ll waste a bunch of money on fees and expenses in the process. You can read more about index funds in some of the links in this thread (including mine and James_Miller’s).
Third, if you invest in index funds, one very good option is Vanguard’s US fund VTSMX (or you could split your money between that and VFWIX, their non-US fund). There may be better options for you, but they aren’t likely to be much better. Vanguard has an excellent reputation, these funds have very low expenses and few restrictions (especially the US fund, VTSMX), VTSMX does an excellent job of matching the US stock market (and the combination does a good job of matching the world stock market), the minimum investment is only $3,000 (USD), and it’s easy to do the investing online. There are other options you could look into, including ETFs (which are stocks that are designed to match the market, rather than mutual funds) and index funds at other brokerages like Schwab and Fidelity, but don’t get stuck agonizing over which one to pick because the differences aren’t that big.
To add some more detail, you could consider this to be three pieces of advice, in increasing order of specificity:
First, if you want to invest your savings to make more money, you should strongly consider the stock market, since it tends to grow faster than other investments. But you should be aware that the stock market sometimes goes down, so you might lose money. So you should think this over and decide if it’s what you want to do.
Second, if you invest in the stock market, you should go with index funds. Index funds try to match the market, rather than trying to beat the market, which allows them to have lower fees and expenses. It’s very very hard to beat the market, and if you try to (e.g., by picking stocks or investing in an actively managed mutual fund) you’ll waste a bunch of money on fees and expenses in the process. You can read more about index funds in some of the links in this thread (including mine and James_Miller’s).
Third, if you invest in index funds, one very good option is Vanguard’s US fund VTSMX (or you could split your money between that and VFWIX, their non-US fund). There may be better options for you, but they aren’t likely to be much better. Vanguard has an excellent reputation, these funds have very low expenses and few restrictions (especially the US fund, VTSMX), VTSMX does an excellent job of matching the US stock market (and the combination does a good job of matching the world stock market), the minimum investment is only $3,000 (USD), and it’s easy to do the investing online. There are other options you could look into, including ETFs (which are stocks that are designed to match the market, rather than mutual funds) and index funds at other brokerages like Schwab and Fidelity, but don’t get stuck agonizing over which one to pick because the differences aren’t that big.