Historic Investment Results

We all know that we need to save for our future, but how? Stocks, Gold, Housing,
Bonds? Which is best? There is no way to know the future, but this calculator will
tell you what was the best in the past.

Do you sometimes wish you could have a time machine and change your
investment strategy? Wouldn’t you like to be able to go back and tell a
grandparent to make an investment in your name for you to cash in today?

Do you realize if someone had put a dollar in the stock market in 1871 and left
it there, that investment would be worth over $123,000 today? In 2007, it would
have been worth only a little less at $121,000, but two years later in 2009, it
would have been worth only $77,500. The most brilliant traveler would have put
a dollar in the stock market in 1871 and then moved it all the gold in 2000. That
person would have $655,500 by 2012.

The Time Traveler’s Investment Calculator is a simple way to go back in time and
choose a hypothetical investment strategy and see how you would have done.

You can compare your actual investments with what you wish you had done.
Was gold, housing or the stock market the best investment? Check it out. See
what fun you can have in out guessing the experts. Historical Novelists can make
sure their characters made the right or wrong decisions to fit their plots.

For you Gold Bugs, the last decade and the 1970s beat all alternates. Tell your
broker if you had put your money in gold in 2000 instead of the stock market
you would have had five times as much money by 2011. But be careful, during
the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, an investment in the stock market out
performed gold by a factor of seven!

What about housing?

Between 2000 and 2006, investing in a house paid an 11% annualized return.
Only gold paid more at 13.7%. Since 2006, there has been a drop of 33% in
housing values, with a small recovery starting in 2013. But back in the 1980s,
owning a house was almost three times better than holding gold and in the
1970s, owning a home was a better investment than the stock market.