Ever since the real estate crash in 2008, I’ve been thinking about investing in… real estate. Real estate is cheap after the crash, right? It’s bound to go up eventually, right? However, I’ve never actually sat down to research investing in real estate, let alone actually got around to investing in it. That changed when I joined FutureAdvisor.com.

Future Advisor is a mint-like web application that tries to be your financial advisor. I read an interesting article about the site (which is lost in the ether of my mind at this point) and decided to check it out. You give it the login information of your investment accounts, they analyze your investments, and then give you recommendations based on what you are invested in and your risk tolerance. A major thing that it recommended for me was to invest in both domestic and foreign real estate. And, since it knew I had investments with Vanguard, it recommended me Vanguard’s foreign (VGXRX) and domestic (VGSLX) REIT funds. It only took a couple of days of pondering before I transferred some of the money in my Roth IRA into these funds to get some exposure to real estate. It was that simple.

Now I have $13k of the $38k in my Roth in real estate, $3,000 of which is in the foreign real estate fund. I also adjusted my automatic investment to continue to invest in these funds at about the same ratio. Another great benefit was that since I invested $10,000 into VGSLX, I got the “Admiral Shares” variant of the fund, which has an even lower expense ratio than the normal “Investor Shares”. Awesome!

Future Advisor recommended that I put 20% of my investments in real estate, but I felt like that was too much. I only ended up doing about 7%, but I may increase this more in the future. Nevertheless, thanks to them for giving me the kick in the butt I needed to actually make the investment!