<prompt> Human: Ive got 250k split among 2 savings accounts earning me a little under 1 interest. Ive got 0 invested in anything. Nothing in a 401k my employer doesnt match and nothing in stocks. Ive actually never invested in anything. The first few years I worked I just put everything I had towards paying off all my student loan credit card debt until I was debt free. Then I started stashing it all away in my savings accounts. Im terrified of putting money in the stock market while its at an all-time high. Theres no way it doesnt go down sometime within the next two years, so if I buy now instead of when it goes down, Im just losing money. That has been my reasoning for the last year or so and the stock market has just climbed and climbed. I almost invested in real estate, but I have no idea what Im doing with that and I pulled out at the last second for fear of losing all my money. I dont want to use a financial adviser because they will just take a cut of my money and throw it in the stock market. Fuck, I could do that without giving a cut to some middleman. Should I just wait until the stock market plummets and then put it all in a mutual fund?Im 30 years old. No debt. No kids. I rent in a big expensive city 3kmonth. But I do support my girlfriend younger beautiful model, totally worth it, dont judge :P . Heres the rub: I am probably going to lose my job within the next 6 months and will have to take a job paying about 80kyear quite a bit less than Ive been making for the past few years. Any advice? Assistant: With this kind of money you dont want to do something you would regret later on. You might want to find a Financial Adviser who charges a flat fee so you can have some piece of mind that a professional can give.But if I were you I would start maxing 401k and IRA. I would go for a moderate asset allocation maybe 67 stocks 33 bonds. No matter how the stock market goes I would rebalance to this allocation periodically. The stock market goes up and down but over time it goes up. If you park your money in an index fund for 35 years it will go up by a large amount. Your 250k will turn into 1 million in 2013 dollars more like 3 or 4 million but I took inflation into accountsource on historical returnsHuman: Am I being foolish for saying I want to wait for the stock market to plummet before I put my money in? Every financial adviser tells me so, but they have a huge financial incentive to tell me that so Ill give them my money to invest. Also, how much should i invest vs. leave in my bank account? Leave like 20k in the savings account and invest the rest?  <response>: You already know the problem. You have been waiting for the next crash but the markets have been going higher and higher. Inevitably we will have another bear market like we did in 2000 and 2008. But the bottom of that crash might be higher than what we are at today! Example, dow can go to 30,000 then crash to 20,000 but thats still higher than 14,000 we are at todayYou should leave 6 months living expenses in your bank account. If you decide to have a kid then bump this up to a years worth. 