Investing strategy after maxing out retirement accounts

What do you guys do after you’ve maxed out your work 401k and contributed to IRA (Roth or traditional)? I’ve been working a few years now (in my mid-20s) and have some more money to dedicate to putting away but trying to be smart and thoughtful about what I do.

Right now my investing strategy (if you would call it that!) falls into 3 main buckets

  1. Work 401k/Vanguard IRA – mostly set and forget. I probably check way too much but don’t tinker unless to speed up contributions to my 401k since my employer just does a set contribution each paycheck, not a % match. So it doesn’t matter to draw it out to keep getting the match. In the past I’ve sat on too much cash so I have more than enough of a buffer to live off while I dwindle my paycheck down to hit the yearly limit faster.

  2. Brokerage (taxable) – this is where I am looking for ideas or wanted to check what other people have done. My dad was generous enough to get me started with some blue chip stocks when I was toddler and my inherent bias leans on that / from what he taught me when I was younger. I started pulling some money out of each paycheck and will automatically invest in a Vanguard Fund or two. I think I’m going to do a VG dividend growth fund and a growth fund but open to suggestions if someone has nerded out on VG fund research.

What else should I be doing? I’ve heard HSAs have tax-advantaged investment opportunities but I think I missed the window to sign up for this year. Any other strategies I should use to minimize taxes?

In addition to dollar-cost averaging a few VG funds I’ll plan to buy some select opportunistic individual stocks. Biased towards dividend stocks because of my dad and DRIP but I know a lot of studies have shown that a portfolio of primarily growth stocks can consistently outproduce a portfolio of dividend stock. So any thoughts here are welcome.

  1. Brokerage (other) – I won’t going into too much detail but I put a few grand into my account and traded options. Minimal success (but have not lost money, net net!) but this doesn’t really factor too much into my long term plans. I find it hard to follow the market too closely with my day job (sell-side M&A) so I’m becoming more and more selective/winding down what I do here.

tl;dr – what do you guys do for investing after maxing out your tax advantaged retirement accounts?

 

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