There are some personal finance communities on Lemmy that would likely be eager to answer this one for you. Seems like communities you might be interested in if these kinds of questions are important to you.
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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do you know which ones are active?
The most active is the Canadian one. But there's a lot of crossover there. Most suggestions you get, especially for something like this, are going to be relevant in any major western country. The UK one is the second most popular.
3 year horizon: Not stock market. Unless you are okay with delaying the purchase for as long as it takes for the market to recover.
High interest rate account is what I'd look for.
If you want to save less than 5 years, banks with CDs or high yield accounts are your best bet. The stock market is far to volatile for short term saving, you really need need 5-7 years of investing to make growth likely.
With cars specifically, an option is to use existing car + bank account to buy a better car for cash on a 6 month to 1 year timeline. This works because at the low end cars don't really deprecate until they break. This stops working well in the 10-15k range.
High yield savings account or the short term Treasury bonds, and good luck with this, I hope at the end you have enough for a car AND no need for a car so you just have money.
I want a car though, I'm a car guy
unless I buy a motorcycle
I have a car and love it (Accord Sport 6 speed manual) but use the electric bike to commute, and let the kids take the car since they have a longer drive. I want to keep it when they move out though, it's just such a great car and harder to find stick shift now.
But if it didn't rain so much here, I do think I'd sell it to the kids (cheap since it's paid off)
Motorcycle insurance here is like $100 a year but car insurance about $300 a MONTH, so make sure you budget for all those extra costs, fuel, insurance, maintenance.
Money market like vmfxx, tax exempt bond like vteb, Treasury money market like vusxx, tbills which are tax exempt from the state.
These are all generally pretty safe and low risk. With tbills you have a little more flexibility to stagger or create a ladder.
Money market or high yield savings. They may not return much but will keep you at or above inflation. 3 years is too short for stock. Maybe it would work, but maybe it won’t and you can’t recover that quickly.
In general I think ten years where stock is an unbeatable investment where you’ll almost always come out ahead.