The 2008 Return on 1998's $100k

New York Magazine's Relative Investment- What If You Had $100,000 to spend in 1998 is an eye popper. Okay, sure, NY Mag is a real estate junket, and NYC real estate is a kick in the pants, but the list isn't all city square footage.

Some examples- Eighty grand on a Harlem townhouse shell, is now worth $800k to $1.5 mil, and that's still a shell. Then we have the example of a hair below $100k worth of Apple stock, now worth $1.9 million. In 1998 I had some jacked up Mac laptop circa 1994 that was the size of the Manhattan yellow pages, and I had to jiggle the power cord to get consistent power. But what did I expect, I bought it at a Salvation Army in Los Angeles. I should have bought some Apple shares, but I was still too busy blowing off my student loans, which is why one would shop at the Salvation Army for a laptop to begin with.

Anyways, check out the list, it's kind of fun. It runs through everything from real estate to Hermès Kelly bags to 64 cases of Dom. It also helps put things in perspective because the past ten years have had some serious market woes. At the end of the day, it's all about investing for the long term.