Love Dividends? Check Out These High-Yield Alternative Investments

The following post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga.

Dividends are a great source of passive income while you wait for your long-term investments to appreciate in value.

Dividend stocks aren’t the only source of this type of passive income, though. A growing number of alternative investments make cash distributions to investors.

What Are Alternative Investments? Alternative investments are assets that don’t fit within traditional investment categories like stocks, bonds and currencies. Some popular alternative investments include real estate, art, wine and even racehorses. 

Most alternative investments are highly speculative and require investors to wait for the asset to appreciate in value over time and sell for a profit in the future, if all goes as planned.

On the other hand, assets like real estate can generate monthly cash flow that's paid out to investors either monthly or quarterly. There are also alternative investment funds that regularly pay out dividends to investors as profits are realized. 

High-Yield Alternative Investment Platforms: These X investment platforms allow passive investors to participate in investments like rental properties, commercial real estate and even a portfolio of high-end motorcycle loans. 

CrowdStreet: CrowdStreet is a real estate crowdfunding platform that allows accredited investors to invest in institutional quality commercial real estate deals. Access to these types of deals typically requires investing in a private equity real estate fund with a minimum investment of at least $250,000, but CrowdStreet has a minimum investment of only $25,000 for most offerings.

Several deals are listed on CrowdStreet at any given time with varying levels of risk and target returns, including an offering for Steam on the Platte, a creative office in Denver, Colorado with a target annual cash return of 10.2%.

View available investment offerings on CrowdStreet.

Arrived Homes: Arrived Homes is a newer alternative investment platform and allows non-accredited investors to buy shares of income-producing rental properties for as little as $100. Arrived Homes selects and acquires rental properties with the greatest income potential then sells shares to individual investors on the platform. 

The company takes care of all of the management headaches that go along with investing in rental properties while passive investors collect their dividends each quarter. When the company eventually sells the property, the investors receive their share of equity. As long as the property sells for a profit, investors can receive a nice return from the equity they’ve built over time. 

View available investment offerings on Arrived Homes.

YieldStreet: YieldStreet is an alternative investment platform that offers a wide range of investment options ranging from short-term notes to commercial real estate and even a portfolio of loans backed by high-end motorcycles. The platform even has a fixed-income fund with multiple types of assets including art, debt and real estate. 

YieldStreet has investment options for non-accredited investors as well as funds that are only available to accredited investors. Minimum investments range from $500 to $15,000 and annual yields ranging from 8% to 11.5%. 

View available investment offerings on YieldStreet.

Should You Invest In Alternative Assets? Alternative investments definitely aren’t for everybody. In most cases, these investments have little to no liquidity and require you to commit to keeping your money invested for at least three to five years.

There are also additional risks involved since these types of investments aren’t regulated the same as publicly traded stocks. 

There are definite benefits to alternative investments if you’re comfortable with the risk and committing to a long-term investing strategy. For one, these types of investments offer higher yields than most dividend stocks and bonds.

There’s also very little correlation between most alternative investments and the stock market. This means that even when the stock market is down, alternative investments can continue to provide high returns. 

See also: Best Alternative Investments

Photo: nick mercer on Unsplash.

The preceding post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.