@newcovenantheart So here’s the short of it.
Roth and 401ks are REALLY long term, like can’t touch that money until you’re 59.5 (exactly 59 and a half or you pay really high penalties).
As such, I personally stay away.
There are plenty of halal, shariah compliant, ETFs that perform very well, better than the market right now even. An ETF is basically a bag of many stocks, which is what I recommend you invest in.
Think of it this way, you can invest in a single company like Microsoft. That’s a bit risky though but high reward. Microsoft could do very very well, or do very very poorly and all your money is in that stock.
ETFs will take multiple stocks, often hundreds, and give you one price to average out those that do poorly. For example, SPUS is based on S&P 500. S&P 500 is basically the top 500 companies in the U.S. rolled into one ETF and is a market standard. SPUS is the shariah compliant version of S&P 500 as it removes the haram businesses.
There are a few halal ETFs. I used SPUS and SPTE. SPTE is a shariah compliant ETF of global tech companies, it’s more risky than SPUS but again, higher reward higher risk.
There are many more halal investments like SPWO which if I recall is a developing world industrial index, SPRE which is a real estate ETF, HLAL which is a ETF similar to SPUS I believe, UMMA another ETF, and SPSK.
So to list them out what we have today in the U.S. include (in order of what I like to invest in)
I don’t invest in the following, in decreasing order of my preference