Originally Posted by lazycash

Have you considered buying a home? If you're convinced you want to stay conservative, at least put your money into a high yielding certificate of deposit - cd. Take 100k and put it into a 12 month or longer cd from an established online bank, ie www.ingdirect.com and you can lock in your interest rate at 5 - 6% and at least make $500/mo in interest off of that. As bad of an experience as you may have had with the stock market, you're only 27 and you should think long term. There's mutual funds that you can invest in that have averaged 10%+ over the last 50+ years. Sure they may have a down year and only earn 5%, but the next year they may earn 15%, you can't view it as a short term investment. With the kind of cash you are talking about having on hand there's no reason why you shouldn't have a few million in liquid funds by the time you are 40 if you invest intelligently now.