Tangible assets as a meaningful investment? Invest EUR 50,000 

Capital markets have been moving for years, and the list of uncertainties is getting longer rather than shorter. Geopolitical tensions continue, and the interest rate environment has changed fundamentally after the long low-interest period. There are also changes in economic policy in Washington and Brussels, which shift expectations for inflation and growth each quarter. So anyone who wants to know how to invest 50000 euros today is doing so in an environment where there is hardly any forecast for a long time.

Such conditions change what investors expect from their investment. Instead of short-term price gains, the focus is on how wealth can develop steadily over years and decades. Ideally, regardless of the ups and downs on the stock markets. The desire for reliable and comprehensible returns is high on the agenda for many.

Investments in tangible assets provide an answer to this. As an addition to equities and bonds, they act as a counterweight to the typically more volatile capital markets and contribute to the stability of the portfolio with current income. Anyone who invests 50,000 euros has the leeway to actually implement such diversification.

In this guide, we present the most important tangible value options for an investment amount of this magnitude and categorise return opportunities as risks. This provides you with a basis for carefully dividing your 50,000 euros into different non-cash options. 

The basics: How do I invest 50,000 euros?

what are tangible assets?

There is one characteristic feature in particular that distinguishes tangible assets from other forms of investment: They have a material, physical intrinsic value. Traditional tangible assets are, for example, precious metals such as gold and silver or real estate, which combine various resources with their own value as structures made of concrete, stone, wood or glass.

The asset class of tangible assets is a broad field and ranges from traditional assets such as precious metals and real estate to works of art, classic cars and watches. This gives you the opportunity to allocate your capital - depending on your personal interests and expertise - to different assets within the asset class of tangible assets, thereby achieving broad diversification.

What is your financial situation?

Before you invest your 50,000 euros, we recommend that you take a look at your financial situation: Check to see if you are still paying off any debts or loans. Make sure that your financial cushion is sufficient to be able to deal with any major purchases and expenses. Deduct any larger amounts due in the near future that you know of from your current budget.

Consider your investment objective – and therefore also the period for which you can do without your invested capital. This will help you define your personal investment horizon.

How much risk are you prepared to take?

On the one hand, you can use this question to find out your risk type. This allows you to select investments in a more targeted manner or to exclude investments that exceed your personal risk tolerance.

On the other hand, it also helps you to narrow down your upcoming investment of over 50,000 euros. Do you prioritise safety, meaning that you will also accept lower returns? Or are you willing to invest in a higher risk class to achieve correspondingly higher returns?

The triangle of investments makes it easy to visualise the relationship between security, return and liquidity.

Every investment provides you with a balance between the three dimensions of safety, returns and liquidity. However, it is never possible to have the best of all three aspects at the same time.

In the triangle, the further you move towards safety, for example, the more you have to compromise on either returns or liquidity – or both. If, in turn, you want to invest your capital without committing to long terms, you will either have to assume a higher risk or do without higher returns.

In this way, the triangle can help you to better assess both your personal preferences and your next investment.

In addition, it is worthwhile for investors who are risk-oriented and those who value safety to observe the fundamental principle of risk diversification: do not put all your eggs in one basket.

What does that mean? Even if you want to focus on particularly stable investments, you should spread your investment capital across several safety-oriented investment products. In this way, you avoid the so-called cluster risk and ensure that the individual investments provide mutual risk compensation through sufficient diversification.

Invest 50,000 euros: What tangible value options you have in 2026

Investing 50,000 euros in real estate

Real estate is one of the classic tangible assets in the private investor portfolio. They have a physical intrinsic value and generate current income from rental income, supplemented by possible increases in value. After the price corrections in 2022 and 2023, the German residential real estate market recently stabilised. In the third quarter of 2025, prices were around 3.3 percent higher than in the previous year’s quarter, the fourth consecutive plus.¹

In most locations, 50,000 euros is not enough to invest in your own property. However, the tangible asset real estate is also accessible without a home, primarily via real estate funds. Here, a distinction is made between open-end and closed-end real estate funds, and the two could not be more different.

Closed-end real estate funds: good returns with a cluster risk

Closed-end real estate funds are alternative investment funds that usually only invest in one or a few properties. Investors benefit from potential returns of around 3% to 5%. However, to participate, higher minimum investment amounts from around EUR 5,000 are usually required, which fall due within a specified investment period.

Closed real estate funds are usually also long-term investments with investment periods of 10 or more years. Early terminations are therefore often barely possible, as the sale of the shares often involves a great deal of effort and additional costs.

If you are familiar with real estate and perhaps already hold another real estate investment in your portfolio, a closed-end real estate fund can offer good potential returns. However, if you invest in one or only a few properties, you cannot diversify widely – in this case, you are more likely to deal with a cluster risk which, in a worst case scenario, will result in a total loss of your investment. Closed-end real estate funds are therefore considered to be particularly risky and are only recommended to connoisseurs.

Open-end real estate funds: Widely spread and plannable

Investing in an open-ended real estate fund avoids cluster risks and long maturities: They invest in a variety of high-quality properties, which are usually spread over different types of use and locations, thus contributing to risk diversification. You generate reliable returns through rental income and sales. After observing the statutory minimum holding periods, you are free to sell or redeem your units. As a result, you can access to your capital again more easily without anticipating additional costs. 

The average returns of open-ended real estate funds are solid 2 to 4 percent per year. So what distinguishes this form of investment is not the level of return, but its stability. A 20-year analysis by the IREBS Real Estate Academy at the University of Regensburg confirmed that open-end real estate funds have the lowest risk of loss of all asset classes examined in 2025 and around ten times lower fluctuations than the global MSCI World equity index.²

This makes open-ended real estate funds suitable as a security-oriented basis in the portfolio. On this basis, further components can be added for an investment total of 50,000 euros, which aim at higher return opportunities.
 

Invest 50,000 euros in renewable energy

Renewable energy is a comparatively new and thus still underrepresented investment segment. Investors benefit here from tangible assets such as wind power or solar plants, which generate consistent cash flows over many years thanks to power purchase agreements. The fluctuations in value are very low, as long-term purchase agreements are often used for hedging purposes. However, sustainable added value also makes an investment in renewable energy promising and sustainable.

However, many investment products that invest in renewable energies are not authorised for private investors, but are reserved for companies and institutions. The opportunities and risks of such investment products are also often more difficult to assess.

However, an investment in renewable energies can certainly be worthwhile - which is why we present two investment options here:

Crowdinvesting: doing more together

Crowdinvesting is the financing of projects with the help of a group of investors. Through a crowdinvesting platform, you usually have access to a wide range of projects available to you for an investment.  

However, it is your job to deal with the various projects and find a suitable investment. They all look promising when you read the sales prospectuses, but you have to assess for yourself how great the risks actually are.

However, there are also a number of advantages: On the one hand, you usually benefit from good return opportunities when crowdinvesting, and on the other hand from full transparency about your investment project including investment objective, concept and project owners. 

This means that you need to trust the project you have selected – which entails a risk of total loss of your capital invested. In particular when it comes to new investment segments, such as renewable energy, retail investors often lack the experience to realistically assess the opportunities and risks – and the same applies to project owners. Especially when competing for the most promising assets in an emerging market such as renewable energy, many issuers have difficulty asserting themselves against large fund providers. 

Anyone investing 50,000 euros via crowdinvesting should allocate the capital to several projects anyway in order to mitigate the high individual risk.

ELTIFs: Broadly invest in tangible assets

With ELTIFs (European Long-Term Investment Funds), both institutional and private investors have the opportunity to invest long-term and directly in tangible assets. The financial instrument was first introduced in 2015 to build a bridge between private investment capital and the European real economy.

For example, ELTIFs enable investments in many different types of tangible assets, whether in the field of infrastructure, digitalisation or renewable energies. Usually, an ELTIF invests in several assets at the same time, thus offering investors an internal risk spread across different assets.

Compared to other non-cash options available to retail investors, they offer several benefits. Unlike crowdinvesting, investors do not bear the individual risk of a specific project, but participate in a portfolio managed by professional fund management. In contrast to closed-end funds, the capital is also spread over several investments from the outset, so that the risk of clustering is significantly lower.

Our klimaVest renewable energy fund is also designed as an ELTIF. With around 1.8 billion euros of fund assets, it is Europe’s largest ELTIF (Scope ELTIF Study 2026) and has been on the market since November 2020. Investors invest in 43 tangible assets in 6 European countries, mainly from wind and solar power. In the 2024/25 financial year, the fund achieved a performance of 3.5 percent, up from 3.7 percent in the previous year. This makes klimaVest suitable as a broadly diversified individual investment for 50,000 euros.

However, an ELTIF such as klimaVest can also be combined with other investment products to further diversify your investment amount and minimise possible investment risks. In any case, with ELTIFs, you contribute to promoting the European real economy - and benefit from the opportunities of a rising investment segment.

Invest 50,000 euros in precious metals

Precious metals are considered to be the ultimate crisis-proof currency: in times of inflation and economic turmoil, precious metals tend to perform in the opposite way to the stock market – and thus retain their value even if other assets fall victim to price fluctuations and slumps on the stock market. In addition, the precious metals market is not only large, but also international: Buying and selling is therefore uncomplicated and possible at virtually any time. 

And this is where the crux lies. Precious metals are not as safe as the status as “crisis currency” suggests. At the beginning of 2026, the gold price reached an all-time high of almost USD 5,600 per ounce and then fell by around 16% by the end of April. Those who enter in the face of a crisis often buy at prices that have already taken the crisis risk into account.

This is why renewable energies are increasingly being seen as a sensible alternative not only to the stock market, but also to the famous “crisis currency” - the motto here is: green is the new gold.