High yield savings account or the short term Treasury bonds, and good luck with this, I hope at the end you have enough for a car AND no need for a car so you just have money.
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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3 year horizon: Not stock market. Unless you are okay with delaying the purchase for as long as it takes for the market to recover.
High interest rate account is what I'd look for.
If you want to save less than 5 years, banks with CDs or high yield accounts are your best bet. The stock market is far to volatile for short term saving, you really need need 5-7 years of investing to make growth likely.
With cars specifically, an option is to use existing car + bank account to buy a better car for cash on a 6 month to 1 year timeline. This works because at the low end cars don't really deprecate until they break. This stops working well in the 10-15k range.
There are some personal finance communities on Lemmy that would likely be eager to answer this one for you. Seems like communities you might be interested in if these kinds of questions are important to you.
do you know which ones are active?
I would never take financial advice from random people on a message board.
It's not a bad place to get search terms though
In short, since this is somewhat near term, you probably want as little risk as possible, so stocks are not recommended.
Said longer, a high interest savings account or bond fund at 2-3% is probably your safest bet, but you also need to consider the opportunity cost— tariffs WILL increase the price of a new vehicle this time next year, so are you planning to buy new? Does it make any sense to buy now and refinance later? Tariffs could be as high as 25%, depending on which way the wind blows (country of origin, assuming new, etc).
Opportunity cost aside, what’s your spending target, how much do you have saved already, and how much does optimizing on interest rate actually help?
From $0, saving $300/mo for 3 years at 0% interest is $10,800.
At 3% interest, the same total after 3 years is $11,127, which nets you $327. That’s not nothing, but even an insanely optimistic 10% is ~$1100, but you would be just as likely to lose money.
Your needs and risk profile are yours alone, we’d need a lot more information to say more than “low risk and buy used”.