S & P 500 investment in wive's name

ChesterDog

Just to pick up on your "depending on the experience" comment...

One of the great things about investing nowadays is the wealth of experience and analysis that is easy to find and draw upon, and the ease with which ideas, processes and models can be back-tested using freely available online tools. It's easy to test how a model would have performed in the past during various scenarios and to see the benefits and especially the potential pitfalls of any given approach. 

Nowadays, it's quite easy to stand on the shoulders of giants. For me, that means investing the equity portion of my portfolio predominantly into a cheap, global index tracker on an inexpensive platform. That accounts for 80% of that allocation, and I'm very pleased that it does.

The remaining 20% consists of 5% gold (which tends to boost your overall longterm returns) and two or three more speculative assets, largely for interest/entertainment. One of those currently IS an S&P 500 tracker (despite it duplicating the top end/bulk of the global index), but only amounting to a 5% extra little chunk and subject to annual (not more frequent, so as to avoid "tinkering") review.

That approach has served me very well indeed for the last fifteen years.