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MY HUSBAND AND I have been investors for a long time. For us, it’s an interesting hobby and we’ve learned a lot along the way, plus we’ve made some money.
Friends and family sometimes ask what we’re doing and whether we can help them. Neither of us has any sort of certification as a financial advisor or any sort of formal training in investments. We can just imagine what a wrong suggestion would do to a friendship or family relationship.
Instead, we share our thoughts and philosophy in general terms, and shy away from naming specific investments. Here are five points we make:
1. Get a financial education. Read The Wall Street Journal. It’s the gold standard for financial information and highly readable. Check out CNBC’s Mad Money for its interviews with corporate executives, and also Squawk Box, which tends to be more issue-oriented, with big name guests such as Alan Greenspan and Bill Gates.
YouTube has a variety of options, including a popular channel for Millennials called The Financial Diet. The choices in books are vast. We enjoyed The Gone Fishin’ Portfolio by Alexander Green, which encourages diversification with a selection of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). If you’re like us and interested in dividend stocks, you might also enjoy Marc Lichtenfeld’s Get Rich with Dividends.
The investing forums on Reddit and Quora are great for asking questions. We constantly refer to Seeking Alpha and Atom Finance for general market information, and head to Yahoo Finance and Fidelity Investments for information on specific investments. Vanguard Group has a wonderful tool that lets you compare mutual funds and ETFs, even those not managed by Vanguard. For dividend investors, DRIPInvesting.org is an excellent resource, while MarketBeat.com is good for information on dividend increases and decreases.
2. Think hard about your goals. It really pays to have some basic understanding of where you want to go on your financial journey and how gentle you want the ride to be, because your time horizon and risk tolerance will have a big influence on how you invest. While retirement is the ultimate goal, perhaps you have interim goals such as a college education for a child or a second home.
3. Diversify broadly. You should probably have the bulk of your money in mutual funds or ETFs, which are a simple way to get exposure to hundreds or even thousands of different securities. My husband and I favor ETFs. Why? Mutual funds will, in almost all cases, have higher fees, plus they tend to generate bigger tax bills.
4. Hire a financial advisor. I realize that not everybody needs a financial advisor. But even though we feel we’re reasonably knowledgeable about investments, my husband and I have an advisor. He’s a good sounding board, and he helps us stick to our financial plan and revise it when necessary.
How do you find an advisor you can trust? Get recommendations from your tax advisor, attorney or other professionals with whom you have dealings. You might also ask friends. Make sure potential advisors have meaningful credentials, such as the Certified Financial Planner or Chartered Financial Analyst designation. You can check out an advisor’s credentials at Finra.org. Then interview your choices. Some questions you might ask:
Make sure the advisor you pick is someone you feel comfortable with and who understands your goals. If it just doesn’t feel right, or if the advisor speaks only to you and not to your partner, look elsewhere.
5. For my husband and me, the fun part of investing is following companies that interest us. For instance, you might keep tabs on Apple because you like its iPhone or Teladoc because you’re a doctor. Just don’t imagine that because, say, you’re a software engineer or a physician that you have some special insight. Indeed, if you decide to buy individual stocks, don’t invest in a company just because you work in the same industry, or you got a tip from a friend, or you heard someone rave about the stock on TV.
Instead, get help from your financial advisor or from a financial newsletter. To find a newsletter that resonates with you, ask for sample copies. We subscribe to one that matches our philosophy. The biggest benefit is that the newsletter does the financial analysis for us. So what’s our philosophy? We like dividend-paying stocks, especially those that have a history of regularly raising their dividend. Reinvesting those dividends can be a great way to benefit from investment compounding.
Sonja Haggert’s previous articles were Right Turn, Getting Used and Check’s in the Mail. She’s the author of Invest, Reinvest, Rest. You can learn more at SonjaHaggert.com. Follow her on Twitter @SonjaHaggert.
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While your advice may make sense for those who have the financial resources to allocate some of their wealth to investing as a hobby, I don’t recommend it for those who are focused on ensuring that they have a secure retirement. A simple approach, such as that recommended by Jonathan Clements, the late Jack Bogle and many others, with the portion of one’s portfolio allocated to equities invested in index funds has proven to be the be superior to picking individual stocks and relying on sources such as Mad Money and Squak Box.
Have you found that all those resources have proven accurate in their advice? If you don’t mind what has the reading, viewing and asking questions returned? Can you share your rate of return YTD, last 12 months, etc.?
I don’t want to come off harsh, but that seems like terrible advice to recommend people to read the financial papers or even worse watching the circus act of stock trading shows. I advise people the exact opposite. I tell them to first read A Simple Path to Wealth, or one of the Bogleheads books. Turn off the talking heads and follow an indexing approach. If they need tax advice consult with your accountant or a fee based hourly planner.
Another vote here for Bogleheads, or one of the several books they’ve published. For the younger crowd, William Bernstein’s “If you can” sets up the right mindset and basic approach. I like Abnormalreturns.com for general investment information that is ‘forecast free’. It doesn’t entirely live up to that claim, but it comes pretty close.
I believe that investing should be boring, for the most part. Have fun with 5% of your portfolio if that sort of thing interests you (as it does many of us), but the rest should be in solid, low cost index funds that never get sold.