Andrew Forsythe

ONCE UPON A TIME, I thought it was a little unseemly to pay a lot of attention to costs. My father grew up in a farm family with little money. He was the first to attend college and, indeed, went on to law school from there. He did well in his profession and, when I was growing up, we lived a comfortable—though far from luxurious—life.
Maybe because he’d spent his youth worried about money,

WHY DO I AVOID individual stocks today? I’ve previously written about the big loss on a broker-recommended stock that led me to manage my own investments.
That loss, however, didn’t deter me. In my early days as a do-it-yourself investor, I mainly bought mutual funds, albeit too many of the high-fee actively managed variety. But I still had an interest in picking individual stocks.
In fact, it was part of my investing heritage. My father had always invested in individual stocks.

IN AN EARLIER ARTICLE, I wrote about a catastrophic stock market loss that taught me—the hard way—about the benefits of diversification and the importance of managing my own investments. That loss derailed our plans to build a large and expensive home in the hills overlooking Austin, Texas.
We were heartbroken at the time. This had been our dream for several years. But it’s funny how life works out sometimes—and it may have been the best thing that ever happened to us.

THIS IS THE STORY of a bitter life lesson that taught me two things: the desirability of managing my own investments and the perils of putting almost all my eggs in one basket.
In the late 1980s—and early in our marriage—my wife and I were busy raising four kids, while also managing two demanding careers. Our dream was to build a beautiful house on a large wooded lot that we owned in the hills west of Austin,