Should You Sell? Should You Buy? Should You Invest More?
It depends on your goals, your long term financial plan, your age even factors into things here. Let's just run through these options real quick.
It depends on your goals, your long term financial plan, your age even factors into things here. Let's just run through these options real quick.
As your advisor we are a walking talking insurance plan hired to protect one of the largest assets you own, your retirement nest egg. The difference being that unlike most insurance plans we protect you before a disaster strikes, not after the damage has been done.
Retirement has two doors. One leads to a chance of success. One leads to certain failure. Which door will you choose?
In the Book of Genesis, God gives Adam and Eve authority over the earth, forbidding them of only one thing. They are forbidden from tasting the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. And for a few moments, their innocence is perfect. Then it happens. They taste the fruit and commit the original transgression. And after that, everything bad and wrong with earthly life suddenly enters the world: sin, shame, struggle, sickness and death. They only made one little mistake, but it was the only mistake they couldn't afford to make.
One of the most underused, overlooked and unappreciated practices in investing is rebalancing your portfolio on a yearly basis. There's an old saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Disciplined rebalancing, however, is as close as you can get to a free lunch. Let's explore why.
Since 1948, there have been 10 Bear markets U.S. excluding the one we are in right now. The average number of years from the peak of the Bear market to the recovery, meaning the time it took for the S&P 500 to climb back to its previous highs was 3.9 years and the median/midpoint was 2.7 years. On five of those occasions, the market recovered in 2 years or less! In other words, market downturns feel much longer than they actually are.
A 30 year retirement means more than likely facing many surprises with which a flat monthly payment isn't going to help. The lump sum option, invested properly, offers flexibility to meet those surprises, can be strategically invested to provide regular income, and most importantly could possibly change the lives of the loved ones you leave behind.
What a wild year so far in the in regards to the market. We've seen volatility like we haven't seen since March 2020 which was the beginning stages of the pandemic. Today I want to discuss why you should actually embrace temporary market declines rather than fear them. Notice I said, temporary market declines. I said temporary because they all are temporary and always have been temporary and will always be temporary. But the good news is:
It seems that whatever I read, watch or listen to these days gets interrupted by a commercial with a current or former celebrity telling me I need to buy gold because of inflation, because Russia invaded Ukraine or because of (insert whatever manufactured crisis you want here). If I'm seeing this constantly then some of you are as well. So...let's talk about gold as an investment.
Good intentions sometimes have bad consequences. A perfect example can be opening a 529 plan for your child or grandchild. Depending on the financial situations of the parties involved the intentions of helping the child can possibly (key word is possibly) have the consequence of hurting the child chances of financial aid in the future. Let's explore how.
Performance calculations for a portfolio on a monthly statement can be very complex and over a 30-year retirement even totally meaningless. Remember as long-term goal-focused investors, we don’t chase performance, we chase outcomes. If your portfolio is up 25% this month or year congratulations! But will that matter in 15 years if you run out of money??? Retirement is a marathon, not a sprint.
Every night in the news or in any news article we read we hear about the government spending trillions of dollars on some new bill that's going to change the world. As our national debt snowballs it makes one wonder, will it affect your investments at some point?
The long answer is stock prices are the world's way of appraising the value of the company in which they own stock. The most consistent and reliable signals of a companies value are the level and trends of it's earnings over time.
I'm a financial advisor that specializes in retirement planning. My job is to align peoples investments with their goals in retirement. What I do isn't sexy and doesn't make the news but it works and it has for well over 100 years.
"The majority, if not all, of financial input you get from the "news" is journalistic. And journalism by nature, stays in business by selling you the news which is timely, as opposed to the truth, which is timeless." Nick Murray
In short, Robinhood is an online trading platform that allows its customers to buy and sell stocks for free. They target rookie and novice investors by using gamification and of course everyone's favorite word...free. But is it really free? Let's break it down.