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Best Investment Strategy
Comprehensive personal financial planning software is needed to develop a fully personalized family financial strategy
This free “financial freedom guide” on how to invest is just a part of our web site about how to develop a personal family financial plan
The personal finance plan essays on this free site supply important ideas to individuals and families about financial planning program and financial strategy subjects that should taken into consideration. These postings help in understanding how to establish a life time personal finance planning strategy. Also, to generate a really useful long-term money management strategy depends upon you using the top personal financial planning software with a high quality investment financial calculator and the leading financial planning software features.
Also, our financial freedom web site enables you to find the top all-in-one financial planning software program for home PC use, and it includes the top retirement investment calculator tool, the best personal budgeting software, and high quality investment calculators for your personally customized life long financial planning.
Personal investing seems incredibly complex, but the best investment strategy also tends to be a more simple investment strategy
This complexity is driven by the nature of investing in securities of highly uncertain and unknowable future values. This complexity is greatly exacerbated by the proliferation of investment products and services aggressively promoted by a securities and financial services industry that purports to serve your best interests. However, this proliferation of complex investment products very often seems only to serve the financial interests of the securities industry itself. Averaged across all retail investors, the high fees of the financial service industry dramatically reduce rather than help to increase retail investors’ net assets.
Personal investing can be simplified greatly by focusing only on valid strategies that have support in the investment research literature. This personal investment planning summary is intended to help you to understand that you can manage your investments using strategies that have a demonstrated basis in the research literature. When one pursues strategies that are designed to focus solely on the fiduciary interests of individual investors, the vast majority of investment products promoted by the industry can simply be eliminated from consideration. They cost far more than they are worth.
Once you have committed to a durable long-term investment strategy, you can manage by yourself relatively easily the details of investment implementation. You do not need to pay high costs for something you can do yourself.
You can build an easy-to-manage, do-it-yourself, lifetime investment strategy based upon these principles:
- To improve your long-term investment returns, move fully toward the completely passive, globally diversified, and extremely low cost end of the investment securities products spectrum. Invest only in a variety of passive, very broadly diversified, and low cost investment funds.
- Understand better your investment risk tolerance relative to the larger population of investors and decide how much you are willing to be exposed to investment risk. Your investment risk tolerance leads to your asset allocation strategy, which sets the balance of overall expected investment risk and return in your personal portfolio.
- Get invested and stay invested in the global securities markets according to your asset allocation — through thick and thin. Never attempt to second-guess the markets or to time the markets by moving assets around hoping to beat the markets. The academic research shows clearly that nobody really knows how to time the markets and jumping in/out when you are confident/scared usually leads to inferior results.
- Buy and hold and hold and hold. When you own broadly diversified, passive index investment funds, professional investment portfolio managers will make all the needed adjustments within these funds for you over time.
- Maintain your asset allocation within the percentage policy variance that you have pre-determined. Do so in as low cost a manner as is reasonably possible. Use asset purchases during your accumulation periods and asset sales during your divestment periods to maintain your target asset allocation. This reduces the need to make changes and incur costs solely to maintain your asset allocation.
- Only buy investment mutual funds from mutual fund companies that deal directly with the public. Only buy exchange-traded funds (ETFs) through discount brokers. Never pay any broker or any other commissioned financial advisor another dime during your lifetime to tell you what funds you should buy. They do not know what will happen to future asset values, because they have no information to make such judgments. Instead, their high advisory costs will be extracted from your assets up front and along the way. Purchasing investment funds through an advisor is far more likely to reduce rather than increase your wealth. Investment cost are not “just a few percent.” For the average investor, average investment costs consume about one-third of average annual investment returns — year after year after year after year. The cumulative losses to even average investment costs are huge and simply horrendous.
- Improve your overall net investment portfolio returns by consciously managing the asset “tax location” of your investment assets, which can reduce the investment taxes that you pay. Federal capital gains investment tax rates vary by holding period and different types of assets have returns that are treated differently under the federal tax code. Take advantage of the opportunities that you have to arrange your assets for minimal taxation.
- Focus the time that you spend on financial affairs during your lifetime on increasing your income and/or managing your consumption to increase your savings rate. In addition to reducing your investment costs, saving more is the single most effective way to accumulate assets for retirement and other personal finance goals.
- Enjoy your life and resist the compulsion to act as an amateur investment portfolio manager. By ceasing their amateur investment management activities, most people can free up substantial amounts of time to spend on far more pleasurable activities.
The vast majority of people waste time on investment activities, tactics, and strategies that are more likely to reduce rather than increase their investment portfolios.
Professional, low cost index fund managers can manage your money far more efficiently in terms of better returns, lower taxes, and far less time than you can ever realistically hope to achieve as a personal investment portfolio manager. If you simply cannot resist the temptation to play investment portfolio manager, then understand clearly that this is a hobby, which is highly likely to cost you money through inferior returns, and this hobby is extremely likely to waste a significant amount of your valuable time in life.
Despite these factors, some people just cannot resist the personal investment management game. If you want to do this, then never play with the rent money and baby’s milk money. Never allocate more than 10% of your overall investment assets to this hobby. Invest the remaining 90+% in accordance with the investment methods summarized above. In addition, learn how to track accurately your investment performance relative to appropriate passive benchmarks, so that you do not fool yourself into thinking you have more skill than you actually do. Academic research clearly demonstrates that individuals usually achieve sub-optimal investment results.
You investments should work for you rather than you working for them. Avoid all the financial industry games designed to make money off of your assets. Instead, simplify your investment program, and use your financial assets to enrich and protect your life and the lives of those you love.
OK — So How Does One Go About Doing This?
Here are some ideas to get you going:
1) On the “Personal Finance Software” front page of this website, you can read about VeriPlan, which is an automated personal financial planning software tool that individuals and families can use to do their own lifetime financial plans. VeriPlan is the most sophisticated and high quality financial planning software that you can buy at a great bargain price. VeriPlan automates all of the tedious calculations needed to do fully integrated lifetime financial planning in a manner that is customized to reflect your particular financial situation, all your financial resources, and all your financial life goals and objectives.
Furthermore, VeriPlan also provides very extensive and absolutely objective personal financial planning documentation that helps you to understand the lifetime financial planning process. While VeriPlan hides the complexity of millions of inter-related financial projection calculations, it also treats you like an adult! VeriPlan was designed with the firm belief that smart, well-educated adults need and want well-designed financial decision support tools. If you are going to invest the time needed to plan your family’s financial future, you need a financial planning software “power tool” to help you. It must be highly functional and robust, while it also provides useful and entirely objective financial information.
2) In parallel with checking out VeriPlan, you might also want take a look at this “Financial Planning Reading List.” This reading list compiles the top 60 or so personal financial planning and personal investment management articles from the many hundreds that the designer of VeriPlan has published on various personal finance websites across the web. All of these “Financial Planning Reading List” articles were personally researched and written by the designer of VeriPlan. If you want to judge whether VeriPlan could be right for you, then these articles might help you with your decision. Furthermore, the more articles on this reading list that you read, the better prepared you will be to manage your own family financial planning and personal investment portfolio over your lifetime.
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