Category: growth

Once you sell out, when do you get back in?

I recently heard about a 62-year-old who was scared out of the market following the dot.com crash in 2000.  For the last 17 years his money has been in cash and CDs, earning a fraction of one percent.  Now, with the market reaching record highs, he wants to know if this is the right time to get back in.  Should he invest now or is it too late?

Here is what one advisor told him:

My first piece of advice to you is to fundamentally think about investing differently. Right now, it appears to me that you think of investing in terms of what you experience over a short period of time, say a few years. But investing is not about what returns we can generate in one, three, or even 10 years. It’s about what results we generate over 20+ years. What happens to your money within that 20-year period is sometimes exalting and sometimes downright scary. But frankly, that’s what investing is.

Real investing is about the long term, anything else is speculating.   If we constantly try to buy when the market is going up and going to cash when it goes down we playing a loser’s game.  It’s the classic mistake that people make.  It’s the reason that the average investor in a mutual fund does not get the same return as the fund does.   It leads to buying high and selling low.  No one can time the market consistently.  The only way to win is to stay the course.

But staying the course is psychologically difficult.  Emotions take over when we see our investments decline in value.  To avoid having our emotions control our actions we need a well-thought-out plan.   Knowing from the start that we can’t predict the short-term future, we need to know how much risk we are willing to take and stick to it.  Amateur investors generally lack the tools to do this properly.  This is where the real value is in working with a professional investment manager.

The most successful investors, in my view, are the ones who determine to establish a long-term plan and stick to it, through good times and bad. That means enduring down cycles like the dot com bust and the 2008 financial crisis, where you can sometimes see your portfolio decline.  But, it also means being invested during the recoveries, which have occurred in every instance! It means participating in the over 250%+ gains the S&P 500 has experience since the end of the financial crisis in March 2009.

The answer to the question raised by the person who has been in cash since 2000 is to meet with a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA).  This is a fiduciary who is obligated to will evaluate his situation, his needs, his goals and his risk tolerance.  And RIA is someone who can prepare a financial plan that the client can agree to; one that he can follow into retirement and beyond.  By taking this step the investor will remove his emotions, fears and gut instincts from interfering with his financial future.

What’s Your Risk Number?

risk

Defining how much risk someone is willing to take can be difficult.  But in the investment world it’s critical.

Fear of risk keeps a lot of people away from investing their money, leaving them at the mercy of the banks and the people at the Federal Reserve.  The Fed has kept interest rates near zero for years, hoping that low rates will cause a rebound in the economy.  The downside of this policy is that traditional savings methods (saving accounts, CDs, buy & hold Treasuries) yield almost no growth.

Investors who are unsure of their risk tolerance and those who completely misjudge it are never quite sure if they are properly invested.  Fearing losses, they may put too much of their funds into “safe” investments, passing up chances to grow their money at more reasonable rates.  Then, fearing that they’ll miss all the upside potential, they get back into more “risky” investments and wind up investing too aggressively.  Then when the markets pull back, they end up pulling the plug, selling at market bottoms, locking in horrible losses, and sitting out the next market recovery until the market “feels safe” again to reinvest near the top and repeating the cycle.

There is a new tool available that help people define their personal “risk number.”

What is your risk number?

Your risk number defines how much risk you are prepared to take by walking you through several market scenarios, asking you to select which scenarios you are more comfortable with.     Let’s say that you have a $100,000 portfolio and in one scenario it could decline to $80,000 in a Bear Market or grow to $130,000 in a Bull Market, in another scenario it could decline to $70,000 or grow to $140,000, and in the third scenario it could decline to $90,000 or grow to $110,000.  Based on your responses, to the various scenarios, the system will generate your risk number.

How can you use that information?

If you are already an investor, you can determine whether you are taking an appropriate level of risk in your portfolio.  If the risk in your portfolio is much greater than your risk number, you can adjust your portfolio to become more conservative.  On the other hand, if you are more risk tolerant and you find that your portfolio is invested too conservatively, you can make adjustments to become less conservative.

Finding your risk number allows you to align your portfolio with your risk tolerance and achieve your personal financial goals.

To find out what your risk number is, click here .

 

Would You Prefer to Have $1 Million Cash Right Now or a Penny that Doubles Every Day for 30 Days?

Albert Einstein is credited with saying “compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.”

To get back to the original question, would you prefer to have $1 million today or one cent that will double every day for 30 days?  If you chose the million dollars, you would leave millions on the table.

If you chose the penny and passed up the million dollars, on the second day your penny would be worth two cents, on day three it would be four cents, on the fourth day it would be 8 cents.  By day 18 the penny will have grown to $1,310.72.  By day 28 it will be worth over a million dollars:  $1,342,177.  On the 30th day it would be worth an astounding $5,368,709!

If the penny were to be allowed to double for another 30 days, the penny would grow to over $5 quadrillion (five thousand trillion!) dollars.

One of the things this illustrates is that compound growth takes time to make a dramatic difference.  For the person who wants to have enough money to retire in comfort, starting early is the key to success, even if the starting amount is small.

 

The right time to invest?

Is this the right time to invest?  Good question.

Here’s another good question:  when is the best time to plant a tree?
The answer:  “Now.”
Here’s a better answer:  “When you were a child.”

Time is our most precious resource.  A wasted moment is lost forever.  Trees take time to grow.  The same is true for wealth.

We are often asked “is this a good time to get into the market?”  The answer is that there is no better time.

Here’s why.

If you put your money in a savings account you might get about 1{030251e622a83165372097b752b1e1477acc3e16319689a4bdeb1497eb0fac93}.

At that interest rate it takes 70 years to turn $100 into $200.

If you could grow your money an average of 5{030251e622a83165372097b752b1e1477acc3e16319689a4bdeb1497eb0fac93} per year, that $100 would grow to $200 in 15 years.
If you can get 6{030251e622a83165372097b752b1e1477acc3e16319689a4bdeb1497eb0fac93}, it would take 12 years to grow to $200.
If you can get 7{030251e622a83165372097b752b1e1477acc3e16319689a4bdeb1497eb0fac93}, 11 years would get you to $200.
If you can get 8{030251e622a83165372097b752b1e1477acc3e16319689a4bdeb1497eb0fac93}, 10 years would get you to $200.

At 15{030251e622a83165372097b752b1e1477acc3e16319689a4bdeb1497eb0fac93} your money doubles every 5 years.

We are big advocates of people working hard for their money.  But we are just as insistent that money should work hard for them.  Why be a hard worker with lazy money?

Investing is one of those things that people put off.  But doing so wastes their most valuable resource:  time.

If you’re not happy with the way your money’s working for you, check out our website or give us a call.

No sales pitch, no pressure. Just good advice. That’s the reason we won the 2015 Suffolk Small Business of the Year award from the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce.

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