Recently I made up my mind that I was going to become more proactive about my finances. For me, that meant learning how to invest. Finding a beginning guide to investing is the easy part but choosing the right one is a little more of a process, so here is a guide to investing and tips on making up your mind.
You see, if you were to pay a visit to your library or local bookstore, you would probably find dozens if not hundreds of books that claim to be a beginning guide to investing.
But sometimes, too much choice is worse than no choice at all. How on Earth do you choose one? Many top investors will all have their ideas of what you should or shouldn’t do when investing.
How can you narrow down your choices? Or should you look through the phone book and hire someone to do it for you?
Well, I can’t tell you what you should do, ultimately only you can make that decision. I can provide you with some ideas and some things I learned as I was starting.
Hopefully, some of this information will make it easier for you to decide the best course of action too:
- First of all, I decided that no one will ever care about my money as much as I do, so I decided against just hiring someone to do it for me.
I will work with someone, but only after I’ve gained a little knowledge to be a partner in the decisions that are being made.
I want to have enough knowledge to determine whether or not the information I am getting sounds like it is a good fit for me or not.
One other note on this point, make sure if / when you do hire someone to work with that you know just what you are getting. Not everyone who claims to be a financial adviser has your best interest at heart.
If you read the fine print of the contract, you may even see a few lines that say something along the lines of this: “At times the interest of the client and our interests will not be the same, if that occurs, we will do what is in our best interest.”
That is not the exact wording, of course, but it is close. The bottom line is that the company will do what is best for them (buying and selling lots of stocks so they can make a commission) even if it isn’t best for you. Be careful.
- Some of the most successful investors of all time have done things counter to what most of the “experts” will tell you to do. You have to decide if you will do what the crowd tells you that you should do or if you want to pick someone who has made a fortune investing and follow what they do.
That is the path I choose. I picked an investor who has made millions investing and found out all I could about his methods and followed those.
Even though a lot of what he does runs counter to the prevailing wisdom, I feel like if it’s good enough for a billionaire, it’s good enough for me!
If I were you, I would find someone who knows what they are doing, learn all I can, start small, and educate myself.
One way to limit the risk you take in the stock market is by using dollar-cost averaging when you purchase your positions. For more on this, visit https://kgmeyerpc.com/dollar-cost-averaging-2/.
I believe that is the best way to have success in investing. A beginning guide to investing may be helpful, too but pick the right guide first. For more understanding of the markets, get a copy of How the Stock Market Operates. And for additional reading on investing, try Investing 101.
As always, contact me directly if you have any questions or visit any fee-only Registered Financial Consultant.
