Should You Hire A Financial Planner?
Have you considered hiring a financial planner? Are you concerned that you need help figuring out how to achieve your financial goals or plan for retirement? Maybe you don't think you have the skills or knowledge to successfully take this on yourself?
If you are willing to take the time to study a little, you can do it yourself. There are plenty of free retirement calculators available online where you can develop how much you need to save for retirement. The one from NerdWallet is pretty simple and easy to use.
According to the 2018 Trends in Investing Survey published by the Financial Planning Association, the majority of financial planners are recommending relatively straightforward investments such as ETF's (87%), cash and equivalents (83%), mutual funds (73%), individual stocks (56%) and individual bonds (46%). These are not complicated investments and there are plenty of research tools available, you just have to take the time to read up on them. Check out my recent post for my favorite investing books, which can help you get started. What's also interesting about the survey is that most advisers still think a portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds is viable and only 1% are recommending that their clients invest in crypto currencies, which seems a little behind the times. In my book Investing in Gold and Silver (recently released on Audible), I recommend a very simple, defensive investment strategy to avoid losses resulting from extreme market movements and in order to make money in any situation:
Stocks (broadly diversified across size of company/international/various industries, ETF's work well for this) - 20%
Bonds - 20%
Real Estate (investment properties preferred, but REIT's are good too) - 20%
Cash (direct investment in Treasury Bills is the way to go, see my post on this) - 20%
There are also a number of "robo advisers" that you can choose from that are available on some of the newer investing apps that I have recently reviewed, if that interests you, but many people have complained that the returns aren't as good as the market in general recently and you may be able to do better following my simple approach above.
For more investing ideas.
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