Invest Money Wisely at Any Age: 7 Simple Principles

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Hello friends. And thanks for joining me on the money girl podcast. My name is Laura Adams and I’m a personal finance and small business author, educator spokesperson and consumer advocate.

Who’s been hosting this show since 2008. I am thrilled to have you here. I want you to think about this podcast as your secret weapon for getting the knowledge and motivation. You need to prioritize your finances, build wealth, and have a lot more security and less stress. We cover a wide range of topics each week, and you’re going to learn actionable strategies and tips to take your money management to the next level. Don’t forget to subscribe to the show and also to participate by sending me your money, questions, or comments. There are a couple of ways you can do that. You can leave a message 24 seven on our voicemail line, just call (302) 364-0308. Or you can send me an email using the [email protected]. Also don’t miss the notes for each show and there’s a full archive of podcasts. Those are in the money girl section [email protected] today’s show is episode number 670 called invest money wisely at any age seven simple principles.

And we’re going to do just that. So stick with me and I’ll review seven simple principles to grow your money. No matter if you’re just starting to invest or you’ve been at it for decades, you’ll learn how to achieve long-term financial goals, such as retirement or paying for a child’s college. Even if you don’t have much money to invest right now, I’ll also include an explainer on why everyone has been talking about game stop. And if it matters to average investors, not only have the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis triggered extreme stock market volatility, but you probably also heard news about the video game retailer game stop having it stock price skyrocket far above what many people think it’s worth seeing huge daily spikes and drops and stocks. And the overall market may leave you wondering what to do with your investments or whether you should even be investing in the first.

Well, fortunately, the answer to why’s investing hasn’t changed no matter what’s going on with GameStop or the market in general. In fact, the market turmoil and the game stopped stock frenzy actually proved that using simple, tried and true investment strategies is the best way for investors to get through any crisis and to build wealth. When you have a strong investment strategy, you will never panic. You will never wonder if what you’re doing is right with your money, no matter what the news headlines say. So I want you to follow the seven simple principles to invest money for healthy returns without taking too much risk. That’s what it’s all about. So let’s dive in principle. Number one is separate savings from investments. And you’ve probably heard me talk about this concept before though, we tend to use the terms saving and investing interchangeably. They are not the same thing.

Savings is cash that you keep on hand for short term, planned purchases and those unexpected emergencies that always come up, it should be liquid. So you can tap it instantly. If you lose your job or you’ve got a considerable unexpected expense, you want to make it separate, make it a separate bucket of money that you accumulate as a safety net in a recent podcast called the right amount of emergency money to keep in cash. I explain how to build your emergency savings. So you’re always prepared for what happens in your financial life. Also consider saving money for big purchases that you want to make within, let’s say a year or two, like a new car or a home, keeping that money in a bank savings account means that you won’t earn much interest, but you will not lose a penny. So remember, there’s always an exchange, a trade-off for risk and return.

When you want to keep your money safe, you need to keep it in low risk accounts, such as a bank savings account. A common question is whether you should invest your savings since banks are paying such little interest right now, and again, investing means that you expose your money to some amount of risk in exchange for that potential long-term growth. So I do not recommend investing your emergency savings unless you’ve got more than enough on hand. And a good rule of thumb is to keep at least three to six months worth of your living expenses in bank savings. If you’ve got more than that, you might consider investing the excess using the principles that I cover here. So using a wise principles to invest that excess money moving onto principle, number two is invest to reach long-term goals. So again, think about savings and investing as two different buckets of money savings are for those short-term goals.

But when you have long-term goals, that’s appropriate for investing. And while market values can swing wildly in short periods, such as days, months, or even a year or two, they have consistently gone up over more extended periods. So that’s why investing is only approved for goals that you want to achieve. And at least I’d say three to five years in the future, such as putting kids through college or retirement, historically, a diversified stock portfolio has earned an average of 10%, but even if you only got 7%, if you invested $400 a month for 40 years, you would have over a million dollars to spend in retirement. A good rule of thumb is to always invest a minimum of 10% up to 15% of your gross income for retirement. Yes, that is in addition to the emergency savings that I previously mentioned. So if you don’t have a healthy emergency fund, you want to make accumulating at least some amount of cash, a top priority before you in investing, you need a little bit of a cash cushion.

I’d say maybe, you know, at least 500, ideally a thousand or, or maybe even one month of living expenses before you begin investing. And then you’ve got to continue to accumulate emergency savings to build up to that goal of have three to six months of your living expenses on hand principle, number three, start sooner rather than later, one of those most critical factors in how much investment wealth you can accumulate safely depends on when you start. There’s no, no better example of how the proverbial early bird gets the worm than with investing. Starting early, allows your money to compound and grow exponentially over time. And that’s very safe, even if you don’t have much to invest. So I want you to consider two different scenarios. Let’s say we’ve got somebody named Jessica and we’ve got somebody named Brad and they both are setting aside the same amount of money each month and they get the same average annual return on their investment.

So Jessica begins investing at age 35 and she stops investing at age 65. And she’s going to invest 200 bucks a month. She’s getting an average return of 8%. So between 35, yeah, 65 investing 200 a month with an 8% return. She ends up with just under $300,000 at age 65. Let’s contrast her with Brad who begins investing earlier. He begins at messing at aged 25 and also stops at age 65. So he’s got 40 years of investment. He’s also investing the same amount as Jessica, just 200 a month. He’s also getting an average return of 8%, but because he started investing earlier, Brad ends up with just under $700,000 at age 65. So again, because Brad started investing 10 years before Jessica he’s got $400,000 more to spend in retirement than she does. And even though he only contributed $24,000 more than Jessica out of his pocket, that’s 200 bucks a month times, 12 months, times, 10 years, Brad’s investments had a whole lot more time to compound.

That’s what made the difference that made him more than two times wealthy than Jessica at retirement. So unfortunately, a lot of people don’t do this. They believe that they don’t earn enough money to invest. And they’ll just catch up later on, you know, at some point in the future, some magical time when they’re going to be able to afford it. If you are waiting for a someday raise bonus, some kind of a windfall lit, you know, winning the lottery, whatever it is, you are burning precious time. My friend catching up becomes more difficult and a whole lot more expensive the longer you wait. So please remember that you are never too young to begin planning and investing for your future. Even if you only have a small amount to invest right now, that is better over the long run than waiting. The bottom line is that the earlier you start investing even small amounts of money, the more financial security you will have, but maybe you’re thinking well, Laura, I did not get a headstart on investing and I’m worried about running out of time.

Well, you’ve just got to dive in and get started. Now, you know, you can’t say, well, it’s too late, so I’m just not going to invest. And I’m just going to throw it all, you know, uh, in the garbage can, you can’t do that. You’ve got to begin right now and it can be simple. It doesn’t have to be anything complex. Most retirement accounts allow for additional catch-up contributions that will help you save more in the years leading up to retirement. And we’re going to talk about those next today’s episode is supported by fund rise. Want to really diversify your portfolio for 2021 start investing in private real estate studies have shown that portfolios with private real estate investments generally delivered a better risk adjusted return with more annual income and lower volatility over the past 20 years. And you can get started with fund rise.

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Once you’ve completed your pre-licensing courses, you’ll take an exam administered by your state in an effort to obtain a real estate license. Be advised that some States do require a certain number of on the job training hours. In addition to pre-licensing coursework, friends, this is your moment. Change your career, change your life, and do it all with real estate express. Again, get 40% off by going to real estate express.com forward slash money. Girl principle, number four, use tax advantage accounts. One of the best ways to invest money is under the umbrella of one or more tax advantage accounts, such as an IRA or a workplace 401k. And if you’re self-employed, you’ve got even more choices in my newest book called money, smart solo preneur. I cover all of the retirement plans that you can use. So that book ebook audio book will help you choose the best business retirement plan for your situation.

It’s based on your company size and your goals. So no matter your situation, whether you’re an employee, uh, with a 401k or even if you don’t have a 401k at work or you’re self-employed, you have tax advantage accounts that you can use to turbocharge your retirement. Investing inside of these retirement accounts helps you accumulate a nest egg, and it also cuts your tax bill at the same time. So that’s what really gives you additional leverage. And when you use traditional retirement accounts, what you’re doing is contributing on a pretax basis. That means you defer paying tax on both the contributions that you make and the earnings that you achieve until you take withdrawals in the future. Another option is to contribute to a Roth 401k or a Roth IRA. This is where you pay tax on contributions upfront, but you take withdrawals in retirement that are entirely tax-free, which is fantastic.

So if your employer offers a retirement plan, start participating as soon as possible. If you haven’t gotten started, especially if they pay matching contributions. Let me give you an example on how that can help. Let’s say you get a full match on the first 3% of your salary contributed to a 401k. If you earn $40,000 a year and contribute 10%, which is that, uh, kind of that sweet spot that I recommend the 10% to 15% of your, of your income. If you do that, that would be $4,000 a year or $333 a month. Now, if that’s all you invested over 40 years and you earned an average 7% annual return, you would have a nest egg worth over $875,000 at retirement. Now let’s consider the benefit you’d get. If you were also getting matching funds from your employer, if your employer matched contributions up to 3% of your salary, they would be adding $1,200 a year or a hundred dollars a month to your account for free.

Now you’re socking away a total of 5,200 bucks. That’s $4,000 of your own money, plus $1,200 a year that your employer is giving you. That means you will have over $1.1 million after 40 years. So that’s about $260,000 more that you’ve gotten to spend in retirement. Thanks to those free, additional matching funds that your employer gave you. That is how powerful that benefit is. So my friend be sure that you are always taking advantage of those workplace retirement plans, especially if they have matching. Now, even if your employer does not match contributions, I’m still a big fan of workplace retirement accounts. Not only do they automate investing by deducting contributions from your paycheck before you get to see them and spend them, but a retirement plan also cuts your taxes and you can take all your money with you, including your vested matching funds. If you leave the company.

In addition to retirement plans, there are other types of tax advantaged accounts that you might use to invest for different purposes. These include a five 29 college savings plan. These allow your earnings to grow tax-free if you use the funds to pay for qualified education expenses, and that could be for yourself or for a family member. And another one is a health savings account or HSA. These are available to pay eligible medical costs on a tax-free basis, completely tax-free basis. When you have a high deductible health plan, okay, moving on to principle number five, which is don’t be a stock picker buying and selling individual stocks such as Apple, Amazon, Google, or game stop comes with substantial risk, even professional money managers can’t predict with certainty, whether a stock will go up or down the game stop frenzy you may have heard about this week is a great example.

In a nutshell, here’s what happened. The game retailer hasn’t been doing so well. So professional investors shorted the stock. That means they were so sure the company would fail, that they bet on it. Shorting a stock means that you profit. If the price goes down, and this is completely legal, when a vast group of investors and a Reddit forum discovered the huge short positions on game stop, they decided to do the opposite and buy the stock that pushed up the price, causing the short sellers to lose billions and many trading platforms and apps put on the brakes by temporarily restricting users from buying and selling game stop. And some other volatile stocks. You might say the game stop move is sort of like individual investors banding together to quote, stick it to the man or, you know, stick it to wealthy investment firms. It’s the first time we’ve seen online groups of day traders inflate a stock price so much that it hurt huge retail investors.

However, the artificially inflated game stock stock price will eventually drop because the company is not fundamentally healthy. The takeaway is that any individual stock can fluctuate wildly from minute to minute making it too risky for an average investor. Now, if you’ve got money to burn and you’re okay with losing money, like all of your money, sure, go ahead, invest in stocks. But for most people, we are not willing to lose 100% of our money and we need the savings on the investments that we have to last. We need them to reach our goals. So unless again, you’ve got money to burn. You do not need to be buying individual stocks. The best strategy for getting high stock returns with a whole lot less risk is to own one or more diversified funds. So a stock fund is what I recommend you own in your portfolio, in your 401k or your IRA.

A stock fund is made up of hundreds or even thousands of underlying stocks, which spreads out the risks. So if one stock, you know, is doing crazy things, it really has just a tiny, tiny impact on your overall portfolio and wealth. I recommend that you start by figuring out how much stock funds you should own based on your goals, such as a future retirement date. So here’s an easy shortcut, subtract your age from 100 and use that number as the percentage of stock funds to hold in your retirement portfolio. For example, if you’re 40, you might consider holding 60% of your portfolio in stock funds. Now, if you tend to be more aggressive, you know, you, you are okay with more risk, subtract your age from 110 instead, which would indicate 70% for stocks. But this is just a rough guideline that you may decide to change.

You may decide that you want to take more risk or less risk. You might allocate your stock percentage to various stock funds or put it all just into one, such as a total stock market index fund that mirrors an entire index, such as the S and P 500 and the remaining amount of your portfolio would own investments. In other asset classes, besides stocks, such as bond funds, real estate funds, or even cash principle, number six, avoid high fees, different investment funds charge very different fees. And they’re known as an expense ratio. For instance, a 2% expense ratio means that each year 2% of a funds total assets will be used to pay expenses such as management, advertising, and administrative costs. So if you choose a similar investing fund, that charges 1%, that may seem like a small difference, but the savings really add up. For instance, if you invest a hundred thousand dollars over 30 years with an average return of 7%, instead of 6%, because of the fee difference, you will save about $200,000.

So be sure to choose low cost funds, and you may see them call it exchange traded funds or ETFs and index funds. You want to choose these low cost options. So more of your money stays in the account, helping you earn higher returns and our last principle, number seven, use automation to be a successful investor. You need to invest consistently over a long period. That’s just, you know, end of story. That’s how it’s done a great way to maintain an investing habit is to automate it, have money automatically transferred from your paycheck or your bank account into a savings or into an investment account every month before you get tempted to spend it. Yes, sometimes you just have to outsmart yourself to manage money wisely, putting your investments, or even, you know, your savings for an emergency fund on autopilot is by far the best way to build wealth safely years from now, when you’ve got savings to fall back on and investments to fund your dream lifestyle, you will be so happy that you took control of your financial future.

Thanks for being with me today. If you would like to get short email updates from me that are filled with tips and tools that I think you’ll enjoy for saving more growing your money and becoming an amazing money manager, please visit Laura D adams.com or text me. You can text the phrase, get updates to the number three, three, four, four, four, again, text get updates two, three, three, four, four, four. And if you’re not into email or even if you are an email, another great way to stay in touch is to join my private Facebook group called dominate your dollars. You can find it on Facebook, or you can also text me and I’ll send you an invitation text, the word dollars’ D O L L a R S to that same number three, three, four, four four. And I’ll send you your invitation to the group.

That’s all for now. I’ll talk to you next week until then here’s to living our richer life. Money girl is produced by the audio wizard, Steve Ricky Berg with editorial support from Karen Hertzberg. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, everyone at the quick and dirty tips network would really appreciate you taking just a moment to rate and review the show on Apple podcasts. New episodes are released every Wednesday and when you’re subscribed, you will get them automatically for free. So be sure to hit the subscribe button in the Apple podcast app or wherever you listen, you might also like the backlist episodes and the show notes that are always [email protected].

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