Guest Post: Your Investment Costs Matter Too
paidtwice’s note: When a new site run by a seasoned blogger, ABCs of Investing, approached me about running a guest post for them, I was intrigued. And the post itself really drew me in. As an investing newbie who is flying by the seat of her pants, I’ve appreciated the short, informative posts that appear on their site twice a week. So without further introduction, I hope you find this post as interesting as I did. 
This guest post was written by ABCs of Investing - a brand new site for novice investors which offers two short and quick investing posts per week. Feel free to subscribe to the feed.
Do you clip coupons to save money? Do you know the “normal” prices of items on sale? Do you monitor your spending closely? Do you know anything about your investment costs?
Investments - they are one of those possessions that people love to ignore. As long as they have some then everything is ok and no further learning is necessary. Nothing could be further from the truth!
Retirement investments will usually end up being one of your larger assets and unless you have a good pension, one of your larger income streams.
Don’t ignore one of your largest assets!
Some of you might be thinking “I don’t have any retirement savings because I’m still working on my credit card debt”. But you will have savings at some point because you aren’t going to be in debt forever. Once you finish slaying the debt monster, then you should start using that free cash you have and save for retirement. You don’t have to be doing something in order to learn something about that something! Most people don’t want to read book after book on investing. They don’t want to go to a big website and read for hour after hour about investments. But they have to start somewhere and learning is the key to being a good investor. An informed investor is a good investor.
If you have already started saving for your retirement then congratulations! You are already on your way. However - do you know what kind of asset allocation you have? Do you know what asset allocation means? What kind investments do you own? What are the fees charged on those investments? What kind of accounts do you have?
You don’t have to be an expert on investments to be an investor but it sure helps to know something about them. It doesn’t matter if you have an financial advisor you work with - the more you know about investing then the better off you will be. Financial advisors are in business for their own profit - not yours. If you have to accept everything they tell you because you don’t know any better then it is time to get started with learning about investing.
I hate investments - I don’t want to learn about them.
Too bad! Nobody cares about your money like you do so it is up to you to learn as much as you can and make sure you aren’t being taken advantage of. Your partner is the investment guru in your family you say? Well, what happens if someday your partner isn’t your partner anymore and you have to do all the investing. Hopefully that will never happen to you, but if it does - wouldn’t it be nice if you had at least a solid knowledge of the investing basics?
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October 22nd, 2008 at 11:18 am
Great guest post! I certainly agree that you don’t have to be an investment geek to be a decent investor. However, you do have to take the time to educate yourself on the fundamentals. In fact, I wrote a similar post that might interest your readers called:
Back To Basics: 8 Tips For Investing Money To Build Wealth
I hope our articles will help people learn what they need to know to grow their money.
October 23rd, 2008 at 11:34 am
There’s so much to learn about investing, it’s kinda scary for newcomers like me. Thanks for the great posts, they really help make sense of things for me. I’ve been reading The Big Gamble and finding it really helpful as well. I really liked that the authors took the time to explain the differences between investing, speculating, and gambling — that was a real eye opener for me.