Investments

Millennial finance is more than figuring out where our generation should invest its savings and they type of returns you can get on your portfolio. Simply becoming investors in the first place has proven to be a difficult task. To succeed in a financial landscape that’s vastly different than any other generation’s, the relationship between Millennials and money must be different..

I can’t think of a better way to further capture our firm’s approach to investing then by providing an expert from from our book, The Millennial Money Fix:

People think investments make them rich. That’s why they love them; why folks the media, like Jim Cramer, can scream at millions of viewers on television almost every day; why moviegoers clamor The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short, despite their portrayal of how awful investments can be when manipulated for greed; and why Amazon once had 123,984 search results it its books department for one single word: investments. It’s all about glamour, the risk, and the sizzle when you get them right – and the thins you can buy when you do.

Okay, okay, that’s enough. Time to cool off.

I may sound like a grandpa to my young clients, calling in with their first load of cash looking to triple their earnings. But I don’t care. Investment make up just one area of personal finance. And like we discussed earlier, you need to earn the right to invest by first prioritize your goals, mastering your cash flow, and establishing the safety net of a cash reserve that’s appropriate in size to where you are in life. If you’ve followed along and met those benchmarks, than we can talk about investments.

Investing tests the relationship between risk and reward. People invest to grow their money at a faster rate than placing it in the bank. Some consider it “putting your money to work.”

This means that if you are willing to risk losing money by committing it to something that could generate income or profit, you might be rewarded for that risk in the form of greater income or profit…

Let’s touch on the differences between investing on your own and investing with professional. I make a living helping individuals invest toward their goals. Most of my client trust our firm to mange their money in a way that puts their interests above everything else. But I’m not going to tell you that you can’t do this yourself. Of course you can. Many people do, and perhaps they are going to save money doing so. You can take the lessons in this chapter, along with an unlimited number of online resources (Investopedia.com is my favorite) and execute an investment strategy that works.

I can tell you that most of my clients are too busy working toward their goals to do as good of a job as we can do for them. Their time too valuable and too precious to be spent perfecting an asset allocation model or mulling through the tens of thousands of funds that exist to creat the optimal investment portfolio. They must find value in working with a professional to help them make the best decisions, because they can reinvest that time into work or their personal lives. What it comes down to is, what is your time worth to you?