755th Friday Blog Roundup
Let’s pretend someone who knows nothing about investing wants to learn about investing. (Actually, we’re not pretending. I know nothing about investing.) How does one go about getting started? I have a 401K that I am probably mismanaging because I don’t really know what I’m doing. And I wanted to understand the different types of saving programs… programs is probably not the actual term but I think you all know what I mean.
Is there a book that teaches you what everything is and how the stock market works and how one goes about setting up an e-trade account and doing something like that with a small amount of money?
This is part of the whole “find a hobby” thing. I just thought it sounded like this topic had a good learning component and it would be fun to check on the stock market every day and understand what I’m seeing. Plus if I did well, there would be a clear benefit whereas learning about birds does not provide the family with a clear benefit beyond bird knowledge.
Um… does anyone have a good book explaining investing and stock and bonds and all of those other keywords that pertain to money management? Something really straightforward and simple for the true beginner?
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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.
Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.
As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.
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And now the blogs…
But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:
- None… sniff.
Okay, now my choices this week.
Of Needles and Noodles writes about family building for the second time after infertility. She writes, “The stakes are most definitely higher with another frozen embryo transfer than they were with Laurie’s round. Before we had Laurie, we’d only experienced loss; now we’ve experienced success, it’s just another added pressure; we’re more fully aware of what’s at stake than we ever were before.” She explains what other people can do to make things easier for the person who is still family building. It’s one of those posts you hope everyone reads.
An Engineer Becomes a Mom writes about the “messy middle,” that time that comes between the beginning when things are finally changing and the end when it looks like things will work out. The messy middle is “the part where it’s so comfortable to slide back to where I was, to just wallow in the mud puddle of me vs. them, I’m gonna go hide, I’m not going to show up, I’m not going to embrace this.” Cheer her through this patch.
Baby Ridley Bump is trying to add to their family. She admits, “For the first time ever in my treatment, I am hesitant to move forward. I’ve never ever wanted to wait for anything on this journey … But now that I’ve taken a break and enjoyed these last several months, I find myself often questioning if one child is all that we really need.” She is starting the process for another transfer, taking her time to do it in the best way possible. Go wish her good thoughts.
Lastly, No Kidding in NZ has a bittersweet post about losing a cousin but realizing the strength of family and friends. When her cousin got sick, “they were concerned she had no partner or children or parents who could help. One of her brothers told us that she wasn’t dejected. ‘I have cousins!’ she declared enthusiastically.” It only took a few days to put together months of support. It’s a good reminder that we all need to nurture our relationships.
The roundup to the Roundup: How do you get started in understanding what you’re doing with your 401K? Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 9th and August 16th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week? Read the original open thread post here.
11 comments
I had an Investments class in college and have retained only the very basics (“buy low, sell high,” lol). I’ll be curious what you come up with.
Bogleheads guide to investing.
The trick with investing is that you do not want to get complicated. You do not want to pay much attention. You want to set and forget and occasionally rebalance (possibly automatically). The VAST majority of people should just buy a target date fund from Vanguard or whatever the cheapest provider their work offers is and leave it alone until it’s time to tap in. (Exceptions for super wealthy people who are trying to take advantage of tax loopholes for super wealthy people.)
Once you decide on what fund you want (I recommend a Vanguard target-date fund), if you call Vanguard and tell them you’re new, they’ll help you with the paperwork. (I have both vanguard and etrade– you probably want vanguard.)
Don’t try to pick stocks. Don’t try to time the market. While some people get lucky, the majority end up doing worse than they would have if they’d just picked a broad-based market index fund because we have all sorts of weird psychological problems and because of transaction fees.
So I’m with you…like, everything nicoleandmaggie wrote above sounds like a foreign language. I took a class in high school that was supposed to teach us this stuff, but I don’t think anything really stuck.
There is a fellow local author that I went to school with who spent many, many years working for a financial company doing the actual financial stuff before she started writing full-time a couple years ago. Her name is Brigid Kemmerer, and you could easily find her website and send her an email, I know she would be great to get advice from and she definitely won’t mind me sending you her way. She does tons of her own research for books so she knows what it’s like t reach out. You can also tell her I sent you if you want (my real name lol) If you can’t find her, I should still have her email just let me know!
I know of a couple of good books, but they’re geared for the Canadian market. We have somewhat different investment vehicles (RRSPs, RRIFs & TFSAs as well as regular savings & investment accounts).
But I’m with Nicole & Maggie. Keep it simple. It doesn’t matter so much WHAT you invest in — just get into the habit of saving, and after a while, you’ll be surprised at how quickly it accumulates. My dh did the Canadian Securities Course & almost all the work to qualify as a certified financial planner… he worked on the floor of the Toronto Stock Exchange and after that on a trading desk at a bank — and he will tell you the same thing (he tells our nephews too!). Keep it simple. The important thing is get in the habit of saving.
I was hoping N&M would reply and I see they have. Good advice.
I don’t remember how much information it includes about investing — it’s been awhile since I read it — but I liked Elizabeth Warren’s co-authored book (with her daughter, I forget the latter’s name) called All Your Worth. It’s not so much investing advice (as I recall) but big-picture perspective on the challenges facing Americans in terms of finances and planning and some reasonable advice on how to navigate some of them.
I haven’t read it, but I hear good things about A Random Walk on [or down?] Wall Street, if you want to know (as I recall what I’ve heard it’s about) why you shouldn’t care about the day-to-day, invest in individual stocks, etc.
I hope you find good books! Mine were all hopelessly outdated, but I would have totally sent them to you. We have an adviser because we don’t know what we’re doing and have zero interest in doing this ourselves, but feel like we should get our money to work harder for us. Good luck!
I loved Infertile Phoenix’s post about the stages of her survival, it’s a good reminder that these things don’t happen overnight and you never know where your life will take you: https://infertilephoenix.blogspot.com/2019/08/stages-of-my-survival.html
One more roundup to the roundup choice:
https://torthuiljourney.blogspot.com/2019/08/maximum-responsibility.html
Lots of wisdom and beauty in this post. The balancing is gorgeous.
All Your Worth is a wonderful book, but it’s really about getting your spending/saving balance right. I don’t think there’s much in there about investing.
If you just turn off when it comes to money stuff, 9 Steps to Financial Freedom by Suze Orman is pretty good. Her investing advice is not great, but her how to get over the emotional hurdles of dealing with your money is great.
It does matter a little what you invest in– the key is you want something that is broad-based in order to mitigate risk and low-fee so you’re not throwing your money away on fees. When I got my FIL to switch from the high-fee swindlers at Edward Jones to Vanguard after retiring, he calculated he saved 10K/year in fees alone(!) That’s THREE online classes my MIL doesn’t have to teach.
Seriously, if you want to optimize, just pick a Vanguard Target Date fund– this date will be the year you are considering retiring. Set and forget. You will match the stock/bond market at a low fee without taking unnecessary risks at a stock/bond balance appropriate for your time to retirement. It’s a single decision– the year you’re considering retiring. If you are off, that’s not a huge deal, it just means you start going into bonds earlier or later than expected.
Now’s probably not the time to say I heard the author of a book on investing (he was involved in bailing out one of the US banks in 2008) say that at the moment, he can only recommend cash and gold. The week that interest rates in NZ fell again, and the stock markets everywhere were falling. How depressing.
I do love the way you can ask advice though – about ANYTHING – and get such interesting comments.
Jess’s post made me angry. And then it made me want to give her a hug.
http://mypathtomommyhood.blogspot.com/2019/08/how-can-you-be-happy.html
Thank you for featuring my blog post here. I’m equally glad and sad that it resonated with people.
Cait @ Of Needles and Noodles