Man, I really wish I knew about dividends when I first started out investing. I mean, I know it took me only like 2 years to take them seriously and to actually understand how they work, but still, I probably missed out on a solid $40 or something! Before I had any idea, dividends to me were something old people at the country club would talk about. All I heard people older than me bring up, was what the yield of a stock was and how it was amazing that a dividend yield in a certain stock was 3% or even more. All I kept thinking was first of all, what the hell does that even mean, and second, who even cares, that stock is too expensive. And by expensive, I literally meant it had to be anything over like $95 regardless of what the company was, what they did, etc. Solid principles, right? Whatever, I got mine after I read all those books! Dividends are the best But in all seriousness, dividends are immensely helpful when building your net worth, especially for …
Investing
Your Peers Today are Screwing Up Their Retirement for Later
Last year at my job, the "Young Professionals" group organized a seminar and invited a financial advisor to speak to us. He was from Merrill Lynch and had previously worked at the company I'm at now. He came to speak to us about what he does, why he loves his job and how his services can help us prepare for our future. Some things he mentioned were saving for a down payment on a house, retirement, etc. He began by saying how he loved his job because it allowed him to be able to help people of all ages prepare for retirement or any other major event they were planning for. He talked about how proud he was that he could make a direct positive impact on family's lives by showing them what exactly they should be doing with their money. The guy said one of the major things people don't do is track their finances. And you guessed it, he asked us to raise our hands if we did. I kid you not out of around 250-300 people in the room, only me and two other people raised their hands. I …
Index Funds vs Individual Stocks: Which is Right for You?
There will always be an ongoing debate whether index funds or individual stocks are the best way to go about investing. On one side of the argument, index funds are better, because they give you the overall performance of the market, or whatever index it's tracking. For instance one of the most popular ones, the S&P 500 index. Those in favor say it's much better to invest in index funds because the cost is low to manage them, and you don't have to do much work to get an "average" performance. In reality, it's a better than average performance because 99% of actively managed US equity funds underperform. The index fund is really just a collection of stocks the index is tracking and more or less matches the performance exactly, less the fees of the fund. Typically you can find fees as low as .05% or even .01% in some cases. Those against the index fund go as far as to say passive investing is worse than Marxism. Yikes! But the thing is, it doesn't really matter. It …
Monthly Net Worth Update #3
Hey guys, welcome to my monthly net worth update. For those of you new to the blog, I provide updates every month on how my net worth is progressing. I personally always love it when I see other bloggers either post updates on their net worth, monthly income from their blogs or both. Without it, I probably wouldn't have had the confidence or motivation to give this whole blog thing a try. The other personal finance blogs really motivated me to give this a shot and see what happens regardless of the end result. What's the worst that could really happen? Get published? Find a job at a media company doing something I actually enjoy for once? Sounds good to me. I ultimately wanted a platform where I could share what I’ve learned over the past few years and track my net worth to make sure I’m always going in the right direction, sticking with my principles. And who knows, maybe along the way one of you guys will teach me a better way to approach investing. But for now, this is the …
Monthly Net Worth Update #2
Hey guys, welcome to my monthly net worth update. For those of you new to the blog, I provide updates every month on how my net worth is progressing. I personally always love it when I see other bloggers either post updates on their net worth, monthly income from their blogs or both. Without it, I probably wouldn't have had the confidence or motivation to give this whole blog thing a try. The other personal finance blogs really motivated me to give this a shot and see what happens regardless of the end result. What's the worst that could really happen? Get published? Find a job at a media company doing something I actually enjoy for once? Sounds good to me. I ultimately wanted a platform where I could share what I’ve learned over the past few years and track my net worth to make sure I’m always going in the right direction, sticking with my principles. And who knows, maybe along the way one of you guys will teach me a better way to approach investing. But for now, this …
The Difference Between Speculating and Investing
I feel like there will always be a debate about what's considered speculating and what is really considered investing. Most of the time, in my opinion, people confuse speculating for investing rather than the opposite. It helps them justify buying a stock they believe will go up in a short period of time. But when you really look at it, it's pretty obvious at times when you're guessing a company's stock is going to go up compared to the actual practice of investing. I know people who speculate all the time. It's ridiculous to me that someone could willingly give themselves that kind of anxiety and most likely, terrible performance. Even if you threw only $300 in say something like stock in PayPal and lost only $20, you still lost over 6% of your investment in less than a month. Not that I know someone who had exactly that happen to them or anything... Related Posts: How to Get Rich if You Don't Know Where to Start The #1 Mistake Costing You …
Here’s How to Get Rich if You Don’t Know Where to Start
I never thought I'd see the day where I'd be writing a post about this, let alone living my life like this. I mean, as a kid all I wanted to do was run around, play soccer and hang out with my friends. Actually, I take that back, I still wanna do that. BUT, the difference now is I have a little more willpower to stop myself from doing whatever I want all day long. Plus I need some monies from my day job too. There's nothing more I'd like to do than spend the weekend playing soccer, going out in the city, spending money on bottomless brunches and whatever else. But at the end of the day, I know that's not gonna help me get rich. It'll most likely do the opposite pretty quickly. Instead, what you itould be doing is getting your hands on as many books as you can to figure out how to start making yourself some extra income! When I was in high school, I'm pretty sure I only finished one or two books. You couldn't for the life of me get me to finish a book unless the cover …
