Success, Health and Balance

Most people do not believe in the Capital Markets. I do and this is how I have accumulated vast amounts of money over time.  If you have any discretionary money, or have extra money at the end of the month, put a plan together for yourself or your children or for someone you love because the “long-term” benefits will be so worth it.  The absolute best way to do this is to find a really good and historically proven mutual fund-or three (of which I will have a future blog discussing how to find the best ones)  or seek the right Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs- also discussed in a future blog) and start investing the money.

The Key: Take the amount of money that is comfortable for you and have it automatically invested through your bank account to the investment of choice—every month on the same day.  Don’t miss a beat! Instead of saying “you know what?  I’ll do it next month, I would rather buy “this or that” this month.  This breaks the discipline and the investment strategy. The whole premise is that you, the investor, buys into the investment at a certain price on a certain day.  The next month and the month after that and the month after that (for years to come), the price of that investment will be either up or down (obviously, since the markets continually change).  When you buy at a different share price every month, the value will be different.  When the market goes higher, you buy less shares at a higher price, and when the market goes lower, you are buying more shares at a lower price.  Hence, over time, you are averaging the share price down.  It is as if you have been buying at lower costs.  So the key FACT is that as markets go up over time, you will have accumulated this investment with averaged down prices!  Aside from the fact that you have had a form of forced savings!  The money is there for you. You can believe that doing this correctly will accumulate tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in your accounts over time.  It is also best if I give you an example: I am not yet going to tell you the funds or the ETFs to choose but I will give you the whole premise behind this incredible wealth accumulator… Say that I have an extra $600.00 per month to put away and I choose three mutual funds that I believe have tremendous potential (based on previous performance, a track-record of excellent management, and the “sector” you believe will grow).  The best and most prudent approach will be to  “DIVERSIFY” among 2 or 3 investments.  For example, $200 in International Growth, $200 in Emerging Markets, and $200 in Large Cap Growth).  This approach reduces risk even further by not putting “all of the eggs in one basket.”  The investments will grow at different rates and some will do better than others.  The nice thing about this is you do not really need to monitor them all of the time.  It would be best to follow them but not make changes unless you see certain trends or changes in managemnt that you believe will effect the investment long-term.