Pains & Struggles of Investing

Think when people say "investing" they normally think of the stock market. Over the years, I've traded, but have just not cared for it. Hey, its real simple right...buy low sell high...lol. Lots make money, lots lose money on the market.

Would like to find something other than that to invest in. Also tangible other investments.
Right now, hearing people are parking their money...thinking the market will go down.
Equities aren't what they used to be, the country is heading for a dive, etc. Its just basically boring to me.

Would like to hear from those who are not bored and have interesting investments. Of course we all like a decent yearly return, now don't we...whether we sell "stuff" or get
dividends or interest.
 

@Liberty

I'm not sure if this qualifies as "interesting" investments or not but, right now we have four rental houses. I wish we had gotten into the rental market years ago but we have only had them about 5 years. We are going to start selling them off since they are a lot of work and when I retire I want to start traveling.

Since the properties are in an LLC and we want to avoid capital gains, we will probably take the money realized from the sales and buy a vacation house somewhere warm, keeping it in the LLC. Perhaps renting it out when we aren't there. We haven't gotten everything worked out yet but are researching it.

I guess I would consider this an investment and really, it's still renting out properties.
 
Nothing exotic here, when it comes to my retirement income boring is exactly what I'm looking for.

"I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over." - Warren Buffett
 

Boring is great when it comes to investing....now that we are retired I want no more investment real estate ....hopefully the last will be sold on this upcoming Thursday... I want liquid investments that are boring and can be sold ,swapped or rebalanced with the click of a button ..... I maintain a diversified mix of stuff wit equities,bonds and gold ....it works well
 
Ok, had to sign a universal non compete that's got 2-1/2 more years to run - stops me from being in the specialty food biz...lol.

So, guess I'll just get my jacks out and see if I can do my "tenzies". Can you tell I've been
talking to the kids?th-3.jpeg
 
Nothing wrong with dollar cost averaging but I also watch for insider advice on what is going on behind closed doors trying not to buy solid stocks when they are overvalued. CBI has long been a solid world leader in their business but I took a bath buying in a dip and again on several dips that never stopped dipping;)
 
My retirement portfolio consists mainly from 40+ years of socking away funds in three 401k's (different employers), then moving
them to IRA's. I have also invested in some mutual funds outside the company's 401k's. While I have become fairly knowledgeable in financial
matters, I utilize professionals for some of the financial decisions and management. I feel it's too important to rely just on my own (sometimes emotional) decisions. Three years into retirement; so far, so good.
 
I just retired about a year ago, I would like to keep things simple. I got with a Vanguard adviser and moved my savings into a profolio of index funds. He gets .3%. Not many transactions in index funds, just keep a balance of 60/40. This has been a good year maintaining about 9% return. I know this because each month I take the numbers and put them to an excel from the profolio and again to keep it simple I note the gain/loss from the beginning year balance. I look to average 6% to do a withdrawal of 2.6% but will not withdraw unless I have a gain of better than 4%. I meet my expenses with my fixed income money but my expected yearly desired amount is met with the 2.6%. My withdrawals happen once a year in Jan and are moved to a spending money market account where money is moved once a month as needed to my local bank to pay bills. I am not a market / stock player, as this would require allot of effort keeping up with transactions and capital gains for taxes. Nor do I think I will get into tax harvesting or trading ETF's. Retirement should be about the beach and a Corona and my investment watching should be once a month. But that's just me I guess. Cheers!
 
My biggest regret is that I didn't start ''playing the market'' until I was 51, although I've owned real estate and rentals since I was 24. Hey, no one I knew was into stocks, that's my excuse. Then someone at work in 1993 told me to open a stock account at Quick & Reilley (later Merril Lynch) and play a little. I made a lot of mistakes and had a few home runs and it got into my blood. Love it, it's my drug of choice. LOL Right now I am fully invested but I'm not buying much, am letting my dividends grow, and hope to buy a few stocks at sale prices when the market goes into bear territory. This bull started on March 9, 2009 so it's just a matter of time to the crash. I also add, I'm not into technicals and barely know how to read balance sheets, my buying choices are based on gut instincts mostly. I was also lucky that I worked for an electric company and they had excellent benefits, including a 401k and a pension.
 
mathjak107 said:
Any time I hear someone use the words PLAYING THE MARKET odds are pretty good they don’t understand much about investing...
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Buying stocks IS a form of gambling, even those who do extensive research can end up with losers. The odds are much better than gambling, though, and I don't mind the occasional losses.
 
Buying individual stocks is speculating unless you can buy enough to not have individual company risk ...however buying index funds or broad based stock funds is investing and unless you exhibited poor investor behavior there is only volatility to deal with but little risk ..

Try to time buys and sells , freaking out and bailing out when you should be buying and mismatching the time frame you want the money are all bad investor behavior that cost them in the end.

if it was possible to miss the worst days or even the worst time frames , our record would make buffetts look like an amateur .. the reality is we can't not only guess the right days to be out we are very bad at even picking the right time frame .

University of Michigan Professor H. Nejat Seyhun analyzed 7,802 trading days for the 31 years from 1963 to 1993 and concluded that just 90 days generated 95% of all the years’ market gains — an average of just three days per year.

so while missing the worst days while not hurting yourself is near impossible , catching the best days is easy ... just stay invested and dont try to time things
 
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mathjak107 said:
Buying individual stocks is speculating unless you can buy enough to not have individual company risk ...however buying index funds or broad based stock funds is investing and unless you exhibited poor investor behavior there is only volatility to deal with but little risk ..

Try to time buys and sells , freaking out and bailing out when you should be buying and mismatching the time frame you want the money are all bad investor behavior that cost them in the end
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I have ONE fund in my IRA with Vanguard, I don't really care for funds. I prefer ETFs and individual stocks. ETFs for safety of number of companies they own, and individual stocks for the excitement of ''gambling'' since they're more volatile. My favorite ETF is QQQ and I hope to buy SPY when it goes on sale. I have a few other ETFs, of course. In individual stocks I like volatile ones like TSLA and NVDA and SQ and recently I bought and wish I had bought more of AVAV (drones, bought at $50 and now at 58.62, not bad). I gravitate to futuristic stocks, even bought some of IPOA (Virgin Galactic), they will merge on Oct 23 (or so they say).
 
oldmontana said:
Well said....its investing in the market...its buying stocks in companies.

If you can not stand the ups and downs of the market do not invest.
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People do the wrong thing all the time ..with little knowledge they speculate in individual stocks ...they have little clue about financial things yet they are trying to pick the right company , in the right sector , at the right time ,in the right part of the market cycle ....even if they lucked out and got all that correct ,they likely have no clue what the competitors have on their drawing board ...then they do poorly and blame markets and write investing off as gambling ....we have people who are still waiting for the roll back since 2008 and missed a 300-400% run up ......
 
Liberty said:
So you are saying they are trying to get in or out to make more money, when the funds might say, for instance May 31- to May 30 year to year to determine fund status earnings or losses?
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I think he is saying most new investors get the idea they can time the market when what they should do is stick with what they have instead of trying to out think what the stock or market is going to do. Ride out the lows and highs, think long term.
 
I started investing in my late 30's after attending an investment seminar sponsored by what was then Dean Witter Reynolds. I became very interested in learning the ropes and am basically a self taught investor only having used DWR's broker for a short time. I tried Target funds, balanced funds (which bored me) and found out along the way my style is more of an aggressive nature. I switched from Target funds to utilities within the same brokerage and invested in other funds and ETFs at different brokerages over the years. Within the last couple of years, I've consolidated my investments into 3 brokerages. The one I like best is Schwab.

I shied away from private stocks until Facebook's IPO when I bought only 14 shares. I later bought 15 shares of Apple. I know...a drop in the bucket but I'm basically leery of private stocks.

My biggest investing mistakes were 1. Taking distributions from mutual funds that were doing quite well (their share prices have more than doubled). I wish I had built an emergency fund first and withdrawn from that. 2. Buying a highly touted mutual fund that changed it's objectives and lost money. 3. Listening to the "experts" again and buying shares of Fitbit. The company seemed to be doing quite well but thank goodness I only bought 45 shares because it went from between $36 - $45 a share to less than $6 a share before I decided it wasn't going to rebound and dumped them. On the up side, the Fitbit capital loss offset the capital gains I got that year and all of the investments I chose myself are doing quite well. I didn't even lose money during the 2008 crash; I stayed invested and distributions I took from one of the formerly mentioned funds were at a profit. I still "inhale" financial articles and reading them is somewhat a hobby for me. Even though I've been retired for nearly 22 years, I'm still an active investor, preferring mutual funds and ETFs.
 
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OneEyedDiva said:
I started investing in my late 30's after attending an investment seminar sponsored by what was then Dean Witter Reynolds. I became very interested in learning the ropes and am basically a self taught investor only having used DWR's broker for a short time. I tried Target funds, balanced funds (which bored me) and found out along the way my style is more of an aggressive nature. I switched from Target funds to utilities within the same brokerage and invested in other funds and ETFs at different brokerages over the years. Within the last couple of years, I've consolidated my investments into 3 brokerages. The one I like best is Schwab.

I shied away from private stocks until Facebook's IPO when I bought only 14 shares. I later bought 15 shares of Apple. I know...a drop in the bucket but I'm basically leery of private stocks.

My biggest investing mistakes were 1. Taking distributions from mutual funds that were doing quite well (their share prices have more than doubled). I wish I had built an emergency fund first and withdrawn from that. 2. Buying a highly touted mutual fund that changed it's objectives and lost money. 3. Listening to the "experts" again and buying shares of Fitbit. The company seemed to be doing quite well but thank goodness I only bought 45 shares because it went from between $36 - $45 a share to less than $6 a share before I decided it wasn't going to rebound and dumped them. On the up side, the Fitbit capital loss offset the capital gains I got that year and all of the investments I chose myself are doing quite well. I didn't even lose money during the 2008 crash; I stayed invested and distributions I took from one of the formerly mentioned funds were at a profit. I still "inhale" financial articles and reading them is somewhat a hobby for me. Even though I've been retired for nearly 22 years, I'm still an active investor, preferring mutual funds and ETFs.
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a mix of bond funds and stock funds rebalanced provides cash for spending just fine even with no cash buckets for spending .

in fact spending down from 100% equities has worked fine simply because the weight and drag of holding cash has negated the effects of spending down directly from equities .

our minds like cash buffers but research shows they are only a mirage and spending down even in down markets has not been a problem with 100% stocks because the up years are so much greater .

holding cash is a mental comfort but adds no value financially .

kitces did a lot of research on having cash buffers . for the record i do hold a cash buffer for spending down from .

https://www.kitces.com/blog/are-retirement-bucket-strategies-an-asset-allocation-mirage/
https://www.kitces.com/blog/researc...s-dont-work-unless-youre-a-good-market-timer/
https://www.kitces.com/blog/are-cash-reserve-retirement-strategies-really-necessary/
 
mathjak107 said:
a mix of bond funds and stock funds rebalanced provides cash for spending just fine even with no cash buckets for spending .

in fact spending down from 100% equities has worked fine simply because the weight and drag of holding cash has negated the effects of spending down directly from equities .

our minds like cash buffers but research shows they are only a mirage and spending down even in down markets has not been a problem with 100% stocks because the up years are so much greater .

holding cash is a mental comfort but adds no value financially .

kitces did a lot of research on having cash buffers . for the record i do hold a cash buffer for spending down from .

https://www.kitces.com/blog/are-retirement-bucket-strategies-an-asset-allocation-mirage/
https://www.kitces.com/blog/researc...s-dont-work-unless-youre-a-good-market-timer/
https://www.kitces.com/blog/are-cash-reserve-retirement-strategies-really-necessary/
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FYI Mathjak....I am Muslim and Muslim's do not generally invest in bonds and products that pay interest (Riba). We're instructed not to deal with Riba for it was seen as something Haram (bad for us). If you see how many people are in financial ruin due to interest they cannot get out from under, you'll understand why it was mandated over 1,400 years ago that we don't pay it or charge it. Within the last couple of years, however, I consulted an Islamic advisor who said scholars are now saying a very small amount of interest is considered acceptable but it's still best to avoid it when possible. For this reason I have not had any bond funds or CDs since accepting Islam. Dividends and capital gains are a whole nother "animal" so obviously we are permitted to invest in vehicles that pay those.
 
OneEyedDiva said:
FYI Mathjak....I am Muslim and Muslim's do not generally invest in bonds and products that pay interest (Riba). We're instructed not to deal with Riba for it was seen as something Haram (bad for us). If you see how many people are in financial ruin due to interest they cannot get out from under, you'll understand why it was mandated over 1,400 years ago that we don't pay it or charge it. Within the last couple of years, however, I consulted an Islamic advisor who said scholars are now saying a very small amount of interest is considered acceptable but it's still best to avoid it when possible. For this reason I have not had any bond funds or CDs since accepting Islam. Dividends and capital gains are a whole nother "animal" so obviously we are permitted to invest in vehicles that pay those.
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I would think there are specialists in this kind of planning because stocks are stocks and dividends do not act nor are they a proxy for interest … so it looks like to a simple mind like mine that you need to have zero return on a large chunk of cash and then have equities dividends or not …. so I would imagine there are advisers with products that can work within the bounds
 
mathjak107 said:
I would think there are specialists in this kind of planning because stocks are stocks and dividends do not act nor are they a proxy for interest … so it looks like to a simple mind like mine that you need to have zero return on a large chunk of cash and then have equities dividends or not …. so I would imagine there are advisers with products that can work within the bounds
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Absolutely. There is a company which has three funds that adhere to Islamic investing principles, the Saturna company and Amana funds. But there are "non-Islamic" funds that are also acceptable. We also can't invest in companies that feature gambling, pork, alcohol, etc. products. The best way is to keep it simple. The less companies a fund has, the easier it is to keep track of and adhere to the principles, bearing in mind that a very minute amount of interest is now permissible.
 
mathjak107 said:
I would think self directed Ira accounts are a good way to go so you can control things ....
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I agree. Most of my investments are in IRAs. 68% are in Roths and 11% in a Traditional account (which I don't pay taxes on either because my RMDs are direct donations to St. Jude. The only reason the remaining investments are not in IRA accounts is because I retired almost 22 years ago, so obviously could no longer contribute to those.
 


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