In celebration of Frank Armstrong Day let’s consider a basic question:

How hard is investing?

Let’s look at two aspects to this:

• How complicated is investing?
• How much work is investing?

How complicated is investing?

Several answers are offered to this question:

1.  It’s so complicated you should pay a genius to do it.

2.  It’s so complicated so you should go to great efforts to learn how to do it.

3.  What’s hard about it?

• • make your contributions automatic
  • increase your contributions yearly and when you get raises
  • buy a few low cost passive index funds
  • optionally rebalance once a year or so

How much work is investing?

Not a lot if you do it a step at a time.

Case Study 1:  Someone who made 2 good decisions and 2 pretty good decisions – he’s doing fine

Case Study 2:  Someone who saved consistently with a mediocre investment (annuities).  He did fine.

Boring, low return, high fees.  Even though there isn’t much to love about annuities, If you do what “L” did, you can succeed.

He kept buying them.  He didn’t annuitize them.  His widow never ran out of money.

How can you make investing easier?

Phone a friend by getting Frank Armstrong’s book, The Informed Investor.  He takes you step by step and makes it easy.

Write up your plan and update it once a year.  Even people who didn’t perfectly follow their plan did better than those with no plan.  Those who only thought about planning still did better than the no plan & no thought folks.

The post How hard is investing? appeared first on Intentional Investor.