DYI Investing, Budgeting, and Retirement Planning

Too many people think all financial advisors, funds, portfolio managers are the same. They are not. There are good funds and bad funds, good managers and bad managers. Just like in school there were those that received A's and those that received F's. If you needed a study buddy to pass an end-of-year exam, you would choose to study with the A student, not the F student. The same is true with anything. The reason graduates from ivy league colleges make tend to make more throughout their life than those from state colleges is because the ivy colleges select the very top students. If you want to experience higher than normal returns, pick winners, not losers. When picking winners, small advantages make big long term differences. Take the following example. If $10,000 were invested over twenty years at the typical S&P 500 return of 10%, then the total balance would be a little over $67,000. However, if an investor were able to eek out just a single percentage point advantage ...

  Industrial stocks include companies that build and distribute machinery , equipment or supplies for use in manufacturing, construction, or defense as well as aerospace, railroads, and waste management. These companies tend to be a strong indicator of supply and demand in the economy and can be good barometers of whether the country is going into a recession or coming out of a recession. This is because they often produce the goods that more retail-like companies (those that sell directly to consumers) need in order to sell finished products to consumers. When the economy contracts, and consumers have less money to buy things, the demand for industrials drops and when there is growth in the economy, the demand for industrial goods grows. Over the last five years, the industrials sector has slightly outpaced the S&P 500. The thing to keep in mind, however, if you add industrial ETFs or mutual funds to your portfolio is that you will likely experience cyclical returns. This mean...

  Utilities are not the popular kids of the stock market world. They are generally known for their stability and dividends and rarely have eye-popping returns. Investors include utility funds in their portfolios to hedge against market volatility. When the market is in turmoil, sensitive stocks like technology have a tendency to lose value rapidly. Inversely, because people always need services like water, sewage, electricity, or natural gas the market returns for utility stocks will drop less during hard economic times. But just because utilities tend to be more stable than other stocks does not mean they should comprise a large portion of an investment portfolio. During a short term recession, having a utility ETF or mutual fund in your portfolio may limit your overall losses but over the long term if you have too high a percentage of utilities in your portfolio, that same stability will result in lower overall gains as other sectors such as technology provide greater returns....