Managing your investments for the long-term

We recently came across these guidelines for managing your investments which are pretty straightforward and simple with regards to investing and building a retirement plan.

These guidelines made sense to us and are easy to remember, however for many people are very hard to implement.

The Managing your investments guidelines are as follows:

Invest in long-term stock; it is a marathon, not a sprint. Start early and treat it as a marathon investment plan.

Invest based on factual information that you can collect from your financial adviser, as well as reading news, the news items, and following information released from companies you’re investing in.

Keep your emotions out of your decisions. Greed, envy, and following the crowd are strange ways of influencing your decisions. Stick to the facts.

Focus on quality stocks that pay dividends regularly and also that have a history of increasing their dividends year-over-year.

If you can start early investing for retirement, plan in a conservative manner, follow diverse investing and using several financial advisers there is an excellent chance that you will save sufficient money to provide for your retirement and the quality-of-life level that you prefer. Start early and it is much easier to achieve these objectives

Keep your emotion Out of Managing your investments

This is one of the most difficult things to do overall. Imagine you have been saving a nice nest egg of investments. Everything is going well, and it is growing as fast if not faster than the market. Suddenly the market decides to take a correction, which it does every few years. Suddenly your investment value drops by 30% to 40%, and you are overwhelmed by the loss in your savings.

The first thing to remember is that it is only a loss if you sell now at a loss. The market has gone through many corrections over the years and then recovered. Even in 1929, which was the most significant correction we have ever had, the market recovered and far surpassed that loss. Keeping your emotions out of the decision is hard to do, but one of the most important things to do when managing your investments.

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