VIDEO: Retirement Investing Pitfall #11 – Not Taking Advantage of Professional Investment Advice
For weeks we’ve been tackling one retirement investing pitfall after another. As we have covered, being unaware of these many pitfalls can potentially lead you down a path to an unfavorable and undesirable investment outcome.
In this video I am going to discuss the final pitfall from my book… which is Not Taking Advantage of Professional Investment Advice. Before we dig in, I’d like to make one thing very clear: financial planning is not just for the wealthy. The thought that you need to be rich in order to benefit from financial planning may be one of the biggest misconceptions out there. As a matter of fact, studies show that putting a comprehensive financial plan in place can benefit people at any income level. In my opinion, having professional guidance to help you make sound, logical investment decisions should help you overcome your own irrational perspectives. A long-term investment outlook requires a personalized strategy that accounts for your current and future needs, time horizon, and appetite for investment risk.
As you can imagine, it’s not uncommon to feel overwhelmed by the number of important decisions we need to make regarding retirement, investments, insurance, college savings and other complicated financial issues that may come our way. If you don’t feel confident in your financial future, you’re not alone. Today more than ever, financial advisors can be an essential resource and help bring together all the pieces of the challenging puzzle that encompasses planning for the future and managing your finances. For this reason alone, I believe you can benefit from working with a financial advisor to help develop a realistic, measurable, and achievable plan with your specific goals in mind.
Working with a financial advisor can help enhance your knowledge of various topics relative to your current financial situation, and provide a framework for structuring and simplifying your financial endeavors. The main goal of financial planning is to help take the guesswork out of managing your finances so you can truly see the big picture and make more informed decisions – thus enabling you to better understand the implications of each financial decision you make.
Successful long-term investing requires the ability to position and rebalance your portfolio to ride bear and bull markets. This level of complexity can make working with an investment professional critical to meeting your goals. Chasing returns and following cookie-cutter approaches on your own is risky. I believe successfully navigating the turbulent investing world of today requires training, prudent management, and committing to a long-term, active investing strategy.
