I Lost Track of My Investments!

In the webinars, I suggest that investors stick with index funds or target date funds. I've also laddered my target date funds through retirement. Well - I reviewed the returns and expenses on my target date funds...y'allllllllll...my funds are trash!!

I took my eye off of some of my funds over time. I've held some of my funds for more than a decade, and the returns went down, while the expenses went up. I do not recommend reviewing your investments more than quarterly. And if you've invested well, you can leave them alone for 6 months and you should be fine. But I took it too far. I didn't keep up with my older funds and they played me when I wasn't looking.

How did it happen - I TEACH this stuff, I should know better right??

Well - yeah, I should. But I manage accounts for myself and my family and all told, there are over 25 different funds for me to manage across 6 or 7 accounts. I’m more diligent with other people’s money than I am with my own and my own accounts got lost in the shuffle. **I dropped the ball. ** Now, because my portfolio is pretty diversified, I didn't lose money - I lost time and opportunity. I didn’t make as much as I should have and to me, that’s just as bad. That's ANOTHER lesson - there's a fine line between having diversified investments and having too many funds to manage...I did it right, so it didn't cost me much.

If you take the Empower course, you’ll go through the “find your money” exercise with me. This is exactly what it sounds like...You go and find every account, every retirement vehicle, every investment you’ve got and we make sure that the account is necessary and doing what we think it is. The reason we do this is because we’re not set up to manage multiple accounts. We have day jobs and families and we’re not professional financial advisors - regular people don’t need to have their accounts spread across the world. Your portfolio (all of the things that you’re invested in) should be consolidated in a few places (and not too many funds or stocks) so that you can monitor them. You should NOT have 35 different log-ins to manage your finances. You’re complicating things for yourself. And managing your money shouldn't be complicated.

So - long story short - I lost track of a few of my funds because I wasn’t paying attention. And I fixed it. Just because you’ve made a mistake doesn’t mean you keep making it. You figure out what you did wrong and you make a plan to fix it. Immediately. Right now. Before it costs you money.

#ItookanL #imakemistakes #ilearnfromthem #fixitandmoveon #whatareyouinvestedin #whatisyourplan

I’d love for you to be a part of the Empower community! Join our Facebook group for free personal finance tips or check out the Face Your Finances webinars! Link in bio. See you soon!