Top 16 Investing Mistakes
The idea of letting someone else manage a complicated part of our lives is not new. We often use experts in the fields of finance, taxes and health. When we are sick, we go to a doctor. At tax time, we let the tax preparer do the work. And for investing, many people rely on their financial advisor.
Getting great expert advice in these fields is a great idea. But it carries with it a certain danger.
The problem is that people often rely on these experts and never take responsibility for the results. Even when we use an expert to make a specific investment or develop a plan, the results of the investment are always our own responsibility. We can use experts to get information, but we can never assign responsibility for results to them.
Why not? Because they will never care about our finances as much as we do. Many financial advisors are paid on a fee basis. Even when they lose your money, they still get paid. Does that sound like a good deal? Do you think that they are going to pay you back if they lose your money?
The reason that people love to give responsibility to the expert for results is that it makes life easy. We don’t have to feel bad if they lose the money. It’s so much easier to just blame the other person and feel angry at them. Who wants to say, “I lost the money though my own decisions?”
It is always our own choice to use an investment advisor, and we are always responsible for the results. It is easy to blame others for what happened, but we are the ones who have to live with the unpleasant situation. We are the ones who become dependent on social security. We are the ones who spend our whole lives working. The financial advisor simply moves on to the next customer.
So, it’s important to separate advice from responsibility for results. It’s a smart idea to get great advice from the best experts that we can find. And, regardless of the results, win or lose, we are the ones who must take responsibility for what happens.
Here are the other Top 15 Investing Mistakes:
Top Investing Mistake #15: Not Managing your Spending
Top Investing Mistake #14: Not Managing your Effort
Top Investing Mistake #13: Not Managing your Time
Top Investing Mistake #12: Not Connecting to your Highest Goal
Top Investing Mistake #11: Not Deciding to be Rich
Top Investing Mistake #10: Not Finding Your Groove
Top Investing Mistake #9: Not Doing More of What is Working
Top Investing Mistake #8: Not Getting Buy-In from Important People
Top Investing Mistake #7: Not having a Specific Goal
Top Investing Mistake #6: Going Big Too Soon
Top Investing Mistake #5: Not Managing Risk
Top Investing Mistake #4: Not Getting Enough Information
Top Investing Mistake #3: Listening to People who are Totally Unqualified
Top Investing Mistake #2: Failure to Launch
Top Investing Mistake #1: Not Having the Right Mindset
There have been some trends in the last few years that are really fascinating. One big one is the book and movie The Secret. The idea that we can create anything we want is becoming more and more popular. In addition, the concept that money and everything else we could ever want is available in infinite abundance is very appealing.
