Don’t miss the five best investing tips of the year from FinanceQuickFix to start your year off right!
This is my favorite time of year. Besides the eggnog and mistletoe, I love to look back and see which investing tips and articles were most popular with readers. It helps me see what investing tips and advice you most like to read and what has been most helpful to reaching your financial goals.
This year was the first full year of blogging on PeerFinance101 though I’ve been posting investing tips on other sites for nearly a decade. The stock market has gone nowhere all year, and higher interest rates may mean 2016 brings an end to the six-year bull market. Click the articles below to avoid losing money in the next stock market crash.
The Best Investing Tips of the Year
The Myth of Passive Income Real Estate Investing
After years as a real estate investor, from owning rental homes and as a developer, I loved being able to put it all down in a blog post. The post was a part of our passive income series on how to avoid the BS you see on the ‘net and create a stream of income in different investments.
There’s good money to be made in real estate investing, few other investments have made so many millionaires, but there are also a lot of false promises with get-rich-quick schemes. Most investing tips and strategies you find online won’t tell you about the headache, hassles, and ways to lose money.
This post was a long one. Startiff with a warning and how to decide if real estate investing is really for you. It then walks you through how to find and finance your real estate properties aavoiding some of the mistakes that I made when first starting out.
How to Win the Stock Market Game
This post got the most feedback from readers and is probably the best investing tip you will ever hear. As an investment analyst of nearly a decade and an investor for longer, I’ve bought into the myth of trying to beat the stock market. Nearly every financial channel and website pushes the myth that you have to pick winning stocks.
The problem is that investomarketing more mistakes than money and the only people who get rich are those collecting trading fees.
It became clear to me years ago that the only way to win the stock market game is to play by a different strategy. Instead of playing the professional’s game, trying to pick stocks and time the market constantly, you should be playing the amateur’s game. The amateur’s game is about making the least mistakes and looking for a long-term win. It’s the only way to avoid repeatedly making the same mistakes and losing money.
The post includes an excellent analogy for the strategy and how you can use it to meet your investing goals.
How I Made $10,000 on P2P Investing
I love talking about p2p investing because most investors don’t even know it exists yet. The few that have heard about it have so many misconceptions about peer lending that keep them from making excellent returns.
This post was an interview with my cousin who has been investing in p2p loans even longer than I have. He started in 2005, and made it through the tough years to book more than $10,000 in profits over the last six years.
Those first years of peer-to-peer investing before 2009, were pretty shaky. Returns were mostly negative on high default rates but defaults were high on all loans during that time. People were just walking away from their home mortgages during the housing bust. Since then, the entire p2p market has put in better credit requirements and other safety measures. Even the high-risk category of loans is composed of borrowers with prime credit ratings.
If you look at one new investment this year, if you read just one of these investing tips, take a look at peer lending. As loans, they can help diversify your portfolio from stocks but still provide a higher return than other fixed-income investments.
How to Retire Early…and Why it Won’t Matter
This one got picked up by The Globe and Mail in Canada as one of Carrick’s Best Reads and was one of my favorites as well. One of life’s biggest myths is that retirement will make you happier. People skimp and save to leave their job and retire early.
But it’s not retirement that people want but just to leave their crappy job. Retiring early isn’t the solution, it’s finding a job you love doing.
The internet is at no loss for ideas on finding another job, but few help you understand what to expect and how to get there. You can’t just quit your job and expect to be making thousands a week on your hobby-job. It may not seem like an investing tip, but figuring out how to launch your hobby job and gradually make it to an income that will pay the bills can make retirement and investing something you don’t worry about.
Investing in the Stock Market: A Smarter Way with Motif Investing
I just heard about Motif Investing
this year and immediately loved the option to build my own funds. I’ve invested in exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for years but always hated paying the annual fees and being unable to customize investments.
ETFs are like mutual funds, but the annual fees are much lower, and you can buy shares just like any other stock. Buying a share of an ETF gives you instant diversification across all the individual stocks held by the fund and reduces your risk.
Motif Investing takes the idea one step further. In ETFs, you have no control over which stocks the fund picks or how much it invests in each. With Motif, you pick the stocks that go into your fund and what percentage of each is invested. You can pick up to 30 stocks for your fund and then buy them all for just one commission. Best yet, you won’t have to pay an annual fee on the investment as with mutual funds and ETFs. Check out the article for more detail on how to use Motif Investing to lower your investing costs and diversify your portfolio.
Your turn! Which were your favorite investing tips of the year, and what would you like to see in 2022?
