Personal Finance and Investing

and in fact they go up two out of every three years. Trying to time the market, sell at the peak, buy at the bottom, isn't possible. Plus, there are stocks and then there are stocks. There are any number of good, solid companies, even those which pay dividends. Or you can buy a variety of different mutual funds.

Getting caught up in a speculative frenzy won't pay off. Being sensible about various things will.

I also have a financial advisor I trust. He's been managing my money for nearly 20 years now. Yes, there's a cost associated, but he's made me much more money than I could have done on my own. His full time job involves researching the investments, informing me about them, moving from one investment to another as he sees the need. And no, he's not churning. All of my money is in funds, rather than individual stocks. Because there's no speculative component, and he understands what he's doing, when the market goes down, my investments go down perhaps half of what the overall market does. They don't climb as dizzily on the up side, but that's more than fine with me.