My brother has a knack for making and saving money. At just 28 years old, he’s managed to build up a sizable net worth. With his current pace, I suspect he can probably be financially independent by his mid-30s.
What makes his net worth growth really astounding is that it pretty much happened by accident. While he’s always been good at making and saving money, my brother has never been so good at actually knowing what to do with that money. For a long time, he put his money in a regular savings account. When he finally did start investing, his strategy was to walk into a random financial institution, give his money to some financial guy, and ask him to invest it for him. As you can probably guess, that money didn’t end up in the best spots. The financial guy invested his money into expensive, actively traded mutual funds which really didn’t make much sense.
Over the past few years, I’ve worked on educating my brother about the fundamentals of investing. Buy and hold. Time in the market. Keep costs low. These are all investing fundamentals that will get him to where he needs to be. He’s now put his investments in a much better place than they were a few years ago.
But every once in a while, my brother will ask me a question about some hot new stock or the latest cryptocurrency or about some other weird investment that he heard about from a friend. I think there’s a reason that these types of out-of-the-ordinary investments appeal to him. My brother actually has a lot of people around him that have hit it big investing in ways I don’t recommend. I like to think of it as “fancy investing” – basically, investing in stuff that is out of the mainstream or investing in extremely risky ways.
One friend of his turned a few hundred thousand dollars into over a million dollars by putting it all into Facebook stock many years ago. Another friend of his is sitting pretty in a million-dollar house that his mom gave him and is now living off the money he made from investing in individual stocks. He has other friends with big positions in cryptocurrencies as well.
Every time my brother brings up some new hot stock or a weird new investment vehicle, I remind him that investing doesn’t have to be fancy. There’s a temptation to keep up with the Joneses in many aspects of our lives. And when it comes to investing, there’s a temptation to keep up with the Joneses there as well.
But as I keep telling him – the great thing about investing is that you don’t have to keep up with the Joneses. You can ignore the people around you and go at your own pace instead.
When It Comes To Investing, Ignore The Joneses
It’s hard to avoid the appeal of fancy investing when you’re surrounded by so many investing success stories. Do any Google search and you’ll find hundreds of articles about people that have made it big investing in the latest meme stock or cryptocurrency. Some people have become millionaires overnight by investing in something weird.
That’s not to say that betting it all on one thing is inherently wrong. Most people who make it really big have done so by betting big on one thing. Starting a business, getting an education – these are all big bets you’re making on yourself. But these bets are a little bit different. You have more control of them compared to betting on a random stock or cryptocurrency.
I often remind people that a lot of the success stories they see come from people in a completely different financial position than they might be. For example, my brother’s friend who made over a million dollars investing in Facebook stock is living a very comfortable life now. But when you dig deeper, it turns out he didn’t have anything to worry about at all. His incredibly wealthy parents gave him the money to do whatever he wanted with. We know about his success, but if he had failed, it wouldn’t have even mattered to him.
When you see success like this, investing in passively managed index funds seems so boring. Not everyone has to earn the money that they invested though. When it’s your money, you need to make sure you invest it correctly.
Stick To The Fundamentals – It’ll Get You Where You Need To Go
My brother is already leagues ahead of most people his age. Keeping his investments boring will be enough for him to get to the promised land. He doesn’t need a 10x stock or a big return on a cryptocurrency to make it.
That’s why I’ve been pushing him to stick to the fundamentals – keep things low-cost, invest consistently, and do it for the long term. Putting all of his money into a total stock market index fund, for example, should be enough to get him to where he wants to be.
Investing in crazy things looks cool. It’s easy to see people making tons of money from some weird investment and feel like you’re missing out or are stupid for not doing it too.
But don’t let that knock you off your path. Stick to the fundamentals and let that money grow. You don’t need to keep up with the Joneses. Let them invest in whatever crazy way they want. You and I can stick to our boring old fundamentals.
Sometimes you can “run through the raindrops” for a long time, but it usually ends badly. I’ve seen market guys or day traders that craved “just another 100K” to kickstart an investment binge. Some who even spiraled into alcoholism and premature death. Other guys simply wish they “had their 500K back”. I’ve always said that what happened to the people that got burned by Bernie Madoff, could never happen to us (me & my wife), with our diversification. However, the more I learn, the more I realize how much we’re exposed to risk. (and I’m talking about individual stock picking) People always talk about their winners, and rarely their losers. Good advice for someone that really wants to “try on” an investment idea, is to simply limit the total amount invested, with just a few shares, and place a stop loss order, right away. Otherwise, just head to Vegas.
You mentioned your Bro isn’t familiar with the concept of financial independence. That would be my first step to piquing his interest in index funds. Of course get rich quick appeals to someone who is surrounded by success stories, however, he is lacking the reality of all those who have also lost big. Sounds like your brother has a chance to get to where his friends are if he could only drown out their whispers! Index funds may not be sexy but they are stable and as close to a sure thing as the market can predict. Great job trying to rein him in!! 🙂
Agreed! We don’t care how we do — we care how we do relative to others. It drives us nutty when someone we know got lucky big and we didn’t. Your brother sounds like he’s on a great path. His desire for this homerun might strike him out. -JT
For every Fancy Investing success story, there’s gotta be at least 100 failures. I feel that if you’re gonna take a flier on something, you better be prepared to lose it all.
We do a little bit of Fancy Investing in a couple of stocks, mainly lithium. But we’re investing a minuscule portion of our portfolio. What allowed us to retire was the boring index fund investing we did through IRAs, Employer Savings plans, and a regular taxable brokerage account.
If you guys did it that way, then I know that’s the way to go!
ah, what a great article, I need to send this along to a few friends! I have had several friends who will get interested when I tell them I like to invest. They instantly ask which stocks I’m invested in (Apple??? Tesla??? Snapchat???), anticipating that I have some secret that I am working off of. When I tell them I’m investing in all stocks a la index funds… their faces drop and they are clearly disappointed in my boring investing style. Fine by me! I’ll be boring for the rest of my life as my husband and I work towards FIRE!
I mean, technically, if you’re doing index investing, then you are invested in Apple, Tesla, and maybe Snapchat. An honest answer might be, yep, I invest in all of them!
Good stuff. I’ve tried my hand a both . . . even my best years in ‘fancy investing’ didn’t match my returns from boring investing . . . one of life’s great mysteries! 😉
It’s like the harder we try to invest fancy, the worse we do. I think there was a study from Fidelity that showed the highest returns on brokerage accounts they had with them were from people who had died and people who forgot they had accounts with Fidelity. An interesting thing to think about.
Good thing your brother has you to keep him in line! A great write up and one that should be shared with all people that get caught up investing with active fund managers.
I got sucked into the active fund manager trap in my early twenties. I put $289/month into a permanent life insurance policy. Over five years, I contributed, or I guess paid, over $17k into this policy. I finally decided to cash it out – only netting about $12k, which I used to start my taxable account!
Man, insurance stuff is something I need to start looking at because I’m definitely underinsured. Luckily, I’ve managed to avoid the insurance salespeople, but did have them calling me up when I was in biglaw. I just kept telling them I wasn’t interested, but mainly because I didn’t even understand what they wanted.
Every time the market bull gets long in the tooth the number of people that think they are investing gurus goes through the roof. They usually disappear with the next crash. The trick is not to fall pray to the sirens song of recency bias.
I’m pretty sure everyone made money in the last 7 years. If that facebook or amazon stock went tumbling down, I’d doubt any of us would have heard from those investing gurus – not too many people are going to go out and say, yeah, I lost half-a-million putting it all on Facebook.
Preach, Panther!! It reminds me of many martial arts techniques. It’s GREAT to know all the fancy tricks, but brilliance in the basics leads to success. What was the Bruce Lee quote? I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
Similar to investing. My index funds charge .15 – .2. A recent active investor proposed charging .35 AND 20% incentive fee “when there is a profit.”
I like the steady defense and offense of low cost. Boring is effective.
I like that Bruce Lee quote, haha. And right on, boring works. We won’t be able to brag about it, but it’ll get the job done for us.
They’re fundamentals because they’ve been proven by time to work, eh? Can you beat the evidence of time? Low cost is the way to go.
Fundamentals are so boring though. How am I supposed to brag about how I’m a stock market wizard?
Yes, I look at fancy investing as gambling in a casino. Fancy investors/gamblers may hit it big but then they may also lose it big. The worst part is that they wouldn’t quite understand why they won or lost money because it was a gamble in the first place and not really an investment. There is nothing to learn with this type of investing.
Like you, I also stick with fundamental based investing; that’s the only way I feel comfortable investing because I understand what I’m doing and have a better chance in being successful long-term than just rolling the dice.
Really not that much different than a casino. If you hit it big, awesome, but gosh it was risky to do that.