#201: Looking after your Investments

Podcast: Looking after your Investments In this video: 00:29 – Managing your investments and retirement 01:02 - Retirement fund closes with zero gains 02:27 – 20 years of payments wasted 03:23 – Understand how to trade for yourself and look after your own future 04:30 – Made more trading FX this year than the retirement fund has made in 20 years 05:14 – Taking control of your finances 05:55 – Topics for future podcasts and videos 06:05 – US Elections approaching – be careful with your trade setups. Should you rely on someone else to help with your long term investments in your retirement, or should you take care of that for yourself? Let's talk about that and more right now. Hi Forex traders, Andrew Mitchem here, the owner of The Forex Trading Coach. Today, this is video and podcast number 201. Managing your investments and retirement I want to talk about something that affects all of us, when you think about your investments, when you think about longer term investments, when you think about retirement, how do you manage that? Is it something that you just handover everything to someone else and say, "You're the experts, and I've got no idea what you're doing with my money or my investments, but go and do it for me." Are you the sort of person who wants to take control of things for yourself and really understand what's happening, because after all, it's your money, and your investments. Which one are you? Retirement fund closes with zero gains The reason I want to talk about that is because of an experience I've had just today. Now, I flew to Tauranga, which is a beautiful part of New Zealand, today to see a client, who's just joined me. He's actually doing really, really well with his trading, just starting off small, but going very well. Through our conversation this morning, he said to me, "Andrew, I've got a bit of a problem." I said, "Okay, so feel free to share it if you wish to." He said, "I've been investing," and I'm not going to tell you the companies name, but it's a very well known retirement investment fund here in New Zealand. It's a global company for they have an office here, and he's been with them for 20 years, he's been paying money as a retirement fund into this company. I've just written and told him, now, I don't know the legalities with this, and it kind of doesn't quite add up, but this is what he's told me today. He said they've written to say, "You can take your money out now, but the money that you take out is only the money that you've put in over the last 20 years. No gains or anything like that." To do that, to have the privilege of taking his money out, they're going to charge him fee to do that, like an administration fee anyway, and that's quite a hefty fee. You think about that, money that he's paid in. 20 years of payments wasted After tax money that is put into this retirement fund for 20 years that he's been working, he's going to get exactly the same amount of money out today than what he's put in over those 20 years. No increase in account, no gains, nothing like that. Of course, with inflation and everything else, we're going to have what you put in, $1000, 20 years ago is not going to buy you very much today in comparison. Effectively, for 20 years he's put his money in, he's paid fees, he's done everything else, hoping that it's going to be his sort of nest egg for retirement, It's just not going to happen, it's completely out of his control. By everything they said to me today, he has little choice but to just take this money out. I suppose, like you were saying, the good thing is that at least he can get his money out, but it's not like he's got any gains or anything like that.