Your Questions: Which Investment Advisor?

One of our Members asked if I could recommend an investment advisor.

Not to beat around the bush, my first answer is “no”.

Here’s why:  It is the wrong question to ask first.  In Privatized Banking, we make the important distinction between savings and investment.  That is the risk.  I’ll be making a separate video soon on risk,  but remember that risk means you can lose some or all of your money. 

Therefore investment is something you should consider last. 

Here’s what comes first.  Have a Guide (as described in “Stop Being Poor”)  help you objectively see your total financial situation.  He (or she) will help you understand where your money is going, and where you are losing it or having it perform poorly.  Make sure your financial goals, short- and long-term, are clear. Make sure you are storing your money where it can work for you safely— as in your own bank.

Once you have figured out how to pay your bills, have a solid Privatized Bank for savings and finance setup and working, discharge all your destructive external debts, then you might consider investments.  Do so only after careful and complete study of what it is you’re thinking of investing in.  Watching CNBC is not sufficient.

Expect partial or total loss of your money.   Really imagine it happening.  Will it cause you to starve or put undue suffering on your family or disruption to your goals?  If not, then the amount is correct.

What’s a good investment? As we discussed in Stop Being Poor, I say that that’s up to you. But I can categorize them, best to worst, in three categories:

1. Yourself. If you invest in yourself, in training, education or experience, you control all the risk of getting a return on that investment.

2. A business you will personally be a part of, as the owner or managing partner. You know how hard you are going to work.  You know the product/service, the market, and the competition. You’ve done your homework.  You’ve considered all the factors it takes to succeed. You’ve set real goals and committed to an end state, for good or bad.   I don’t know what the current figure is, but it is said that the average is seven business failures to get to the one that succeeds.   

3.  Trusting someone else with your money. This is the realm of all startups, hot stock tips, and investment advisors. You have no control over whether the business will succeed or not,  its operational decisions, and whether your money will grow or be lost.  If you put in extensive study into a single stock, a single company, you may be able to predict its future with some level of confidence.  And you still could be wrong.  Can you look yourself in the mirror and say that you’ve done your homework with any single stock, let alone the hundreds of stocks in a mutual fund?

A quick web search will show you that there are plenty of “financial advisors” out there.  Their primary goal is to get your money under their control, their management.  The goal of Privatized Banking is for you to keep control of your money.  Let me make this clear: I’m not casting aspersions on everyone in the securities business. I know several wonderful people who do that, and I don’t want to offend them nor insult them.  I do believe they try to do the best they can for their clients. The problem is the product they are selling.  My unfair cartoon of it is like someone in Las Vegas escorting you to the crap table and telling where to place your bets.  Neither of you can control the result, yet they get paid either way.  In the current Federal Reserve environment, no market uptrend will last more than a few years.  People too soon forget about the Dot.com crash and the disaster of 2008.  Most economists predict yet another very soon.

Beyond that, if you were the studious investor as I described above, then you would be trading specific stocks using a discount online broker whose sole purpose is to process your order at the lowest fee possible.  There are certainly places that will do that for you. 

I do not endorse any investment firm because none of them will or could, by law, give you a written guarantee that you are not going to lose some or all of your money.

That brings us back to Privatized Banking. We deal in guaranteed contracts. We deal with financial powerhouses who have decades of a track record of making the most sensible and educated investments that have stood the test of time, that have earned trust.

To find a Guide, go to MyFreedomBank.com/resources or send a contact question.