“INFORMATION IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOUR PRESENT AND YOUR FUTURE” .: April 2019

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

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Tuesday, April 23, 2019

How to Pick the Best Stocks for Retirement

Picture of Investing in Retirement Homes Pros and Cons — •••

BY TIM PARKER

Saving for retirement doesn’t end at retirement. With people living longer now than ever before, your retirement savings has to last more than two decades. Add to that the problem of lower retirement fund balances now that pension plans are nearly extinct, saving for retirement is more complicated than in the past. Continuing to produce income long after you stop working is key to having enough funds to last through the remainder of your life.

The Basic Rule of Retiree Investing

One of the basic rules that retirees have heard for decades is to ratchet back risk as they age. Going into retirement, a retiree’s portfolio is supposed to be heavy in bonds and certain types of mutual funds because they’re less risky than stocks. But this way of thinking has changed over the past couple of decades for three reasons.

Firstly, 401(k)s have made it harder to save enough. Employees with little financial knowledge are tasked with allocating funds to their retirement although they’re on a limited budget and they’ve not been trained on how to create a portfolio. Those factors have contributed to the underfunding crisis that has gripped the nation. Second, since the financial crisis of 2008, the stock market has been in a bull market that has produced massive gains for those who have invested largely in stocks. Finally, investors have become increasingly aware of fees associated with the products they choose.

Individual stocks have no fees other than those that your financial adviser charges.

The trend toward more stock-focused portfolios isn’t going to change any time soon. How should a retiree go about choosing the best stocks?

Choose a Balanced Portfolio

Regardless of your stage in life, a balanced portfolio representing stocks with differing levels of risks is always the goal. If you think you have identified a stock that you believe will be the next Amazon or Apple, don’t shift your entire portfolio to that single stock. Maybe invest a very small percentage into the stock and leave the rest spread out among healthcare, technology, industrial and other sectors. Spreading risk throughout your portfolio is how the pros manage risk.

Embrace the Dividend

Nobody can predict the future with any kind of certainty. In fact, investors who make big bets based on what they believe the price of a stock will be in the future often lose. Something that’s much easier to predict is a dividend—the quarterly amount that some companies pay just for holding their stock. Verizon Communications pays a dividend of 4.5% annually as of February 2019.

That means that each year Verizon will pay you 4.5% of your entire investment just for holding the stock. Dividend yield is tied to stock price so expect it to change over time but dividends are relatively easy to predict. Retirees should embrace dividend-paying stocks as a core part of their portfolio.

Look at Funds

Unless you have a lot experience in the financial markets, picking individual stocks probably isn’t a good idea. Many financial advisers also shy away from individual stock picking and instead choose funds—either ETFs or stock-based mutual funds.

Exchange traded funds and mutual funds built on stocks combine large amounts of stocks into one fund. It’s like creating an entire portfolio while only purchasing one fund. Funds are a great way to create a balanced portfolio but picking funds means you have to understand fees. Because somebody has to decide which stocks belong in those funds, you will pay an administration fee. Some funds charge a lot while others don’t.

Look for passively managed funds and ETFs. These come with the smallest amount of fees and some studies suggest that they perform the best.

There’s Room for Bonds

As a retiree you should have products in your portfolio other than stocks. Bonds and bond funds should have a significant presence and for the more sophisticated investor, real estate and other alternative investments might make an appearance as well. The more complicated the investment types, the more skill and experience your financial management team should have and the more you will—and should—pay for management.

Pick the Right Financial Adviser

There are a lot of financial advisers out there specializing in different areas. Some are comfortable picking stocks while others may have pre-made portfolios based on your financial situation. If you wish to own a portfolio based on individual stocks and stock based ETFs or mutual funds, ask any potential money manager about their experience in this area. Ask them about their past performance and how they create a portfolio based on individual stocks and stock-based funds.

Following your vision, pick an adviser with proven knowledge, experience, and performance to manage your portfolio.

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Thursday, April 18, 2019

9 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Get Started Making Money in a Hurry

Murray Newlands

VIP CONTRIBUTOR

Entrepreneur, business advisor and online-marketing professional

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The digital nomad revolution is among us and the combination of this remote work trend coupled with the proliferation of technology and the internet means that news ways of making money have arisen. Worldwide, intelligent people are finding new ways to earn an income alongside their day jobs, some of which now do so in their sleep...literally.

If you're sick of keeping up with the 9-to-5 rat race and want to find new ways to earn a living, be it full-time or alongside your current job, you'll be happy to hear that the opportunities are now endless. To help you get started, I've highlighted 10 ways inspiring ways people make money.

1. Arbitrage

Arbitrage is when you hire a middleman to do your job for you. In other words, you work as an agency. For example, if you are a content writer who has been hired by a company, you would accept the work and then pay someone else to do it for you.

Although you would not generate as much money as if you were to do the work yourself, you can take on more projects, hiring freelancers to do the work while you market the services in question.

2. Writing a book.

If you have a specific area of expertise that you feel would be valuable to people, why not tell them through a book? Although you would have to invest a lot of time writing it, publicizing it to the world has been made increasingly easy, thanks to the internet and digital marketing.

Now, instead of spending money getting it printed, you can simply sell it in a digital format on websites, such as Amazon. You could also create your own website, with an optimized landing page that would organically attract potential readers.

3. Drawing and designing logos and graphics.

No matter how many design and logo-building tools appear on the market, the results are not comparable to those seen from professional designers. If you know how to use applications such as Photoshop and have a knack for all things design, then why not start offering your services from home in your spare time?

You could start doing this as a form of side income and slowly evolve by growing your customer base through websites such as Upwork, People Per Hour and Freelancer. You could also create your own business website.

4. Investing in stocks.

Investing in stocks has been a common way for smart people to earn money on the side for years. Luckily, nowadays, you don't have to figure out the stock market on your own because the internet provides you with all the information you need to know.

Aside from the fact that information is readily available at the click of just a few buttons, various educational platforms now offer trading courses whereby you can learn the basics for understanding the stock market and where to get started.

5. Blogging

Similarly to a book or ebook, a blog is a great way to share your expertise on a specific subject or industry. All you need to do is a use a blog-creating platform to get your page up and running then create awesome content. To make your blog successful, you must:

Optimize it to generate more traffic
Update content regularly
Couple your content writing efforts with well-structured social media marketing

Once you have all the above put in place, there are numerous ways you can start generating an income from your blog. You could:

Become an affiliate
Sell advertising space
Create a course or webinar that people can sign up to
Start a subscription business once you have grown a significant following

6. Offering content writing services.

If you have a way with words, you can use that skill to write for businesses who need web content, articles, blog posts, and press releases. By creating a freelancer profile on some of today's online platforms, you could generate up to $50 an hour with the right clients.

In addition, you don't have to stop at just writing. Content creation comes in all shapes and sizes, and businesses worldwide are looking for various videos, infographics, and images for their websites, blogs, and social media channels.

7. Utilizing previous assets.

If you have been working on specific types of projects and have created a valuable template that has proven to be consistently bulletproof, then you can sell this. Templates go much further than simply web design, others include, but are not limited to:

Presentation templates
Proposal templates
Sales and demo templates
Infographic templates
Resume templates
Email templates
Marketing templates

You can also make more money by offering people packages whereby your template comes with content specific to your clients' project. This could be anything from a marketing bundle to photography bundles and more.

Utilizing previous assets could also involve you:

Selling your photography
Selling notes you've taken from a book, video, film or conference
Buying and selling websites domain names

Related: How to Sell Your Extra Stuff

8. Offering personal loans.

Investing in the right people can have its benefits, which is why smart people tend to make calculated decisions with their money, one of these being peer-to-peer lending. It may seem like a risky game to start playing, but lending companies have created new ways for anyone with money to become lenders, safely. Simply put, you sign up on the website, they find a borrower that matches your lending criteria, and you lend that person money (with interest).

9. Property rentals

Smart people use all the resources they have to make a spare buck and this includes their home. If you have a spare room that is more often that not empty, spruce it up, and put it on AirBnB. You could generate enough money to pay your mortgage and even some spare cash, depending on where you live.

If you have a second home that you only visit during the holidays, rent it during the time you are not using it. By treating it like a business, you could turn this into your primary form of income.

Finally ...

The key to making extra money is not being smart, but finding smart ways to generate new forms of revenue. The creative ways outlined above may require a small initial time or monetary investment, but these can eventually be automated in most cases, creating a diversified money making machine that will ensure you don't have all your eggs in one financial basket.