Don't do your own damn financial planning!

The BBQ Pit
1

Pardon me. This is my first post in BBQ.

stepping on to soapbox

What the fucking hell are you people thinking? You fucking pick stocks because some dipshit on CNBC says ‘buy.’ What kind of decision is that? Most of you have no fucking idea of what the risks and or costs of investing are, much less how to read financial statements of companies you own. This isn’t a hobby. Get professional help.

Also, get insurance. Yes, it sucks to talk about. If your ability to earn income is important to you, you better damn well have disability insurance (the state/feds don’t give you nearly enough)…if you value your family, you better damn well have life insurance enough to cover your mortgage, your kids education and your spouses retirement as if you had been alive.

Saving $50 on a stock trade because you did-it-yourself doesn’t mean much 20 years later when you have half the money.

If you don’t bake your own loaves of bread or build your own homes from scratch, don’t invest by yourself either.

stepping off soapbox

2

And for Gawd’s sake, stop wiping your own ass.

How’s the capitalist system supposed to work if you don’t pay people to do jobs like that?

Sheesh.

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Hell, why stop with stock picks? People shouldn’t take any responsibility for their own financial well-being. The government should tell you whether you should buy a house, do your budgeting for you, choose your job, choose the bank you do business at, etc.

4

I’ll chime in, mostly on sethdallob’s side, by extending his remarks with the things that he didn’t explicitly say (of course, he’s free to damn me for totally misinterpreting what he did say).

Learn, damnit. Learn to actually read a 10-K, and tell what it does and doesn’t say. Learn some basic accounting lingo, so that you know what’s being said. Learn the difference between a stock and a bond, between a put and a call option, between whole and term life insurance. Learn what a PEG is. Learn what cash flow and discount rates are.

Don’t assume that, because you watch CNBC for a half an hour whenever you’re not in too much of a hurry to get to your job at Burger Barn, you’re Warren Buffet. Don’t assume that that hot tip that you picked up on a message board will allow you to retire at 23.

The '90’s are over. Deal with it. You can’t throw darts at the WSJ and IBD and come away with a 20% annual gain. Learn to explain why that isn’t so.

And JonScribe and Bill H. also have hold of a part of the truth. No, you can’t blindly turn over your savings to anyone who grins and says, “Hi, I’m a professional financial planner, and I’m here to help you.” Part of learning is knowing enough to tell the actual knowledgeable financial planners from the ignorant twentysomethings who think that watching a half an hour of CNBC when they’re not late to the office makes them competent to advise others.

Yes, financial planning does have analogies to building a house. Learn enough to decide if and when to call someone with more knowledge, more time, and more competence in the field that you. Learn enough to distinguish those people from the grinning assholes who show up to leech off of you.

And, in the name of Heaven, when you screw up through greed or ignorance, it’s your fault, for choosing or ignoring the advice that you were given. Quit blaming Greenspan, Clinton, Bush, or your broker because you were too stupid not to realize that there is someone out there who knows more than you, that everyone you meet doesn’t have your best interests at heart, and that few people will take a bullet so that you can continue wandering on your clueless way.

5

Diversify. Dividends matter. Stocks are junior to bonds, which means they can, do, and will, when things get bad enough, go to 0.
Remember history: the Dow fell 89% from peak to trough during the Depression.
If you have less than 10k, you shouldn’t have anything that isn’t FDIC guaranteed. Less than 20k, and you shouldn’t be making a single stock trade. Savings accounts and a portion in mutual funds, at most.
30k and above, and you can maybe open a small stock account just to get your feet wet.
And above all: tech stocks are NOT the entire universe of stocks out there.
And: dividends matter.