48 years old, currently have no investments. My net worth is my car and the clothes on my back, and I don’t ever want to be in this situation again.
(Edit: I don’t need to buy a house or anything whatsoever related to a house, so please don’t mention the “h” word in your response, it’s triggering me for tangential reasons. Let me be clear, I will NEVER care about real estate whatsoever, mmmkay? Just trust me when I say I have a roof over my head and it’s completely paid off, no property taxes, and No, I will never sell it, so the whole h-word" aspect of life is not a concern for me, k?)
Just looking for guidance where to invest this relatively small amount of money every month so in a few years when I’m older & frailer I’ll have enough for retirement. I don’t want it to just sit in my bank account, I want it to grow.
For reference, I’ve been living on approx $1500 per month for as long as I’ve noticed, so I don’t need much per month, and the sooner I die, the less retirement fund I’ll need, but we can never predict when anyone’s death will happen, so let’s assume I’ll live to 100 because I’m ridiculously healthy & an exceptionally good driver, never been in an accident, one speeding ticket in my entire life, no social life so I never get into risky situations, so let’s just plan for the possibility I’m going to live another 50 years.
Where can you go to find one of these, and make sure they have the proper credentials?
Google is probably your best bet, honestly, but it’s not as easy as I implied. https://www.napfa.org/ is a good place to start. I tried to find one willing to do a one-off consult when I retired. Figured “fee only” would have a business model like lawyers, but most of them seem to be built around annual contracts with fees based on assets (1+%), which generally means that their target market is people with at least seven figures liquid wealth. At least in my MCOL urban market. There may some good options, or courses, for normal humans associated with a local university or community college.
Astonishingly, to me, a lot of the financial planners I contacted were fully subscribed and not accepting new clients. There are a lot of people out there ready to spend $10,000+/year for the reassurance of a quarterly meeting with a CFP who’s almost certainly not getting them $10k/year in tax savings or investment return. Definitely not improving tax savings by that much in the second year over the first year.
I mean, I’m a numbers guy, so I’m totally comfortable with exponential growth, uncertain returns, and tax models, even if I don’t know all the legal loopholes. To me, the CFP is most useful for knowing those loopholes. I know enough people who are intimidated by calculating the tip at a restaurant to understand the value a financial planner subscription brings, but the fees for apparent effort absolutely blow my mind. Even famously low-fee Vanguard offers a personal advisor service, for 0.3% of assets, which is basically a human to plug your numbers into their robo-advisor.
The most interesting part for me would be how much those subscription advisors may be held liable if (when?) they screw up and make you a huge loss in addition to already big total you’ve spent on them over the years of advising.