The Online Investing AI Blog

Since we are not taught anything about financial success in school, it’s a natural inclination to try to find someone else to help us achieve it. Trying to take advice from the talking heads on TV or the millions of Internet blogs is also a challenge. There’s so much information, that it’s difficult to know where to look.

The answer that many people come up with is to trust a financial advisor. They think that he advisor will help guide them with their investments, and they would not be able to achieve financial success otherwise. After speaking with the financial advisor for a few hours and making their decisions, they go back to work and spend as little time and energy thinking about investing as possible. Dreams of financial success are thrown on the back burner. This system is known as the Ron Popeil approach to financial success.

Set it and forget it!
-Ron Popeil, on the Showtime Rotisserie infomercial

One of the major reasons that this approach to investing does not work Is that nobody cares about your finances way to you do. No financial advisor is going to take responsibility if they lose your money. And this has been a case for millions of people who have mismanaged their own finances. If they lose their house, they will have to find a new place to live. Since we have to live with our financial situation, we are the only ones that can take responsibility for it.

Imagine going into a car dealership in saying “I wonder if I should buy a car.” Think about what would happen. A fast talking salesman would find out what kind of car you like, take your test drive, and try to keep you in the dealership until you bought the car. Taking car advice from a car salesman seems a bit silly. Yet most people do exactly that when it comes to financial advice.

Most financial advisors are not really interested in your financial success anyway. They are doing their jobs so that they can get paid. Their job is selling investments like mutual funds. Most financial advisors, are not advisors at all, but are actually just salespeople.

Another reason that we cannot outsource financial success is that everybody needs to find a strategy that works for them. For some people, like Warren Buffett, buy-and-hold stock investing works great. For someone else, swing trading might be the answer. For someone who loves real estate, investing in rental houses could be the perfect answer. And for the entrepreneur, building a business could be the best way to achieve financial freedom.

No one can tell you what’s right for you. You have to decide for yourself. It may sound like a lot of work to figure out how we can achieve our own financial success. But it’s also a lot of work to spend our lives in a prison cubicle, dreading each day more than the previous.

This is the fifth post in a series entitled Secrets the Financial Industry doesn’t Want you to Know.

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Related posts:

1. Skills for Financial Success
2. Why Most Financial Advice Is Useless
3. Can Automated Trading Replace Financial Advisors?
4. Is Buy and Hold Terrible Financial Advice?
5. What’s the Best Financial Advice You’ve Been Given?

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