So Pat, where do you keep your investments? (Brokerage, not underlying securities)
1. Chase managed services. This costs $$ but has some benefits - they didn't do better than the market.
- 1 benefit is an equity secured credit line with no annual fee. as a business owner, i sometimes need to finance cash flow - rate is low, cause it is a secured line (much lower than home equity)
- 2 someone calls me and invites me to ranger and knicks games that i never attend. maybe tennis this year.
- 3 i knew the guy i started with - he was a double major. Lawyer/Finance. He did the finance thing long enough to figure out how to specialize in the legal field. i trusted him.
2. Some $$ i manage myself, inside a SEP (again, business owner version of 401k). Got a few funds, some stocks that i should sell. it lags behind the market,
but still goes up because of an income fund with auto re-invest
3. wife's 401k - she's been with SXM for 7 years now - previously vonage, prior ATT - we rolled those into the chase fund. since she has the corporate match, we push money there, rather than my SEP.
4. house. my mortgage is close to when we purchased it 25 years ago, but that is because we did some major changes (improvements?) - and refi'd a couple times to take
advantage of market conditions. there are 2.75% 5/1/15 arms out there now. double pay the principal, at this low rate, and get a capped change at year 5. good deal.
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we are kindofa neurotic savers, although not the best with investing. We have been consistent, and once accustom to ignoring the $$ and moving up the
savings as income increased, it doesn't hurt anymore.
imho, the market flux is now part of the continued news cycle, and it turns into a Good v. Bad story. like every good movie.
the 1987 crash was like a two day panic, it cost some ridiculous amount of money to
make a trade, so the money just sat there, and it bounced back in 14 months - all that time we were still putting money in from the regular monthly paycheck.
