All tagged SmartShares
A super quick blog post this week because I thought you might find it interesting. My last blog post, Share Market Shocker, shared that our investments had dropped $25,000 between August and October 2023. I said I’d give you an update in a year. Well, just to show how fast and volatile the share markets are, it's only been three weeks, but I have an update for you. The point of this post is to share how comfortable Jonny and I feel with these fluctuations.
In the first seven months of 2023, the combined balance of our investments increased monthly, helped by two factors: the share markets had risen, and we have invested a portion of every paycheque we make. But, it was not to last. As the year has rolled on, between August and October, and despite continuing to invest throughout that time, the total value of our investments dropped $25,000. Am I concerned about this recent drop? Not one bit. Give it time, and it will come right.
This week, I’m aiming for this blog post to loosely follow my last one, where I talked about Index Funds and ETFs. Today, I will share my own experience, and to simplify things, I'm sharing information on one of our investments only, our Smartshares US 500 ETF. As an alternative to property, readers are trying to find the ‘perfect’ share market investment and will suggest an investment provider or fund as ‘the ONE’. My thoughts are that there is no perfect investment, housing or otherwise. It simply doesn’t exist, but I have concluded after investing myself for many years that there are several investments that are perfectly ‘good enough’.
Every Tuesday morning, a group of Kiwis takes part in Rebel Finance School. When I meet people and talk about money, a common regret is that no financial education was taught in school or at home. I think this course is your best shot at bringing yourself up to speed. The only sticking point is that while most of what they teach is internationally applicable, some elements are specific to their home country, England. As soon as we reached the investing component, the companies and products they discussed were incompatible with Aotearoa. Today, I want to explain the New Zealand equivalent of the two Vanguard Index Fund options they suggest as concisely as I can.
In early May, Jonny and I made a call; we decided to sell off a portion of our investments to supplement our lifestyle. There is no drama, and we are not doing this due to inflation or the current cost of living; the simple fact is that our journey with money continues. For those who have followed along from the beginning, you’ve seen us slowly growing our net worth in readiness for it supporting us in early retirement. We are not there yet, we still need to work for an income, but we are well underway with our early retirement plans. What has changed is that there are things we want to do now that we need money for now.
This week I wanted to write about how I teach my daughter about money. And I want to give the grown-ups a wake-up call because you have the biggest influence on younger people, but you might need to take your role more seriously. If some of us had to do an NCEA course in personal finances, we would get a ‘not achieved’ grade. This means it’s hardly surprising that we don’t have the knowledge about money to hand down to those younger people in our lives, meaning that some of them go on to make a right hash of their pūtea.
November is the only month that I ever buy a Lotto ticket. The reason is that when my Dad was alive, he always liked receiving a Lotto ticket on his birthday. Almost five years have passed since he died, and I’ve continued to buy a single ticket for his birthday, eagerly checking it to see if Dad had better Lotto luck in death than he did in life. Yeah, Nah. He didn’t! Imagine if, instead of buying a Lucky Dip, I began to buy a share investment instead of Lotto when my Dad died almost five years ago; how much would I have today?
Today I’m sharing a practical example of why it might be worth investing weekly instead of monthly and moving from Smartshares to InvestNow to enable that. I’ve met many lovely people via my blog, few more lovely than Dale and Dean. We have been emailing back and forth for three years, and they recently let me know of a significant change they have made to how they invest. With their permission, they have let me share it.
Do you like my dramatic title? Does it make you nervous? Don’t be. This week I was given the ultimate compliment. Someone said, “I like hearing what you have to say, Ruth. You have common sense”. It seems to me that every investment provider is telling me not to panic at the moment. Common sense tells me there is no need to; volatile times come and go, but hearing it so often repeated gives my common-sense approach a run for its money and makes me wonder if I should be concerned?
