It's your money. You should keep it.
To be clear, I think that Ted Bauman and his father Robert Baumann are good businessmen and they have a grip on finances. I just believe they have a better grip on their own finances than that of the country.
It does not take a financial genius to know our country is heading for a financial crisis.
So, yeah, when they tout a "new" newsletter or fan the flames of crisis to entice someone to subscribe to their latest venture - well, I don't find that appealing.
I think you work hard for your money and you deserve to keep it.
If they can turn $5 into $50,000 for you with their newsletter, then why don't they do it for themselves and then give you what you need to know?
We should be looking out for our fellow man.
I have to be clear on my own position, though.
I am not a financial analyst. I'm just a common Joe like most people out there. I cannot afford to move to another country and invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a second passport. My plan B is more mundane.
So I just received a comment on the original post:
BlackjackOctober 6, 2019 at 2:21 PMIt seems to me that I should transfer my holdings with major brokerage to a low cost account such as TD Ameritrade or Schwab or Vanguard. I have some large built in profits plus cash. Any recommendations?
I'll sit down with anyone who asks and talk about my hard-learned lessons with finance.
I responded.
VinceOctober 7, 2019 at 8:12 AMBlackjack, Firstly, I don't intentionally give financial advice. I am glad to share my personal experiences, and not all of my financial decisions were good ones. For instance, when I retired in 2015 I invested my 401K in a popular bank. The financial advisor charmed me with his assurance that my money was important to him.
He was right. Within six months my account value dropped more than $50K and he left the bank.
So my personal thought on that? Nobody cares about your money like you do.
You know what? This is worth a post all by itself, so that's where I'll go... Look for it.
So here we are.
My basic financial tenets:
1. Eternity looms and we cannot take any of it with us, so we must be good stewards of what we have on this earth.
2. Spend less than you make.
3. Nobody cares about your money like you do.
4. Help others when you can.
Not surprisingly, these correspond with Faith, Action and Attitude.
I guess the first one is really Faith with Attitude. Darling and I are thankful every day for what we have and believe in a personal, risen Savior.
I apologize for how long this post is, so congratulations if you are still with me.
Let me follow up on my response.
I DO have our IRA monies in Vanguard because they are low-cost. Most of the funds I own are for dividend purposes. We invest very little in stocks because the little guy is a sucker in that game. Not that I don't play with stocks once in a while, but it is always money I can afford to entirely lose. And I'm cautious - oh, so cautious. No matter how I feel about a stock I'm playing with, if it drops 5% after buying it, I just take the loss and move on.
Paying large fees on any investment seems to be bad business.
That was part of my mistake in 2015 with the guy from CO. He promised me my returns would far outweigh the costs involved. My invested value started dropping after a few months and I tried calling him. After a week of not getting him via phone or email I called his main office and was told he left and I had a new account manager.
Needless to say I moved everything away from that company even though they assured me that the paper loss would recover. It might have, but they were not very concerned with my money unless it was available to become their money.
Within a year, by the way, we recovered the value, but we did it using funds with small fees and CO was no longer part of our portfolio.
I still look for someone to invest with, someone I can trust.
We found a guy two years ago who was nice and kind and just an all-around good guy. He worked for a large corporation with initials EJ. He said he could help us increase our net worth.
So we invested a small amount of our money with him and I told him this was a trial basis. I wanted to see what he could do for us, and I'd give him a year to do it.
I was concerned after reading all the investment paperwork. The fine print was clear that his company received a commission when he invested my money in certain funds.
Sure enough, many of those funds appeared in my portfolio.
After a year, this fine fellow made us about 3% on our money. That's not bad, especially considering the fees involved (in everything, even transferring money from one account to another). Still, my equal amount of money in Vanguard made over six percent during that same time period, and that was all invested in a few dividend-returning funds.
We closed the accounts. He was offended when I told him that nobody cares about our money like we do. I didn't mean to offend him. I like the guy.
So, here are some of my financial chronicles. It's a long post.
If you see anything in this that helps you, I'm glad.
Like I said, we should all be looking out for each other.
Thanks for reading.
