And if I’m wrong and everyone is actually doing it, how is it sustainable in the long run? I mean, we can’t all be millionaires.
And if I’m wrong and everyone is actually doing it, how is it sustainable in the long run? I mean, we can’t all be millionaires.
I was one of these. I started my IRA in my 20s with what little money I could put into it. When I left a job I’d roll my 401k back into my IRA under the same Edward Jones advisor.
After over more than 20 years I started questioning it. I asked for statements of all of my deposits. I took those dates and deposit amounts and plugged them into a basic historical simulator to see what would have happened if I put the same money into an S&P500 fund. My real investment account was over $40,000 lower than had I just put the money in myself into the S&P500. I dropped that advisor and transferred my entire balance into VTSAX and never looked back. Future deposits went into my own brokerage into boring index funds from then on.
I credit Edward Jones with making saving for retirement stupid easy for myself a dumb 22 year old at the time. However, I should have wised up sooner and it cost me at least $40,000 for my naïveté.
The stock market and investing (at least investing for the average person) is supposed to seem hard, and complex, and impossible to understand because how else are those thousands of mid-level Edward Jones employees and their ilk supposed to make a living?? Has no one thought of their incredibly easy white collar jobs??!!?