On Sunday night, after the kids were fast asleep (for the third time), I lay in bed and opened my calendar to check what I had on for the week ahead. And up popped my favourite ‘event’:
“Check your dividends, Big Boy!”
“OH YEAH!” I exclaimed, loud enough to startle my sleeping wife.
She squinted at me: “what is it?!”
“It’s dividend week!” I told her wide eyed.
“You’re … a weirdo,” she sighed, and rolled back over to sleep.
One hundred percent, though she knew that when she married me. Yet, I thought you might find it interesting to hear how I invest my money.
Let’s get into it.
These days I have roughly 95% of my net worth in a handful of low-cost exchange traded funds (ETFs).
Which ones?
An Aussie shares index fund, and a couple of international shares index funds.
That’s it.
While I’m classified as a ‘sophisticated investor’ I believe in my bones that keeping things simple is the ultimate high net worth strategy – and one which will deliver higher returns than the vast majority of professional fund managers. Even better, it means I spend as little as four hours a year managing my investments.
How?
Well, to start off, I don’t have a trading app on my phone.
Why not?
For much the same reason that I don’t have social media apps on my phone: when I’m on the throne, the only thing I want to be scrolling is toilet paper, not TikTok.
I don’t want to check my share prices every day, or even every week. It’s a trap that leads to stress, and overtrading, and ultimately, to flushing your returns down the toilet.
Here’s what I do instead:
I have all my investments on autopilot, automatically buying a set dollar amount of the above funds each month. (It used to be expensive to do this, but today you can trade for a few bucks, or in some cases for free.)
When you buy, you can google their historical payout dates and put them in your calendar, like I do. And that means I check my share prices just four times a year … like this week when my dividends come through. That way you can do something more productive with your time … even scrolling TikTok on the tot!
Tread Your Own Path!