It’s easy to be tempted to tweak your investments when you’re checking them EVERY DAMN DAY!
Hopefully you can see how daft this is. I know that when you’re a New Accumulator it can be interesting to see how things are moving in and out around the news stories, watch how the markets react and watch your money rise over time.
But, particularly if markets are struggling at the time you’re checking, it can be easy to watch multi-day, multi-week, or even multi-month declines and then be tempted to make changers or even worse, to bail out completely. Do yourself a favour and set yourself a timescale for checking on your investments.
I sort of hanker for the days when people got six-monthly statements at most, or annual statements. Because they didn’t think about it in the meantime, and that was actually a good thing.
Now, under current rules, definitely quarterly statements come out, and I sometimes think that’s not helpful. We even now have to write to people if their portfolio declines by 10% any rolling quarter. That makes no sense either, because it might be that their risk profile means that all most certainly will drop my 10 percent reasonably frequently.
That doesn’t make any sense. By encouraging people to be more aware and to look at their investments more frequently, they’re actually not doing them a favour, necessarily. As I’ve said, I see no earthly reason to tweak your investments more often than annually, so why check them too frequently? Why log in and see what they’re worth? All it does is it encourages you to meddle.
If you are likely to be a meddler, do yourself a favour and try to stop yourself from checking too often. Take any apps off your phone so you have to fire up your laptop to check, or at least you have to reinstall the app, which is a bit of a faff. The best advice is to sync your portfolio checking with your monthly budget session.
Personally, I check mine once a month, purely for interest. I don’t make any changes, just note down that they’re doing. I only sit down to review holdings once a YEAR. I can see no earthly need to tweak investments more often than annually, so why check them too frequently? All it does is encourage you to meddle.
Do you need more advice on managing investments, or are you ready to learn what to avoid to succeed as a new accumulator?
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