Trick your brain into thinking saving is easy — The human brain is easily tricked — especially when it comes to money. Most of the time, our brain gets tricked into spending too little, making poor investment choices, and not saving enough. But you can flip that script and trick your brain into saving more. Here are four lessons…

If you don’t know your facts, you become an easy mark — What makes passively managed index funds an amazing tool for investors — also makes selling them a lousy business for Wall Street; their ultra-low fees. Vangaurd’s S&P 500 index ETF has an annual fee of 0.03%. If you had a $1 million portfolio, you would only pay $300 per year…

Spoiler: It’s not stock market volatility — Your asset allocation — how much you invest in risky assets like stocks vs. safer assets like bonds — is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as an investor. Everyone and their dog has advice on how you should allocate the assets in your portfolio. A recent survey…

We’ve completely lost anything that resembles work-life balance. Here’s how to start buying back more time without waiting 40 years — Building a great life is about threading the needle between time and money. The difficulty is that you’re forced to trade your time to make money. Then, once you have enough money, you begin trading it back for more time. Life is a constant balance of trading these two precious…

Practical Strategies to Secure Your Future Happiness — In my book “The Investor’s Mindset,” I have an entire chapter dedicated to “financial time travel.” The rules are simple: if you want to send money to your future self, you have two options: If you want to send money to the near future, you put some money in a…

What happens when you can suddenly access your retirement nest egg? — Auto-enrollment is a feature in workplace retirement plans where employees are automatically signed up at a default contribution rate. Most people go with whatever the default option is, so by making the default option to save for retirement — more people will save for retirement. This is a very good…

Plus 3 tips on how to get out of your own way and embrace passive investing — Do It Yourself (DIY) investors self-sabotaging their portfolios without realizing it. According to Morningstar’s annual “Mind The Gap’ report, investors are underperforming the funds they invest in by 1.7% per year over the past decade. The average fund in the study returned 11% per year Meanwhile, the average investor returned…

Then focus on what you actually can control to boost returns — In most areas of life, hard work pays off. When it comes to investing, the opposite is true. The harder you try to be a “good investor” and work hard at managing your portfolio, the worse your returns will likely be. This lesson is one of the most difficult for…

If a financial services company wants to “democratize” investing, run away — Here’s an easy way to avoid making terrible investments: If a financial services company says, they want to “Democratize” any aspect of investing… RUN THE OTHER WAY. Art is one of the more recent asset classes that has been “Democratized”. It used to be that owning a Picasso was a…