There are definitely things I get wrong in my investment portfolio.
I hold too much company stock and cash, and I don’t have the recommended allowance of bonds for a person my age. My record on curbing taxes hasn’t been perfect. I’ve held tax-inefficient funds in a taxable account and have been slow to move money into IRAs each year.
But despite these missteps, my husband and I have managed to do just fine from a big-picture standpoint. Here’s what has worked for us.
We maintained a high savings rate
Luck played a starring role in our ability to save: My husband and I had the good fortune of emerging from college debt-free, which enabled us to buy a house and start saving for retirement early in our careers.
We’ve also both been employed for three-plus decades, meaning that we’ve been able to sock away a good share of our incomes and benefit from employer-matching contributions, tax-deferred growth, and a long runway of investment compounding. We don’t have a budget, but automating our investment contributions has helped us be disciplined about saving.
That’s not to say we haven’t made sacrifices. We spent many a weekend working on our old house when we were just starting out, and I’ve always driven my husband’s hand-me-down cars. The home renovations were fun and I’m not into cars, so it’s a stretch to call either of those things a big sacrifice.
Stocks delivered
We’ve also lucked out in terms of market performance. There have been some bad spots, but over our 35-year investing horizon thus far, stocks have returned about 11% on an annualized basis. That’s a fabulous rate of return by any measure.
Of course, stock market returns over any specific time horizon are mainly luck of the draw, but I’m giving us a few skill points here, because we haven’t pulled back from stocks during times of market duress. We’ve kept investing and even added extra to them, above and beyond our automatic contributions, when we’ve had extra cash on hand.
It has helped that we’re too busy to think much about our investments, and we understand that stocks invariably shake off their periodic swoons.
We curbed investment costs
Limiting investment costs has been another important tailwind, one that enabled us to receive our fair share of the market’s returns.
I quickly got religion on the importance of limiting costs early in my career. And as an analyst, I learned that expense ratios were much more predictive of a fund’s future prospects than its past returns. My employer’s 401(k) investment menu skews toward low-cost investments, and my husband and I gravitated to cheap funds for the rest of our portfolio.
We kept it ‘basic’
My preferences in the realm of investing products are definitely basic.
We dabbled in individual stocks in the late 1990s when everyone seemed to be opening a brokerage account. But our portfolio was always largely anchored in core stock funds.
My cynicism about the investment industry grew as I observed the pattern of firms launching products only after an asset class had enjoyed a strong runup in the market. While we have maintained a healthy allocation to non-US stocks, which has certainly held back our results relative to a US 60/40 allocation, that’s about as exotic as it gets for us.
Just as important is what we’ve avoided: alternative investment products, cryptocurrency, thematic funds, and the other investment fads that have come and gone over the years. I haven’t run the numbers, but I know ignoring the fads has redounded to the benefit of our long-term results.
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This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance.
Christine Benz is the director of personal finance and retirement planning at Morningstar.
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