Paul's Insights: Invest your own way

Invest the way that suits you because if there’s one thing experience has taught me, when something becomes too hard or too time consuming, we’re more likely to give it away.

Your attitude to money can shape the way you choose to invest. Some people have a keen interest in building a vast pot of money for its own sake. For others, money is all about what it provides – the ability to make choices about how you live your life. We all need to eat and pay bills, but money lets us enjoy the fun stuff like family holidays and personal hobbies be they golf, surfing, or, in my case, sailing.

Another place we are all different is whether money is a passion or just a vague interest. You may for instance, be fascinated by the process of selecting shares.  But that is too time consuming for others, myself included.

If you love to spend a heap of time researching the sharemarket, that’s great. Personally, I’m happy to directly hold shares in some of our most successful companies. But I don’t have the time to spend picking small company stocks, which may become the big companies of the future. Same deal with international shares, which I couldn’t hold directly without a lot of time and effort.

This is where InvestSMART makes such good sense. I want exposure to all these shares – and be able to reap the benefits without having to give up time on the water. InvestSMART’s free investment insights let me stay in touch with what’s happening in the market, while the portfolio manager helps me stay up to date with my portfolio. And thanks to technology, I don’t have to sift through reams of information that’s not directly related to my interests. The system knows what I have, and cuts out any clutter that doesn’t relate to me.

Costs are always something to watch for with investing, and this applies even if you take a DIY approach. The cost shouldn’t just be measured in terms of direct expenses like brokerage. You also need to work out the time you spend managing your investments (tax time can be especially challenging when either you or your accountant sort out your tax position).

The bottom line is, if, like me, you want to do some direct investing yourself and still use professional fund managers, no problem. If you want professional managers to do it all for you, that’s okay too. It’s all about investing in the way that suits you best. And it doesn’t have to be hard.

Today officially marks the launch of InvestSMART's new look and tagline – Let’s make wealth happen. 

Last year, you told us that you wanted to be in control of your financial decisions. Our new look is symbolic of the changes we've made to our services, like our recently launched Compare your Fund tool, to help you meet that goal. For us, it's more than a new look. It's also a vision, a mission and an action plan we can start together, today.