Money Lessons You Don't Need To Follow

Old Lesson You Should Follow: Be an Investor, Not a Collector

With all the personal finance advice we have at our fingertips (and on our screens), some of us tend to get excited about hot new stocks and over-diversify, collecting lots of investments that duplicate one another. But that can be detrimental to your financial future, says Carl Richards, a certified financial planner, on his site BehaviorGap.com. The problem is, as he writes, "there's no cohesive investing strategy at work... This over-diversification can lead to inefficiencies, including unnecessary taxes, internal expenses, transaction costs and, maybe most importantly, the impact on your life in the form of the time you have to spend thinking about all those lines on your monthly statement." So while it feels very modern and high-tech to dive into a bunch of individual funds (and manage them from your phone), here might be one place where an old-fashioned approach—a few well-chosen funds, overseen by a financial planner—can serve you well.

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