DIY or seek help

There are three ways to invest and the way you choose depends on your knowledge level and skill. 

1. Use a Financial Advisor/Stock Broker
2. Sign up for a web service that offers robo-advisors
3. Do it all yourself

Investing with a Financial Advisor or Stock Broker

If you are a beginner or of basic knowledge then it is reasonable to use an advisor or broker. This will allow time to learn about investing. Financial Advisors will be able to teach you about planning and they will be able to give you lots of ideas based on your income, your investment budgeting and your timeline. So it is wise to use a financial planner early on to get advice and information about investing. 

Before signing up with just any Financial Adviser learn a little bit about the field. After learning a bit, you will realize that you should be able to ask a few questions about the adviser's company. Some of the questions will be obvious because of the company they work for and other questions will shed light on how much a client will pay for their services. Some of the questions will be:

It is not a secret that using the service of financial advisors will cost you more because you have to pay them for their services. Once you've learned about investing you will have to decide if you wish to continue using a professional or you want to do it yourself and save the service charges. Remember that a broker or advisor might know how to trade stocks and other investments but they can't forecast the future any better than ordinary people. 

 

Using a Robo-Advisor - the new less hassle investment method

There are many types of investment management systems. The original versions are all based on some form of a human being. Lately, though, the investment world is becoming more dependent on computer programs. This has led to online investment managers. The managers may still be human but they interact from anywhere and use computers to do a lot of the work. These investment companies are called Robo-investors. There are many in the US and some in Britain as well as some in Australia and Canada. Most of these Robo-investors set up accounts according to preset information previously provided by the client.

There are at least two good things about these companies. One is that using computer programs means significantly lower administration costs and two, there is no emotion and thinking involved in picking investments. The computer program picks the investments that best suit the planned ideas. It appears that the programs can do a decent job of selecting investments and therefore lessening risk so it is worth a check to see if they will do the job for you.

Before using any of these companies it is best to check out reviews as they are very new and overall are still unknown.

Investing on your own - DIY

Once you've successfully invested over a period of time and consider yourself experienced enough to tackle investing your portfolio independently, it might be time to let go of financial advisors or Robo-advisors. The big advantage here is that you save service fees and thereby increase your wealth. Not quite there yet? learn about investing here!

Using an online brokerage firm takes a bit of testing to get used to but their prices are excellent and most have lots of information to use. Just remember that any information is just that, it is in no way a guarantee that the item purchased will do what it suggests. It is common that the advice about a stock, while correct, turns out to be poor advice in the long run. The market place will price a stock at the price it sees fit and this depends on a large array of factors.