If you've been in the market for any length of time, you've certainly received plenty of advice. Most of it is well intended, and much of it is worth taking, like diversifying your portfolio and remaining disciplined with your stock picks. You'd be wise to consider it all, or at least adapting the top tips to make them work for you.
There's one no-brainer retirement savings move that might pay off more than any other, though, even if it's mostly philosophical in nature: Assume you're not going to be able to check on or change your investments for a period of at least 10 years.
That's obviously not a realistic limitation. The exchanges are reliably operational, and information about your investments is always at your fingertips.
There's good reason for adopting such a mindset, though. Most people still in their working years just don't have time to keep proper tabs on their retirement accounts and make the best buy or sell decisions. We've got just enough time to be dangerous to ourselves, steering our portfolios to a subpar performance.
For what it's worth, a passive, hands-off approach may bear more fruit even if you've got the time and acumen to make sense of the market. Standard & Poor's reports that over the course of the past three-, five-, and 10-year periods, most actively managed large-cap funds underperformed the S&P 500 index.
Legendary stock-picker Warren Buffett embraces this premise too, by the way. In addition to encouraging most ordinary investors to own index funds rather than individual stocks, he tells investors: "If you aren't thinking about owning a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes." In a similar vein, he suggests that you "only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years."
The hard part is accepting that less is more, and resisting the temptation to take a swing on the occasional story stock when it's going to be tough to watch it as closely as you arguably should.
