Managing your money and investing can be agonising! But your pain can be eased with BiG’s information, resources and showing you many experts and gurus around – all there online, ready to help (and some to avoid).

Often you’ll also need ancillary professional services, such as for – getting finance, accounting services, conveyancing, buying and selling property or shares, property managing, trades and more.

Trust

Experts you use should have the right knowledge, experience and your interests at heart.

But as we’ve seen, just Google the ‘best investment advice; financial planners …’ and you’re swamped with results. Often from those best at marketing and search engine optimisation, and who Google chooses to send you based on your search history. (Just experiment – search the same keywords on a different computer with someone else – your results will differ.)

What’s in it for them? Have a healthy dose of scepticism as you choose. Whatever you’re thinking of buying – a subscription, programme, blueprint, or advice – marketers and advertisers understand how money and finances push people’s emotional buttons – so they do!

Alan Kohler, one of the best financial analysts and commentators started the Eureka Report revolution in 2005 because:

The financial advisory business evolved out of … selling life insurance;
life agents became financial planners, and switched from selling insurance policies to selling superannuation and investment products
… It meant that there was almost no such thing as independent advice that wasn’t meant to sell you something.”

Eureka Report Guide to Personal Investing (Alan Kohler/ Barbara Drury)

Beware too of one stop shops (a developer, financier, accountant, lawyer, or conveyancer) as their ability to give independent advice and service may be compromised. See MoneySmart’s warning on Investment Property Advisers.

What’s in it for you? Look behind the claims of what a service or product can do and find the real benefits you’ll get.

Why use the internet – or even this website – to help you invest? Because the internet is now the best way to find investment people and advice. As opposed to relying only on word of mouth, referrals from friends or seemingly ‘successful’ investors, the media or others.

The goal of this Challenge and BiG is to help you pick the best, based on my research and experience. I’m not a financial adviser, don’t give financial advice, nor profess to be an investing ‘guru’. I also don’t receive and money or secret benefits from anyone mentioned. Although ultimately BiG will allow advertising, it will be transparent and not beholden to Google.

Your investing dream team

Many successful business owners, investors, Sir Richard Branson, Mark Bouris and more advocate and rely on a team of great people and experts around them – you can too. Especially as the internet opens up access to the best in their specialty. We’ve shown you in the Challenge and in BiG how to find them.

To be honest, as we built our family’s property investing portfolio and purchased 11 investment properties over 10 years; built our share portfolio and SMSF – we knew and applied few of the investing basics we’ve covered in the Challenge. We chose to do most of it on our own. It did help to have a friend – accountant, real estate agent and property developer all in one. Our small team.

You can’t have everyone on your team

Naturally the number of people you can use, engage or subscribe to is limited. At the moment we subscribe to Peter Switzer, Scott Pape, Alan Kohler’s Eureka Report. We’ll probably go to a financial planner to review our SMSF just to make sure we’re on track. You’ll see others that we have, or would use, in their specialties such as Margaret Lomas and Peter Koulizos for property investing.

Do it yourself investing

You might want to just start investing, using friends in the industry – developers, real estate agents, buyer’s agents, or stock brokers you know, or a friend puts you onto. We call these ‘ancillary service providers’ and show you sites that list them, some rating sites and more in the BiG Directory.

But if you rely solely on them and don’t use a financial planner, do minimal research, or use independent advice – good luck to you.

Investing usually has elements of good and bad luck

Kerry Packer gloated after his $1 billion Channel 9 sale to Alan Bond, then buy back at a bargain,

You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I’ve had mine.

Margaret Lomas may be seen as lucky for buying real estate in areas that miraculously grow in price substantially within a few years. Luck, or her systematic 20 Questions research that she follows and sets out in her book “20 Must Ask Questions for Every Property Investor”.

A few years ago, we were lucky enough to own shares in an iron ore company being bought by a Russian company. The day before the sale an injunction by a Russian shareholder meant the deal collapsed – so too the share price, which plummeted from 30c to 1c!. Unlucky.

I hope the past weeks of the Challenge have given you useful information, ideas and people. A little bit of effort and you’ll be on your way to mastering some investing basics. Keep working on them and you’ll be in a lot better position than many would-be investors:

• Be aware of some psychology of investing and how you can work on your own mindset and emotions to help you invest better
• Get on top of your finances and money management, or at least have got some idea of how much you can put towards investing, or at least some goals or a bucket list of things you want to do before you die and that you’ll need money for – Your Life Planner’s here to help you
• Set some investing goals and timeframes – weekly; monthly; short, medium, long term
• Decide on whether investing in a business, shares or property suits you better and your strategy
• Learn who you can go to for financial planning and investing advice and decided whether or not you will use a licensed financial planner or not
• Check out the analysts, commentators and gurus who can help you research and pick investments
• See how to rate and choose a financial planner, financial products and services and those less regulated in the business and investing industries
• Realise that rather than have your inbox overflow with all the subscriptions available, you’ll save precious time and energy by doing your initial searching on BiG so you can lazer focus your investing research
• Know how and where to look out for investing scams and scammers with BiG’s Guru Cops