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What Kind(s) of Investment(s) Do You Have?

I have to be honest; I don’t do a lot of investing.  Stocks seem complicated and confusing; options and futures even moreso.  CDs don’t have a large return, but require a fairly significant outlay and lock up your funds for a long time.  That outlay is another big hurdle: most meaningful forms of investment require that you already have a lot of money to invest.

I’m not saying any of that to be discouraging or to disparage the idea of investments; I know some people understand them far better than I do and many people do very well with them.  All I’m trying to get at here is that I am really out of my wheelhouse when it comes to investments and don’t really know what I’m talking about.  (I’m dipping my toes in the water with Robinhood and Acorns, and with Coinbase and Strike for Bitcoin, but that’s about it.)  So I’m going to do my best to walk through how to organize something I’m rather ignorant of.

Whatever investments you do have – however large or small – you need to keep track of somehow. (If nothing else, this is essential  information when tax time rolls around.)

STEP 1: List all of your investments: stocks, bonds, mutual funds, CDs, retirement funds, commodities, cryptocurrencies, rental properties, etc. (You might want to include long-term savings accounts here, too, depending on how you plan to use this list.)

STEP 2: Alongside each investment, make note of the relevant details.

How much did you invest? What type of investment is it? Where is it invested? What’s the interest rate or maturation date (if applicable)? If it’s a rental property, what’s the rent?

Basically, you’re building yourself a quick-reference so you know what you have invested where, for how much, what it’s bringing in for you, and when/how you can access it.

STEP 2 (optional): If you have something like stocks or cryptocurrency, create a space to log increases and decreases.

This is definitely not essential.  Nothing says you can’t just leave your investments totally in the background and basically ignore them. But if you like to track your investments closely, this is the place for keeping that kind of log.

If you’re just stumbling across this, please click here for the other posts in the series.