The Impact of Japanese Culture and RealCap 2016

I am back from my vacation in Japan, and I have to be honest with you – it was tough to come back. My husband George and I truly enjoyed ourselves. This picture describes how I felt – FREE! (yup, that’s me and my crazy self.) Anata ni aitakatta! In Japanese, this means “I Missed You.”

But, our unplugging gave rise to lots of creative meanderings and the ability to just be present and take in the new experience. The market remained relatively calm for me while I was gone…whew! [Side note - When I use to work at JPMorgan stock picking, many of my vacations were high jacked by a few of my stocks blowing up. I do not miss those times!]

Whenever I go to a country for the first time, I am amazed by what I learn and absorb. And of course, I would be remiss if I did not share a little bit with you as it relates to journeying with you when it comes to taking it to the next level with your money.

You ready?

Well, I’ll share one major takeaway each week over the next few weeks.

The Japanese put the community first.

Whether I saw a person covering their face with a full-blown mask so that other people won’t get sick or someone on the street stopped to help us not look terribly lost, someone constantly worried about our well-being.

Ah ha moment – What if we took a community approach to our money matters? As Americans, we tend to keep our money talks to ourselves. Families who do transfer wealth between generations do talk more than the average, but it’s still a little taboo.

But what if we (and, I mean YOU as part of the Charisse Says community) got into a habit of sharing your successes and failures for the benefit of the community?

Challenge - Please share below an investing success or failure you’ve had over the last month or two – I know someone else can benefit. We have just a few more months in this Year of Action, so let me hear it.

Vacation also allowed me to get some good reads in. My book of pleasure was Re Jane, a coming of age book told from the Korean-American perspective. Key takeaway for you – when your family has the opportunity to pull together to make a sizable investment, the results might be favorable. We can often do more collectively than individually. Notice a common theme this week?

If You’re In Town

I’ll be a panelist at this year’s RealCap Chicago 2016 conference. RealCap is a national conference dedicated to educating leaders and newcomers, developers and investors alike on the expanding industry of real estate crowdfunding. In my panel, we are set to discuss “Finding and Accessing Capital,” and I’m pretty pumped up. You can get $100 off by using my promocode: CJ100.

3 Investing Takeaways Before I See Ya in September!

We have a few weeks left before it’s “back to school” and “back to work,” and thus I’m saying goodbye for the remaining weeks of summer. Yup, I work hard to play hard and it’s break time.

I told you that I’m all about an Olympian attitude, and it’s time to finish strong.

So, I figured I’d leave you with 3 takeaways before I head out: 

1. Stock Trifecta – Last week, all three major indices reached new heights on the same day last week. And, by major, I mean the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Nasdaq Composite, and the S&P 500 Index. Forget what these mean? No worries – check out my video on the stock market.

   Why should you care? Because you should be thinking about how your portfolio has been doing and whether you should rebalance or taking profits somewhere. Remember, stocks don’t continue to go up forever. Most people, including myself, are horrible at timing the market and thus, staying disciplined on rebalancing is key. 

2. Is Facebook Really Worth an Investment? Yes, Zuckerberg has been all over the news for his desire to put an Oculus on all 1.7 BILLION Facebook users. If you missed the Bloomberg article about it, check it out here. I spent some time with my mother’s investment club over the last month and they weighed the pros and cons of investing more money into this one (Don’t worry – I got permission to write about it).

   Before you start pondering whether you want to invest in the individual stock, check out your current mutual funds or ETFs and see if you already own Facebook shares. Many people want to own the stock outright, but you might benefit from the diversification that comes with owning Facebook as part of a larger portfolio. 

3. My Roboadvisor Account Disappointed. In last week’s post on the Rio Olympics, I told you that I would let you know the results of my 1-year use of the roboadvisor Betterment. I analyzed the results and it is clear that I underperformed the S&P 500 Index over the same time period even though I held 90% stocks and 10% bonds.

   When I dug deeper, a big reason that I didn’t keep up is that my portfolio had some international stock exposure (shall I remind you of Brexit???). More alarming is that account FEEs ate up some of my returns. Because I only invested $50 per month, I had to pay $3 per month in fees. While that doesn’t seem like a lot, it’s 6% ($3 divided by $50) of my monthly investment – Yikes! I have yet to get a hold of Betterment’s customer service, but when I do, we will walk through the details.

My recommendation? If you’re going to use Betterment, auto-deposit at least $100 per month so that the annual fee is 0.35% on assets.

Well, it’s been real this summer. I hope you get your break on and enjoy time with family and friends. And, if you have a good money book that you want to recommend to me, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below. I’m going to need lots to reading material on long my trip to Japan in a few weeks.

Enjoy Labor Day, and I’ll be back in mid-Setpember!