My wife and I have had an Edward Jones account since 1991, when she opened the account before we were married in ’93. We lived in a small town and there were only two options for starting an investment account like this, Edward Jones or AG Edwards. We’ve left it there because we thought it was the smart thing to do. We’ve invested primarily in various mutual funds, with the occasional stocks (which almost never did well) and about 7 years ago we each opened a traditional IRA on the advice of our EJ adviser.
To give you an idea of the growth: in May of 2001 we had around $44,000 (after the 2000 crash), today we have $283,000. Not counting the IRA’s since we didn’t have those back then.
We’ve not added a lot of money to the main account over the years, so it’s mostly growth, but it’s not done nearly as well as we feel it should have in 20 years with a bull market. There are also a lot more options these days, we are hoping a different company will perform better for us. We’ve been discussing moving a chunk of our funds somewhere else, but there are almost too many options now and we can’t come to an agreement on who to use.
I’m leaning more towards companies such as Vanguard, Fidelity or Charles Schwab instead of apps like Personal Capital, Betterment or Wealthfront. Since our comfort zone is to invest in mutual funds rather than individual stocks (we’ve been told mutual funds are safer). We’ve also gotten used to having someone else manage things for us. I don’t want to risk screwing it up if we do things ourselves.
We are in our early 50’s and I feel it’s a security risk to give an app all our financial info so they can track our spending, though my wife likes that idea. She wants to try more than one option rather than putting everything in one place again. I prefer to keep things simple and deal with one entity.
I am also ex-military, we bank with USAA, and they offer investment in mutual funds and ETF’s through Victory Capital, so that’s an option for us too.
We were discussing all this prior to learning about the pending crash/depression and hyper inflation warning from Michael Burry and other experts, that seems inevitable and soon. Now we are contemplating if we should pull ALL our funds out of EJ, not just most and hold onto it until after the crash and then invest with a new company. Though I’m not sure how to “hold onto it” other than the old hiding it under the mattress thing. In the mild crash of ’08 we lost half our funds in EJ and it took 4 years to get back to where we had been. We have more now and it would kill any hopes of retirement if we lost half again. They are projecting this crash will be bigger, so we fully expect to lose more than we did in ’08.
I know I sound like one of those panicky people wanting to pull on my money out of the bank, but we really can’t afford to lose half our savings again at our age.
Any recommendations on what company or app to use as well as advice to get through the coming depression as best as possible (Do we hide it under the mattress?), and how to not get taxed too badly from pulling all our money out would all be greatly appreciated.
Submitted March 08, 2021 at 03:22AM by HeSays-SheSays https://ift.tt/3boLWfm
