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Keep an eye on your nest egg

By Joseph Palumbo III

The other night I attended a networking function in Queens and a topic that kept coming up was how to protect nest eggs. One of our biggest fears is not having retirement monies left after working for many years.

Use a common sense approach to investments. When it comes to investing monies, keep it simple. An investment can be good even if it is technical and hard to understand. Understand where and what your monies are doing by communicating with your financial adviser and do not take on more risk than you can handle.

If it looks too good to be true, stay away from it. I have been burnt on investments that seemed to work fantastically in principle, but made the mistake of believing in returns that my common sense told me were not realistic. At the end of the day, I could only put my losses to experience.

Do not trust anyone and ignore the “experts.” Ask your financial adviser a million questions. Ask what your goal is — like, are we looking long−term and want to buy stocks at a discount or leaning toward fixed investments and⁄or bonds?

Have a licensed financial adviser, but do not put all confidence in your adviser having all the answers. That leads us to ignoring the experts. And what constitutes an expert? Many investors and companies have been stung by Ponzi schemes. So who were the experts managing those accounts? These lost monies have decimated families. If common sense had been used in these instances, these financial villains and their methods would have been exposed a lot sooner.

So How’s Business regarding protecting your nest egg? Keep calm and do not panic. Do not bail out on stocks because that would mean taking the loss. Now is the time to buy stocks at a great discount and perhaps jump−start our dwindling nest eggs when the time finally comes to cash out.

Reach Joe Palumbo at 516−248−0256 or [email protected].