The Prerequisites of Investing

It shouldn't surprise anyone that there are things you should do before you make your first investment. The SEC, NASD and all of the various other financial planning organizations all explicitly list three things that should be in place in most cases prior to making your first investment in anything.



The first of these is an operating reserve. This is a fund of ready cash outside of any investment account, that you can use for emergencies. The minimum is three months of your normal expenditures, but six months is better. People lose jobs, have accidents, have health problems, things come up - you get the idea. Unless your job is rock steady, your cash flow predictable, and you can live on less than fifty percent of your take home pay, you really want to have living expenses for six months saved up, and for some self employed situations where your cash flow is uneven (like say, financial planner or real estate), twelve months is better. Having this much cash on hand gives you a certain security, and you likely won't have to cash in your investment for some minor emergency.



The second of these is a life insurance policy. This isn't from any deep-seated desire to sell you a life insurance policy. Investment professionals have only been getting insurance licenses since about 1980, and this recommendation is far older than that. Almost everyone is going to need a life insurance policy at some point in their life, and it is cheaper and more effective to purchase while you are young. and especially before health problems are likely to develop. As I've found out, sometimes things happen to you that prevent you from obtaining life insurance (as in no company will issue you a policy, or will only do so on prohibitive terms), and if you want a family eventually, it is wise to take care of this now. Furthermore, certain life insurance policies are among the very best investments you can make, and more effective the sooner you start them. This is not to say that life insurance is for everyone. I have a client who's older, has no dependents and never will, has plenty of assets to cover final expenses, and those assets are titled so that they will pass immediately and correctly to his heirs. A life insurance policy would still be of benefit if he had certain goals, but he doesn't. So we've decided it's not for him.



The third of these is estate planning. This is actually in the requirements as a will, but there are other elements such as durable power of attorney for health care, living trusts, and so on. These do cost a certain amount of money, but it's money well spent. If something happens to you without doing this planning, every state in the US has a different law as to what happens to your assets, your minor children, your pets, etcetera. These are all cookie cutter approaches, and that cookie cutter was likely enacted a long time ago, to where the societal assumptions that the legislature made at that time are no longer valid for any large proportion of the population. The majority of your assets should not be transferred by a will, anyway - wills can be and are challenged successfully every day. Trusts are far better.



If the person you work with is any kind of financial planner, they should add two additional concerns to the list. They are disability income insurance and long term care insurance. The need for both goes away as you become more affluent. Remember, that insurance companies exist to make a profit and if you can afford the risk of losing what they insure, you shouldn't buy a policy. So if you've got a couple million somewhere, and if you never made another penny you would be comfortable, there is no need for disability insurance. The same applies to Long Term Care, albeit probably requiring more affluence. Average base per diem cost in California is $180, with another $60 or so in supplemental charges. So when you can afford $240 per day (between $85,000 and $90,000 per year) for a period of several years in addition to what ever else you may need for your family to live, you are not a good candidate for long term care insurance. On the other hand, long term care facility prices keep rising, and as medical capabilities for keeping you alive get better, you can expect to spend longer in such a facility.



(For all the money and research we throw at prolonging lives, you'd think we could spend more on making it a robust life, or allocate more of what we already spend towards that end. More and more, we are statistically tending towards living longer in an increasingly frail, helpless and joyless condition. As long as people are enjoying life, more power to them. When it becomes a miserable painful existence, as I have seen too much of, I just don't see the point. When I see what so many people put themselves or their loved ones through, I'm making certain I'll always have a "check out" option under my own control, and if I don't have control to exercise, my wife and I are agreed that neither one of us wants to hang around).



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