WTOP Interview: Investment Soup – A Recipe For Financial Success
Interview Transcript:
Shawn Anderson: Let’s talk about making some money. Investing can seem very complicated, but like making a good soup, it all comes down to finding a terrific recipe and using the proper ingredients.
Hillary Howard: My grandmother would’ve been awesome. Here to share her recipe for investment soup Nina Mitchell; senior wealth advisor and partner at ‘Her Wealth from Bridgewater Wealth in Bethesda. Nina it’s great to have you with us.
Nina Mitchell: Thank you very much, great to be here.
Hillary Howard: Tell us how to find the best recipe for our own investments soup?
Nina Mitchell: Some of us and especially women find that investing is very complicated, so these same women are great chefs and love to follow recipes. We wanted to relate building a soup or building a successful investment plan with making a soup and just like you need to do a little bit of pre-planning for your recipe, answering a few questions such as what are your investment goals, what’s your risk tolerance and your time horizon will help determine your investment plan or your recipe.
Shawn Anderson: You’re one of our financial contributors on the wtop.com and you have included the recipe for carrot ginger soup. Tell us what carrot ginger soup when it comes to the investing soup version of what you having to say?
Nina Mitchell: This is one of my favorite soups; like our soup, our investment recipe has five key ingredients;
1. The first and the main ingredients are the vegetables which are the stocks and just like you have different vegetables in your soup you’re going to have different types of stocks. You’re going to have domestic, international, different sized companies. You’re going to invest in different industries; it could be technology, financial, healthcare and the largest part of the soup with the portfolio is going to be the stocks because that’s the growth engine.
2. The second ingredient is the broth and that’s the bonds and that provides the income and stability.
3. The third ingredient is a little bit of a dose of ginger and that’s really the multi-strategy funds or provides the lower risk and it tends to be a bit more market neutral.
4. And next you want to add a little brown sugar, that’s your real estate, your commodities like gold, your oil and gas infrastructure, but you don’t want to add too much because that might make it a little bit more risky than you want.
5. The last; you’re going to add some butter or cash. Who doesn’t love butter right, so the fatter the better. Here you go and holding that cash is going to allow you to be a bit more opportunistic with the market, so if the market does go down and you’ve got some cash available to basically buy stocks at a discount.
Hillary Howard: Alright let’s talk spices, because I love spicy soup; do you put a lot of spice in, what’s the spice you have for us?
Nina Mitchell: Spice is great, but you’ve got to be careful and I like to think of too much spice is greed and too little spice is fear. So, some investors think that they can kind of like outsmart the market and so therefore they are going to maybe over-concentrate their portfolio on one stock and that’s going to add a little bit too much spice or too much risk. And on the other hand, you can’t fear every market downturn, because investing involves risk and you need to stay committed for the long-term and just accept the fact that you’re going to have risk in your portfolio.
Shawn Anderson: How do you know when investment soup is ready?
Nina Mitchell: Well, just like having a soup that simmers for a long time, you need to let investing take its course. You need to be patient and have a long-term commitment and we say money grows on money by compounding every year. We’ve got a number of different charts in the article as well as on our ”her wealth” website. I can give you a quick example just you know; if you’d invest $10,000 a month for 40 years, it’s 480,000 and you earn 6% then that portfolio would grow to $2 million at the end of a 40 years and that’s a pretty great recipe.
Hillary Howard: Well, so it’s not just like soup, it’s like rice.
Nina Mitchell: It just boil over, just grows.
Hillary Howard: Thanks so much Nina.
Nina Mitchell: Thank you.
Hillary Howard: That’s Nina Mitchell; senior wealth advisor and partner at Her Wealth from Bridgewater Wealth in Bethesda. Check out our website WTOP.com/search Her Wealth.