New York Times personal finance columnist Ron Lieber offers a seven-word guide to choosing how you invest your money. Lieber writes:

The author Michael Pollan offered an elegant seven-word mantra in his best-selling book "In Defence of Food" that provides clarity amid the bounty of choices on supermarket shelves: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Boiling down investing is a similar exercise: Index (mostly). Save a ton. Reallocate infrequently.

 

Lieber explains that (much like choosing a productivity tool or system), sometimes the hardest part of investing can be sticking to your choices. Most experts, he writes, agree that adjusting your investments more than every six to twelve months can be unnecessarily costly (hence, the infrequent reallocation advice). Do you hand-pick your investments or trust a mutual fund manager to do the dirty work for you? Can you sleep at night without checking your investments' up-and-down activity every day? Share your investing tips in the comments—and get four more finance basics from Lieber in the full article.

Tags: investing | money | personal finance