The list of things to NOT do when investing is much longer than what you should be doing. Building wealth is simple: buy diversified, low cost index funds and stay the course.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of noise that influences us to do things that we should not be doing. There’s a multi-trillion dollar financial services industry ready to take advantage of us. The industry often convinces us how scary or complicated investing is and the only solution is to buy their product or service. We see this often from expensive financial advisors and life insurance salespeople.

Also, the financial media focuses on the things that we don’t need to be paying any attention to if we are trying to build long term wealth. They talk about which stocks have had the hottest performance. They have “market experts” forecast stock market crashes. The majority of the news they produce would unfortunately fall on the “DON’T” side of this post.

As always, reminding you to build wealth by following the two PFC rules: 1.) Live below your means and 2.) Invest early and often.

-Vivi & Shane