A coronavirus recession may be coming: Here's what to do with your money1. Define clear, measurable and achievable investment goals. For example, your goal might be to retire in 20 years at your current standard of living for the rest of your life. Without clear goals, people often approach the path to getting there piecemeal and end up with a motley collection of investments that don’t serve their actual needs. As baseball legend Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
2. Assess how much risk you can take on. This will depend on your investment horizon, job security and attitude toward risk. A good rule of thumb is if you’re nearing retirement, you should have a smaller share of risky assets in your portfolio. If you just entered the job market as a 20-something, you can take on more risk because you have time to recover from market downturns.
3. Diversify your portfolio. In general, riskier assets like stocks compensate for that risk by offering higher expected returns. At the same time, safer assets such as bonds tend to go up when things are bad, but offer much lower gains. If you invest a big part of your savings in a single stock, however, you are not being compensated for the risk that the company will go bust. To eliminate these uncompensated risks, diversify your portfolio to include a wide range of asset classes, such as foreign stocks and bonds, and you’ll be in a better position to endure a downturn.
4. Don’t try to pick individual stocks, identify the best-performing actively managed funds or time the market. Instead, stick to a diversified portfolio of passively managed stock and bond funds. Funds that have done well in the recent past may not continue to do so in the future.
5. Look for low fees. Future returns are uncertain, but investment costs will certainly take a bite out of your portfolio. To keep costs down, invest in index funds whenever possible. These funds track broad market indices like the Standard & Poor’s 500 and tend to have very low fees yet produce higher returns than the majority of actively managed funds.
6. Continue to make regular contributions to your investments, even during a recession. Try to set aside as much as you can afford. Many employers even match all or some of your personal retirement contributions. Unfortunately, most Americans are not saving enough for retirement. One in four Americans enrolled in employer-sponsored defined contribution plans does not save enough to get the employer’s full match. That’s like letting your employer keep part of your salary.
7. There’s one exception to my advice about standing pat. Let’s suppose your long-term plan calls for a portfolio with 50% in U.S. stocks, 25% in international stocks and 25% in bonds. After U.S. stocks have a good run, their weight in the portfolio may increase a lot. This changes the risk of your portfolio. So about once a year, rebalance your portfolio to match your long-term allocation targets. Doing so can make a big difference in performance.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-recession-may-coming-heres-164357499.html
