Is your destiny, your financial future controlled by you, a family member, a financial person chosen by you or a total stranger?

In other words: Who’s in control of your investments, or your retirement account, of your MONEY?

These can be scary questions especially if you think you are not qualified to manage your own retirement account, create one or invest in the stock market. The truth is, I believe almost every single person can manage their financial future. Perhaps you need a little assistance, but you can not only do it, but probably do it better than almost anyone else.

Controlling your financial future involves just a few key factors:

• Time – are you willing to spend 30 minutes a week, perhaps an hour managing and developing your financial future? Your retirement account?

Yes, this means finding 30 minutes almost every week, perhaps skipping a TV show, but the reward is equivalent to paying yourself the “big bucks”.

• Method – invest some initial time to review software that can aid you with recommendations for what stocks, ETFs or mutual funds to buy and when; plus equally important when to sell and especially critical, when you should sell out and stay out of the stock market to preserve and protect your money.

The software should be flexible enough to meet your goals, your personality -conservative – moderate – aggressive.

Preferably the software shouldn’t require months to learn or even a college degree. Even then training videos at a reasonable cost should be available along with the opportunity to talk with a human being whenever you have a question – for free.

And the program should work with stocks, ETFs and mutual funds so you have full flexibility. It should allow you to manage your portfolio daily or weekly or even just occasionally.

• Understanding – what kind of future do you want? Just saying “more money” doesn’t cut it. You need to be specific, for example:

Money for a new house 
A new car 
Secure retirement 
Vacation funds

• Recognize – there are pluses and minuses to having someone else handle your portfolio. They may have cookie cutter portfolios that you must fit into or so many clients that there is no time for true personal attention. Yes, some advisors can and do work with your specific goals and objectives, but you must check them out thoroughly.

Your company sponsored retirement account is most likely handled in the most generic manner and without your input and management will grow slowly and is apt to suffer whenever the market drops.