Jay Vivian, former managing director of the IBM Retirement Funds, on the biggest investor mistakes he sees. More common investor mistakes.

transcript

A lot of people ask, “What are the couple of biggest mistakes that retirement investors make?” And there’s a lot of answers to that, because there’s a lot of different mistakes that people can make. Probably the single biggest one is that people don’t save enough. You got to save more than you think you do, almost always.

People don’t start early enough. People pay too much in fees. People buy and sell stuff when they shouldn’t buy and sell because buy and selling — first of all, it’s expensive to buy and sell and, second of all, human nature often has you buy and sell at the wrong times.

So there’s a lot of different ways that you can screw up. So, save a lot. Start saving early. Use index funds to hold your costs down. And don’t buy and sell a lot.

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