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 hey everyone welcome to my channel and welcome back to my subscribers this is baldguy money i am baldguy and today i am going to tell you all about an investment fund that i started investing in in 2013 and i still invest in it today in order to answer the following questions the first one is why did i buy this product why did i make this investment i'm going to tell you about all the reasons why i decided to do it number two what did i have to do to get it was it easy to get it was it hard i'm gonna

take you through the steps i had to take to actually get into this investment number three is did i make any money and if so how much in this part of the video i'm going to show you exactly how much i've put in to the investment and exactly how much it's worth today and the last point is would i do it again and if so what would i change and why now before i get into it this is the part of the video i ask you all to take a second of time make some noise out there for the youtube algorithm it

really helps get this video recommended to more viewers and for those of you who are interested and have found this video because you're curious about what it is to invest in an investment fund especially for those of you who are just starting out your investment journey drop a like for me right now thank you for all of those of you who did it now let's get into the content so an investment fund from a bank that's what i bought back in march 2013 and the date i bought it is actually

going to be important in understanding basically how i feel about that decision today but the first thing i need to answer is why i wanted to buy this product and the answer is actually quite simple back in march 2013 i was 27 years old i was going on 28 years old and i wasn't the most experienced investor and despite some online online trading platforms that were available at the time it really wasn't as easy to do as it is today with apps like etoro or saxobank that allow you to buy stocks basically at the wiggle of a

finger crypto was still a pretty novel concept at the time and believe me when i say it was a lot less obvious to make an investment in crypto at least for basic retail investors and it was much more difficult at the time or at least complicated than buying stocks so at the time i owned physical gold and silver i've said that many times on this channel i've i've been investing in physical gold and silver for a long time and i had just made my first investment at that age in real estate but i felt

investing in stocks would give me a fully rounded portfolio as well as allow me to grow my money in a form that would be more liquid than gold and silver and real estate at a later time so considering all of those factors i decided that cooperating with a bank would be the simplest and safest way to achieve the following goals number one save money on a monthly basis basically what i mean here is that i was committing myself to an investment savings plan that i would have to make i would commit

myself force myself to make on a monthly basis it was an amount of money that i knew i wouldn't miss and it was also money that i knew i couldn't easily access i'll come back to that in a moment number two is that i wanted to grow my savings and not be fully exposed to inflation so if i was going to be forced to make this savings on a monthly basis i wanted to do it in a way that i was pretty confident that it would grow at least in line more or less with inflation and the final point was is that i wanted

to invest in something that i could easily convert back to cash once my time was up and let me just say a couple words about that last point with respect to time because the product i purchased was something that i agreed to put a fixed amount of money in every month for a period of time and that period of time was 10 years which we're actually coming up on uh not long from now and getting out of it early came with penalties therefore that's why i said in the first point it wasn't really easily accessible

at least there were mechanisms in there that were preventing me from taking it out earlier and spending it on stupid things so again this is how i perceive it as a force savings mechanism and a forced savings mechanism is something that i personally think a lot of people need in their lives especially to make sure that they don't wake up 50 years from now and take a look in the bank account and realize that they don't have anything to retire on because i'm seeing that amongst the elderly in the civilized western world

more and more these days and it's something that i urge all of you watching this video right now to protect yourselves against because the future is going to be very important considering the fact that people are living longer and longer now now coming to the second question what did i have to do to get into this investment and was it hard well as i alluded to in the previous point it was actually quite simple i showed up at the bank one day and i chose the bank that i had actually just taken my real estate loan from and i

asked them to present me with multiple investment options we agreed basically on what it was i wanted to buy after establishing my tolerance to risk we agreed on an amount i could afford every month again i agree to an amount that i basically i wouldn't miss on a on a month-to-month basis and i signed the papers to commit myself to the 10-year program and for the sake of transparency what i bought was this so i put 300 per month into this investment with it broken up as such 70 went to something called the franklin us

opportunities fund and that broke down to 210 dollars i'll be talking more about that in a bit and another 30 percent went towards government bonds i'm sure a lot of you watching this right now are surprised that i decided to make this type of investment but this is where my head was at when i was 27 years old and even though i might do things differently today and we'll talk about that shortly i am happy to report that out of this investment i actually made money and here's how that breaks down

as you can see i have paid 300 for the past 107 months between a fund called franklin us opportunities fund which is a product from franklin templeton that tracks large u.s companies and i will give more detail on that in a moment but i put 70 percent of my money there and that totals up today to hundred 22 dollars and the other thirty percent as i mentioned i put into government bonds and that totals to nine thousand six hundred thirty dollars today and these were european government bonds for the

sake of transparency today the franklin us opportunities fund shares i bought are worth thirty six thousand seven hundred thirty two dollars as you can see here and that gives me a sixty three percent positive return on my investment and if you wanna know how i calculate that i will show you that at the end of this video so be sure to watch to the end if you want to understand how to calculate return on investment on the bonds i bought well they're now worth 8 545 dollars giving me a negative 11

return on investment which is absolute garbage and i will say more on that in the conclusions portion but how you can loan someone money and they give you less back is a deal only someone either very dumb or very inexperienced would make but again i'll i'll say a little bit more about that later and this brings me to actually want to share with you one point and the reason i'm making this video is because i have made some mistakes along the way in my investing let's say lifetime and i want to make sure

that i show you not only the good things that i've done but also the bad things that i've done so you can all learn from the mistakes that i've made so you don't repeat them i've already paid the price for those mistakes there's no reason that you watching at home that you should have to pay for the mistakes that i've made i'm here to share with you in a transparent way all of those those mistakes so you can avoid them now looking at the totals that gives us a grand total of forty five thousand two

hundred seventy seven dollars versus an original investment of thirty two one 100 which is a total 41 return on investment so that brings me to probably the most important part of this video where i answer the question or questions i should say would i do this again what would i change and if i would change something why would i change it and here it is so would i do it again and that's a big yes and the reason i say yes is because all of these products aren't the best investments to grow your money quickly

they are absolutely acceptable for people who like 27 year old bald guy even though i wasn't quite bald at that time are not experienced in investing and i wasn't experienced in investing then but i did want to commit to a savings program and if you're out there and you want to commit to a savings program if you're asking me i would personally do it again it's not advice it's just my opinion as someone who's gone through this process and broken down the experience to you just

now so as i said even though it's not advice if you at home have difficulty saving money and you're not confident in managing your portfolio by yourself a product like this is absolutely better than having nothing at all and that's my opinion my opinion not advice and one additional point i want you all to consider is that when i signed up for this the bank was promising something around seven percent annual return when if you run the numbers here take a look at this if you run the numbers in the awesome

compound interest calculator f app which i personally always have installed on my telephone and if you're interested in making compound interest calculations on the fly i also recommend that you install it on your telephone you can see here that i've actually ran the numbers in the app and you can see that this actually yielded a 7.4 annual return which at the time would have kept up with inflation even though that's not true today inflation is much higher than 7.4 percent but at that time that was

probably keeping up with inflation so it was actually a decent way to remain liquid but but also um keep up and and mitigate inflation okay now coming back to the list the second question of what i would change is quite simple the first thing is that i will never ever again buy a low-yield government bond i clearly didn't understand how bonds worked back when i made this investment my understanding was that it was a safe way to get a modest but guaranteed return on investment today i know that is not true

and you can lose money on bonds which is something i didn't know then and what i would likely do instead to get a similar level of security as to what i thought i was getting is i would look for a corporate bond which is a bond issued by a company that needs cash to grow its business i would only consider established companies that i would be 99 to 100 certain would pay me back and with a return of minimum 8 per year which is actually possible to find with the right financial advisor but more likely today i would probably

avoid bonds altogether because this next little trick would have likely yielded the best results for me looking back in time and i think even moving forward this trick that i'm going to share with you is probably a better way to invest so i said i would come back to the franklin us opportunities fund and here it is as you saw in my calculation i got a pretty good return on investment there despite the tail end you can see here of of the stock market being rough due to the downturns at the end of last year

and at the beginning of this year due to many factors this chart here shows its 10-year performance which has been okay and has increased by 261 percent over that period and it's no surprise really that it's done so well when i originally looked at what this fund invests in i was very impressed i could see then that it had a lot of good names in it and that is the key that is the trick let's take a look here are the top 10 holdings of that fund and you can see the top six names up here

amazon apple mastercard microsoft alphabet which is google and nvidia these are really really good names and they've done really well over the last 10 years but if you take a look at the allocation on the right side and you add that up all of those names total up to only 29 of the holdings of that fund meaning that the rest of my 71 percent that i invested in this fund were split into smaller winners and sadly i have to admit a lot of losers and now to reveal the trick that i've i've been talking about

and and this is what i would basically do differently today looking back on things i would look at a successful fund like this one uh which was doing very well at the time i bought it and i could i recognized that and and i would basically track it okay i would pick probably the best five or six names in it ones that i've just shared with you on that list so you saw apple amazon nvidia those those companies and the fact is that i would buy only those names a strategy like that would have yielded

a much larger return on investment for me over that period and it would have eliminated my exposure to the losers that i mentioned that exist within the bottom parts of that fund and now to answer the final question if i would still make the same choice going back to 2013 which i said i would even though i also said i would make some pretty significant changes why would i make those changes and i think it's an important question to answer and here it is the answer is experience i have more experience today than i did

when i was 27. i understand things in a more complex way even though i still have a lot to learn i admit that i think we all have a lot to learn and i have to say that the more mistakes i make the more i learn and as an investor this is something that you have to basically come to terms with is that you will make mistakes it is unavoidable the real value is what you take away from those mistakes and how you avoid them in the future and really the best thing to do is to watch channels like this one watch

videos about the mistakes that other people have made so you can avoid them without it having to actually cost you money and for those of you considering investing in a fund like this one that i've shown you in this video or if you've already done so good for you really good for you i personally think not advice i personally think you've made a fantastic decision you are doing better than most other people out there and when different gurus or youtubers and i i have specifically robert kiyosaki in mind

because i i watch him regularly i listen to his podcasts and he always calls people who invest in mutual funds calls them losers they're losers right don't let that kind of stuff phase you because in my opinion it's better than keeping cash in the bank so the last thing i want to share with you all before i wrap up this video is this and this is how you calculate roy roi which stands for return on investment i know some of you out there watching are just getting started in investing

and it's crucial you know how to do this so pause the video right now take a note take a screenshot roi return on investment it equals your profit divided by the actual investment that you've made the cost of your investment once you get that it's going to be a decimal point you're going to multiply it by 100 and that's going to give you the percentage in return on investment and your profit equals the current value of the investment that you own minus the amount that you've actually

put into it and these are things i absolutely want you all out there to understand so again screenshot it write it down pause the video because this is an important concept for you all to understand and that's it for this video so please tell me what you thought about it in the comments section don't forget to drop me a like if you haven't done it yet remember i am active in the comment section if you ask me a question if you have a criticism of anything i've done i will reply to you

just please keep the comments and criticisms polite but i am active there and you can expect always a response from me that said i wish you all happiness i wish you all success i wish you all health and i do hope to see you in the next one see you later