My Investments

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Picking and working with an investment advisor/wealth manager is a delicate process. They become like a business partner, but only you, as a client, bring capital to the account. You are, as a client, third in line. First, it’s the bank’s interests, then the banker’s, and then yours. It is very risky if there is somehow no chemistry, and if they comment on your lifestyle and are opinionated, it’s something best not to ignore. In general, the lesson for me is to not think you can just let a bank influence your decisions. The bank doesn’t know everything about your plans and won’t listen, anyway.

Now, I am starting again from another place than I did around twenty years ago, and I have, in the last few years, gone from the feeling of the glass being half empty to half full after losing a lot of money between 2014 and 2019. With time, I will look at setting up a new investment portfolio. Fortunate to still have the opportunity to invest some, and now having more experience, maybe it will soon be a good time to start all over in the stock market. With real estate, in hindsight, I was good at picking locations but not so much at investment, looking at returns, including property management, and I was a disaster at construction. 

Depending on how much I travel and if I make my writing partly about travel, I will not need to invest much in my writing/content creation business. In the Dominican Republic, I use Banco Popular and am quite happy with them regarding day-to-day banking, but they have limited services. In Miami, I use Bank of America for my US company and business. For investments in stocks and bonds, I know they will refer me to Merrill Lynch, but I don’t qualify to work with them anymore, as my portfolio will not be large enough. I used them for some years to try something different after an unpleasant experience with RBC in Cayman in 2009, and I wasn’t too happy with them either.