If you’re looking forward to the day you get to hang up your working boots, kick back and enjoy lazy mornings and carefree weeks, you better make sure you are investing today.
Because if you aren’t, Nuveen associate director Ellie Awford told this year’s EG Future Leaders Summit, then you better get used to living on £10,000 a year.
Awford, inspired by her colleague Manreet Randhawa, one of the original cohort of EG Future Leaders, chose to share some key investment advice in her talk, educating the audience on the benefits of compounding and scaring us all into thinking we haven’t thought hard enough about the future.
“Some of you might still be thinking: ‘Can I still lose all my money?’ Just think for a second what that would take. Every company in the world have to go bust. We’re talking zombie apocalypse. And if you are worried about the zombie apocalypse, do not invest in index funds. Invest in baked beans and bottled water”
“Most of us in the room work in real estate. We work so hard, so much time and energy, making money for our investors, for our clients,” said Awford.
“Most of us don’t spend enough time thinking about our own personal finances. And this was absolutely me when I first started working. I contributed precisely £0 to my company pension. I was a graduate. I was young. I was working in London. It was expensive. I, classic Millennial, was going out for those Thursday night drinks.
“It wasn’t until, thank goodness, auto enrolment came in and the decision was taken out of my hands, that I finally started investing. But I didn’t pay attention. I didn’t think about how much to contribute or how much I might need one day.”
Awford called on the audience to pay attention and to start thinking about investing for their futures today.
Google the 4% rule, have a play with the compounding interest calculator, diversify. All free investment tips, given out by a future leader at a $156bn (£128bn) investment manager.
And while Awford may have said that the best time to start investing would have been 10 years ago, the second-best time, she added, is today.
Watch Ellie Awford’s full speech on investing:
A key element of what makes EG Future Leaders so special is the ripple effect it has. Our Future Leaders inspire action in our audience.
This year was all about the power of turning small ideas into mighty actions and unleashing the creativity we know exists in real estate.
Head to my.walls.io/EGFutureLeaders to see some of the takeaways our audience members shared.
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