Most of us here are heavily invested in farming. The only reason we have any money invested was as income tax reduction. It is sitting there in 2 institutions in about 6 different accounts. Retirement accounts are on the philosophy that when we retire our income will be lower and we will pay lower % in income taxes. In the case of my in-laws... their retirement income was absolutely huge. They took the minimum disbursement and then paid a higher percentage in income taxes. I personally see the same thing for us. After my FIL death we have found a couple of retirement accounts that I, who had been doing all the book keeping for 3 years, knew nothing about.
The only investment firm in our area does not impress us. The man lives in probably the most expensive house in the county. But, then he wants us average people to invest our money in his firm. He has ZERO farm knowledge. At one point he asked me if soybean price keeps dropping are you going to keep planting soybeans. I told him we fed more soybean/soybean meal to our hogs than we raised. So, lower soybean prices were not all bad to us. He had no idea that soybeans were fed to livestock. Gave me lots of confidence. Sometime in the next month I'll go in and put money in our IRA's. We will ;pick some mutual fund that has historical done fairly well for us. We talk to him as little as we can. They call wanting to talk yearly. We say fine you called. As land owners we do not have the same investing interests as others. I just don't want to loose my original investments.
My husband keeps wanting me to learn about Vanguard so to bypass the local institutions. Too many frauds are out there to even think of investing funds with a non name firm. Bernie Madoff did your profession ZERO good.
