Why I'll never tell you where to invest.

Anytime we send an email or run a workshop about investing, the same questions show up within the first ten minutes:

Usually some version of:

"Okay Bob, just tell me. Where do I put my money? What do I actually buy?"

I get it. You showed up for an answer, and that feels like THE answer. The one fund, the one move, the one decision that finally gets you off the fence.

So let me be honest with you right up front: I'm never going to tell you.

Not because I'm holding out, and not because there's some secret I'm saving for paying customers.

I'm not going to tell you because it could be incredibly irresponsible.

Let me explain what I mean, because I think once you see it, you'll actually be relieved.

1.The boring legal reason (it matters more than you'd think)

The first reason I'll never tell you where to invest is the simple one:

We're not financial advisors, and legally we can't tell you what to buy.

That's not a loophole I'm hiding behind. It's a line that exists to protect YOU from people who'd happily hand a stranger a hot tip and never think about it again.

But honestly, that's the smaller reason. If the legal thing vanished tomorrow, I still wouldn't tell you where to invest.

Because the real problem isn't that I'm not allowed to. It's that anyone who WOULD answer that question, for a person they just met, without knowing a single thing about your life… is guessing.

And guessing with your money is the whole thing we're trying to help you STOP doing.

2.The answer doesn't live in the investment.

There's no such thing as a good investment in the abstract.

There's only a good investment for a specific person, in a specific season, with a specific amount of time and a specific tolerance for things going sideways.

The exact same fund can be a smart, boring, set-it-and-forget-it choice for a 30-year-old and a genuinely reckless one for someone who needs that money in 18 months.

Same investment. Opposite call. The thing that changed wasn't the investment. It was the person holding it.

So when we walk people through our 10x Investing course, one of the first real steps (long before we get anywhere near what to invest in) is a risk assessment.

It's a simple assessment that helps you and I know what types of investments are best for you. Because what might be good for you might be bad for me, and vice versa.

And since investing isn't one-size-fits-all, you need to know what is right for you.

Not a personality quiz. An honest look at your timeline, your obligations, what you're actually trying to do with this money, and how much of it you could lose without it wrecking your life.

Skip that step, and any answer I give you is just a guess dressed up to sound like advice. So when someone asks me to skip straight to the pick, they're not asking me to save them time. They're asking me to skip the one step that makes the answer safe.

The two questions people blur into one

When we talk about risk, almost everyone collapses two very different questions into one.

Pulling them apart is one of the most clarifying things you can do for your money.

Some people watch their account drop 30% and shrug. Others lose sleep at 5%. Neither one is wrong. But you have to know which one you are, because a plan your stomach can't survive isn't a plan, it's a setup.

And here's the trap: you can be perfectly willing to lose money you absolutely cannot afford to lose. That exact combination is where people get hurt.

Now here's the part that ties it together. Risk and reward are joined at the hip.

The investments with the biggest potential upside are the same ones that can drop the hardest.

If you want more safety, you almost always trade away some of the upside to get it. That's not a flaw in the system. That IS the system. Anyone selling you big returns with no real risk is selling you something (but it isn't an investment).

So the right amount of risk for you isn't the amount that sounds exciting. It's the overlap between what your stomach can handle and what you need to survive. Finding that overlap is the most important step.

The one lever nobody can argue with: time

Underneath all of this is a piece of math that doesn't care how you feel about it. Time is the single biggest asset you have when it comes to investing. More than your income. More than picking the "right" fund.

Money you invest needs time to grow, to recover from the dips, to compound on itself. The more time you give it, the more the math works in your favor, and the less any single bad year matters.

The less time you have, the more every dollar and every decision has to carry, and the smaller your margin for error gets.

Where that 10% comes from: it's roughly the long-run average annual total return of the S&P 500 from 1928 through 2024 — price appreciation plus reinvested dividends — per data compiled by NYU Stern's Aswath Damodaran. Real years are bumpy; the long-run average is what consistent contributions and time turn into. The calculator is showing you the math, not a promise about any single year.

"What if I started too late?"

This is where I have to do something I don't love doing, which is tell you the truth instead of telling you what feels good.

If you're getting a late start, or you're close to retirement and the numbers are tight, I'm not going to pretend there's a fund out there that fixes it.

Time was the lever, and when you have less of it, the math is simply less forgiving. No pick changes that, and anyone who tells you otherwise is the exact person you should walk away from.

When time is short, the temptation is to swing for the fences… to find the one aggressive bet that makes up for lost ground in a hurry.

And I want to gently grab your arm here, because that instinct is exactly backwards.

The less time you have to recover, the LESS risk you can afford to take, not more. Short time plus a big swing is how people turn a tight retirement into no retirement.

"The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty."

Haste is the danger. A short clock can tempt you into the worst decision at the exact moment you can least afford it.

So if that's you, here's what actually moves the needle.

1. 1
   Do the best you can from exactly where you are.

   Not where you wish you'd started. Where you are. The most powerful thing you can do is the most powerful thing you can do today, and beating yourself up over a decision from ten years ago doesn't add a dollar to the account.

2. 2
   Go looking for money to free up.

   This is honestly our home turf, and it's where I'd point most of your energy. For most people the bigger lever isn't a better investment, it's getting more of the money you already earn pointed where you actually want it to go, automatically, before it quietly leaks out somewhere else. You'd be surprised how much room is hiding in a normal budget once you go hunting for it.

3. 3
   Invite God into it.

   I say this carefully, because I'm not handing you a formula and I'm not promising you a windfall. But I'd be lying if I left this part out. Linda and I have watched what happens when people stop white-knuckling their finances alone and actually bring God in, take the faithful steps in front of them, and stay open to where He leads. I can't put that on a spreadsheet, and I won't pretend it's guaranteed. But I've seen it too many times to pretend it isn't real.

"What if I'm on a fixed income?"

This one is tricky. The "free up more money lever" is real but it's smaller and tighter.

But if you've genuinely cut everything there is to cut and you're down to the studs, then I don't have a magic formula for you. Nobody does. The math is the math, and the honest thing is to say so out loud.

What I can do is tell you what NOT to do, because the worst-case version of this is the one I most want to help you steer around.

If it's money you can't afford to lose, then investing it is exactly why that "willing versus able" distinction matters so much. Your willingness to take the swing doesn't change what losing it would do to your life. The market doesn't know you needed that money, and it won't give it back just because you did.

Time is your biggest asset, and when you don't have much of it left, that scarcity can whisper some genuinely bad ideas. The most disciplined, faith-filled thing you can do in that season is usually the unglamorous one: protect what you have, free up what you can, take the next faithful step, and refuse to bet the part you can't afford to lose.

So here's the better thing I can give you

This is the whole reason I won't just hand you a ticker symbol.

I'd rather approach this with the "teach a man to fish" approach rather than the "give a man a fish" approach.

I want to arm you with the essential understanding that you need to make wise and effective investing decisions for you and your family that will serve you for the rest of your life.

And if you prayerfully decide to let me teach you that, I am completely confident that you will find it all is way simpler to understand than what you have been led to believe.

Ready to get started?