In last week’s Facebook Live episode with Frank Vasquez, he pointed out that we are in the Golden Age of Investing. In this episode, we explore what that means and if we appreciate how good we have it. In an ideal world, we would all like to maximize investment returns while reducing volatility. Holding uncorrelated assets helps to prevent catastrophe. But what is the goal of investing? Although it’s a broad question, Brad believes the ultimate goal is to accumulate wealth. Investing itself is a very broad term, but it is essentially when the money you have saved is working to produce additional income for you. Financial independence is getting to the point when you have saved and invested enough to get to the point where working can become optional. In the last 20-30 years, investing has become fundamentally easier. Even Brad’s first investing experience 20 years ago under the old system was a negative one, where he and his lack of knowledge were taken advantage of by an unscrupulous advisor. Back then, you needed an expert to help you invest money and paid dearly for it in the form of fees. When many of us think about saving money today, it is through a savings account or certificate of deposit where the bank holds your money and pays you an agreed-upon interested rate in exchange for being able to loan out your money at a higher interest rate. Based on current interest rates, it would take a very long time to make a meaningful return on money invested in this way. A more aggressive form of investing would be owning shares of a company’s stock and the value increases as the company become more profitable. Bonds are where a company, the government, or other entity raises capital by selling debt. You buy the debt and are paid back with interest. Mutual funds are yet another investment that first came about in the 1920s, but mutual funds really rose to fame in 1975 thanks to Jack Bogle when he created the Vanguard First Investment Trust. It was game-changing for modern-day investing. With mutual funds, you own a little piece of many different companies with one investment. In the case of an S&P 500 index fund, you would own a little bit of the top 500 largest companies, although it is cap-weighted, meaning you own disproportionally more of the largest companies and less of the smaller. The index funds approximate the market and so you don’t need to pick individual stocks to invest in, which is good since we tend to do so poorly at stock picking both on the information and behavioral side. Owning a single stock is a risky position. If something goes wrong, the investment can become worthless and your money is gone. You can mitigate that risk by diversifying your investment across multiple companies. Jack Bogle changed the game in 1975 when he decided you didn’t need to pay for experts to put together and manage mutual funds comprised of hundreds or thousands of companies. Computers could use an algorithm to manage a fund designed to track a particular index. He predicted you could get a better return from owning all the winners and all the losers and keeping the fees rock-bottom low than with an expert team picking stocks. Although the entire investing industry laughed at Jack Bogle, after 25+ years of data, the results show Bogle was right. The process dominates over one of actively picking stocks, especially with a timeline of several decades. Today, in the index fund space, there has been a continual race to the bottom when it comes to lowering index fund fees and the expense ratio today has been cut by a factor of 10 or more. Something ChooseFI has discussed over and over again is how much of an impact fees can have on your investments. An extra 1% fee can lower your net worth by as much as 30-50%. It’s because index funds with expense ratios of 0.04% or lower that say this is the Golden Age of Investing. It’s no longer necessary to pay 0.75-1.5% expense ratios or 5% front-load fees. In addition, changes to the tax code have