February 7th, 2012 | 
Category: After a month long and 238 answers to my Investing Survey, I am please to show the results! It was my first survey and some of the longer answers appear to be cut off but I’ll help with the analysis. It was a quick and simple survey with 10 questions.
Question 1 – Are you a do-it-yourself investor?
The results of my reader were convincing that most invest on their own with a small fraction investing either through a financial advisor or through the banks and some wanting to switch.
Question 2 – Do you invest in bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, stocks or others? (Select all that applies)
The results of my reader were convincing here again that many invest in stocks followed by mutual funds and then ETFs. A really small section do real estate or bonds at this time.
Question 3 – Do you have an investing strategy? (Select all that applies)
Ok, I expected Dividend Investing to be the largest since that’s what I write about and therefore my readers are also dividend investors 
However, I know that one can have multiple strategies depending on accounts or portfolio objectives. The graph highlights the popularity of the different strategies amongst my readers with index, value and others being the most prominent after the dividend strategy.
Question 4 – What percentage of your gross income do you invest?
The graph speaks for itself here. There is a wide range of saving percentage across my readers and it’s great to see more than 50% are savings more than 10%. I would recommend a saving target of 10% at least so anything above that is golden. Congrats to you!
Question 5 – At what age did you start investing?
I must have found a bug in the plugin because it’s not identifying all the sections here …
- After 35 is the largest pie in the graph – I must say that I am surprised here but happy because there is no time like today to get started
- Between 31 & 35 is the smallest
- Between 26 & 30 is the second largest and it would make sense since you probably finished school and you have a steady job
- Between 20 & 25 is highlighted with the “Between 20″ and it’s quite a large chunk. That’s when I started – as soon as I got my first job.
- Before 20 is also highlighted below and now I am really impressed. Well done to you.
Question 6 – Do you have a retirement plan? (Retirement consists of not needing to work to sustain your life style)
Retirement planning is not always easy as it requires extrapolating into the future. It’s nice to see many have a handle on their retirement plan but I was surprised to see that more than 25% aren’t sure or do not have a plan. It’s good to have a plan even if it changes over time. That’s expected.
Question 7 – At what age do you plan to be able to retire at? (Retirement consists of not needing to work to sustain your life style)
The answers actually falls within my expectation. I personally selected in my 50s even though my goal is to have a financial freedom at 45. Anything before 40 will require the investor to be very dedicated to a plan. I’d love to see if in 5 or 10 years, there was adjustments to the retirement target. When you are young, it’s often hard to take into account all the costs of life
Question 8 – Do you benefit from a pension plan?
I was quite surprised to see how many have pension plans. I thought pension plans were on the decline. Will your pension plan be enough for those that have one?
Question 9 – How much of your portfolio is in individual stocks as opposed to any other investments
Quite a variety we have here. Glad to see the diversification of investments, it’s important in a portfolio.
Question 10 – What do you expect of the markets in 2012?
The crystal ball question We have some bullish readers here and I am in that camp. Later in the year we should see improvements I think but you never know … I am not in a rush for stock prices or interest rates to increase since I benefit from low interest and I like to buy stock at a good value. On the other hand, it would be good for people to see a growing economy and get pay increases. I am not going to discuss real estate …
I hope you enjoyed the survey!
Readers: Any surprises?
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Interesting results! I’m very surprised with the pension plan result. I wonder what is the age demographics. Maybe you have more older readers?
@retireby40
I was surprised too. I unfortunately cannot draw any conclusions … I did not ask for any demographic in the survey.
Investing strategy: Majority Dividend Investor, got to love that. The retire section, what I find interest is whether I’m going to work pass 60 or retire happily. Reading back during those old days where people retire at age 50 sounds like a dream now.
I was pretty surprised by the large amount of people saving in the 20-25 percentile. That is amazing! Recently, my wife and I came up with a plan to retire our non-tax-deductible debt. That would of been interesting to see as well; those who where investing all the while making debt payments. I guess we would be in that percentile as well if we were able to make investment payments instead of debt payments. It’ll take us a year a bit of sacrifice but in the end it’ll pay for itself.
Love the site, keep it up!
Rob
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