My fiancé’s dad lost a lot of money in the stock market and she carries a lot of that fear with her decades later. She thinks stocks are universally gambling and present unneeded risk. Bonds, stocks, index’s, options, everything. If it’s variable and hypothetically could lose money, it’s risky and she would rather hold cash. I’ve tried to explain that holding cash is essentially betting on the inflation rate, and long term will go down, nothing is guaranteed. Nothing works. I’ve gotten her to at least concede control of the finances, so I place most of our money in a very conservative stock portfolio. Not only are we missing out on gains but if we hit a market crash I’ll probably catch hell for it. Also we have $200k equity in our house and $40k in our portfolio. She’s asked to place most of the $40k in cash, and the fact that it’s only 20% of our portfolio goes straight over her head Advice?
Get a new fiancé
Sell them for a loss and get a new one. Sometimes you need to cut your losses vs holding a bag
ETFs
Time to find a new underlying
Show her how other people (your mutual friends and relatives) are growing by investing in stocks, she'll be motivated to grow like them hopefully.
Buy behind her back with your money. When she sees the gains she will change her mind
New fiance is cheaper than losing your money to inflation.
Educate your fiance this is not a one off
Agree. Their stance on this will translate to other areas of an ability to reason and think critically…yikes
Show her a graph of the SP500 over history and have her play around with a compound interest calculator.
This is a good idea. Maybe expose her to some bogglehead stuff too. It's hard to look at those sweet sweet long term gains and not get a little greedy
Dump them