In this great time of economic uncertainty, there are many things you can do to protect your financial investments. Don’t sit back and let your portfolio get creamed. Instead, do something about it! Here are some things you can do now:

1. First, review your portfolio with your Savannah financial advisor to get a baseline of where you are at. If you don’t have a financial planner, then gather all your bank account statements, and 401k statements, and make a chart or snapshot of all your moneyfinances now? In 5 years? In 10? What financial planning do you need? Make a list of what you will need the money for, when, and how much.

3. Determine how much money you want in safe investments. Safe in this case means capital preservation. This is the money you definitely want to protect.

4. For your safe money, you could invest it into precious metals. Metal will always have value. Or a metals ETF can also work.

5. Another place for safe money is to move it into other currencies like the Austrailian dollar. This way you are diversifying your assets and getting out of the U.S. dollar. You can buy currency shares from your broker through various ETF’s. That is the easiest way to get into other currencies.

6. You can also buy U.S. treasuries. The only way these will lose more than $250K into each CD. In fact, we encourage putting less than $250K since you want to leave room for the interest to accumulate and still stay under the $250K. Also, if the CD will be maturing AFTER January 1, 2010, then do not invest more than $100K into any one CD, as the FDIC limit gets reduced from $250K back to $100K after this time.

8. Run from buying corporate bonds. It may look tempting, with the rates and all, and even a AAA bond may look safe. However, as we have seen in the last few months, one cannot always trust the bond rating. If you want to be safe, do not invest in corporate bonds.

9. For your stock investments, hedge them by buying a put option. A protective put option acts like insurance for your portfolio. It is a wonderful way to protect gains you have in either a stock or across an index. This will protect you in case the market goes down. You have to make sure that your brokerage account is setup to trade options. Purchasing a put option is a very low risk strategy which your advisor can set up for you. Just make sure that the put option you purchaseSPX Put Options. If you own a lot of tech shares, you might consider buying Nasdaq put options (QQQ).

10. Lastly, get a good planner from Savannah GA.

If you do the above steps, your financial portfolio will be much more protected than they are now. You will probably be able to sleep better too not worrying about them either.