Dan Malone

Whereas when you compare that to the likes of Zurich or Irish Life, your expenses could be anywhere from 0.75% all the way up to like 1.25% or 1.5%.

Now, those may seem like small percentages, like, oh, what's a 1% fee?

But the difference between 0.03% and let's say 1.25% over 40 years of consistent investing can literally be, it depends on the size of the investment, but it can be the difference of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of euros.

that's the golden question I would always say decades decades decades for sure oh god no Dan I need a quicker win than that there's no free lunches there's no quick wins you know like look there's you know I think the I think the approach that a lot of people say is like oh like can I can I put money in for you know two or three years and is it going to grow consistently and like

The thing about it is when it comes to equities and it comes to stocks, over the long term, it's an extremely proven and safe way to invest.

I believe the statistic is there's never been a single 12-year period in history where the S&P 500 has lost money.

But the point is you need to have the investment horizon for that to come true.

And in the short term, in very short windows of time, like one year or two years...

it's possible that the market can go up and down and experience volatility.

Things like the war, things like the pandemic, things that are unforeseen can have large effects on the prices of your investments over time, which is why

no one is going to tell you with certainty like, oh yeah, it's grand if you invest in an S&P 500 ETF today and you need to take out your money in a year's time.

Realistically, no one can give you that guarantee.

The reason why I say decades, and it's the same reason why pension investing is important from a young age, is that the secret to investment success is time.

You can do grand over a five, six, seven year time horizon, but compound interest, that snowball effect,

to see the real power that, you know, you really have to get into your 10, 20, 30 years.

And that's why for me, it's really important that we develop an investing culture really early on for people in their 20s or 30s, because if you can instill those consistent investment habits from a young age, that's when the results are going to be really good.

But in terms of like what you're asking about, like, why do you actually need to know this?

I mean, you know, so long as you're not going and just randomly picking an ETF, because you need to go and you need to know what the fund invests in, is it actively managed or is it tracking an index?

It is important to know what the expenses of the fund are because it's going to affect your returns over time.

And you need to make sure that you're like...