The Best Financial Advice I Can Give, Part 5

Here's part five of our series asking five top personal finance experts to offer their single best piece of advice:

“Investors should focus on what they can control and ignore what they can’t. You can’t control the market. The fact is it’s extraordinarily difficult to pick winning stocks, find superstar fund managers or guess the stock market’s direction.  What to do? Focus instead on the stuff you can control. That means making sure you save enough, keeping a tight lid on investment costs, minimizing your portfolio’s tax bill, thinking carefully about the investment risks you take and making sure you don’t react too emotionally to the market’s ups and downs.”

Jonathan Clements, personal finance columnist with The Wall Street Journal and author of “25 Myths You’ve Got to Avoid If You Want to Manage Your Money Right.”

Great advice all the way around.  Do it and you'll prosper.

You can review the entire The Best Financial Advice I Can Give series by starting with part 1.

Update: Time to link to Outside the Beltway's Traffic Jam.