This article, by Justin Baiocchi, was originally published in The Northern Daily Leader on 24 September 2016.

In just under a week’s time we’re moving house, an event I’m not looking forward to with any great enthusiasm. According to reports, based on the levels of stress generated, moving house is up there with poking your eye out with your thumb or cutting off your arm with a jigsaw. Ok maybe that’s not entirely true, but it sure feels like it. Mind you, it has been over five years since our last move, so the pain and horror associated with that event has at least been partly dulled by the passage of time. On that occasion we foolishly decided to move ourselves, after all how hard could it be? Well it was incredibly hard. Maybe not fighting-a-rear-guard-action-along-the-Kokoda-Track hard, but certainly I’m-not-sure-my-back-will-ever-be-the-same-again hard. Really, why else do removal companies exist, if it was that easy to pack up a house and move it from one spot to another? Technically we all could do it ourselves, but does that mean we should?

Moving house, as with most things in life, is best left to the people who do it for a living. Sure you don’t need a post-graduate qualification to get a job at a removals firm, but someone who has packed a truck two hundred times and has the back and muscles for it, is probably going to do it a lot better and more easily than you. The same principle applies to investing and managing your finances. There’s nothing to stop you from managing your own investments or looking after your own superannuation. Many people do, and they do it well, but they either love doing it and would happily stare at a stock price chart all day, or they have put in the hours and hours of necessary reading, research and planning to allow them to make informed decisions. If your idea of the perfect retirement involves checking share prices every hour and thinking about the correlation between changes in interest rates in the US and household spending patterns in Australia, then by all means do it yourself. For most people however, that scenario is more akin to a stint in hell than the relaxing trouble-free retirement they’ve spent 40 years working towards. That’s not to say that the professionals never get it wrong, of course they do, just like when the removalist packs your gym weights on top of your glass vase. However, the consequences are usually and hopefully less destructive when they do. So next week we’ll be paying the professionals to move while I focus on markets and the economy. Let them do their job and I’ll get on with mine.