Top Money Tips 3 April 2016: how much do you invest?

‘How much do you invest?’

My question was personal; I was not interested in how much my friend and her husband invest, I was not interested in how much her husband invests.

I was interested in how much my friend invests. Because, a man is not an investment strategy, you know.

(At this point, I thought I should apologise to my male readers. I’m not going to. Because if you are the kind of man who’d be happy to be his woman’s investment strategy, you are not likely to be reading my blog. So there!)

My fiend looked at me over her glass and shook her head; she had absolutely no investments to her name and she wasn’t even thinking about investing.

And this is so lame that if there was a book of the top hundred lame things one can do to oneself this will be a very close second. (Don’t even think of asking what the top one is – work it out.)

So, I’m asking you now:

How much do you invest?

 

You can tell me by leaving a comment; you can tell me by sending me a private message; or you can choose not to tell me at all.

What I hope for is that being asked this question will make you think about this one more seriously and spring into action.

Did I hear you say that you:

• Don’t have enough money to invest;
• Don’t know enough to invest successfully; and
• Don’t want to lose all your money?

I hear you and I’d still say:

• You don’t need a lot of money to start investing; most investment platform today don’t have a strict minimum (check out the best investment platforms).
• Ignorance is an affliction, not an excuse. So, if you don’t know enough to invest successfully you can either educate yourself (there is a lot of information on this out there) or you can bypass the whole ‘I’ll be cleverer than thou’ thing and invest in index funds (if you don’t know what index funds are just Google it).
• I don’t like losing my money either. But what I’ve come to realise is that it’s easier to cope with the ‘loss aversion’ problem if I don’t put all my money in the same place. And keep a proportion (relatively) safe and not doing much in a savings bank account.

‘Gosh, she’s become really bolshie on this investing thing.’ – you may think.

You bet I have!

I had to overcome every single obstacle to investing you may think to throw at me. But I decided to learn about it, to get to understand different investing options, to start doing it and to learn to cope with my ‘loss aversion’.

Remember that ‘scared money, makes no money’? It is true.

Now let me tell you a bit about my investments.

• Nearly two years ago, I bought a blog. It returned a solid 10% per month profit and I recouped my outlay in roughly nine months. It is still going strong (actually, stronger).
• After that, I invested in another local business and it returns 25% per year.
• Couple of days ago, John and I became co-owners (with a 50% share between us) of a local car maintenance garage. We are yet to see how this one works out but I have very high hopes for it.
• I’m most proud of my stocks and shares portfolio because this is what was causing me most trouble to understand. I started buying shares in December 2015 and have built a portfolio of 11 shares. These are mainly selected from amongst recommendations by The Motley Fool. My portfolio is a bit down at the moment but some of the shares are doing really well. Watch this space.

Have I made any mistakes?

Undoubtedly. What matters to me is that I get some things right and learn when I mess up. And I want to be in a position to leave my job if I wanted to by October 2018. That’s all.

Now, to help you start to invest, or invest more, here are the top money tips article for this week.

• Why Watching the Stock Market Can Make You Sick (Getting You Financial Ducks in a Row): Do you check you stocks and shares portfolio every three hours? If you do (I know I do) you should stop. This is a long term game and ‘the market’ is so complex that even if we worry about it, we stand no chance of controlling it. And it is hardly worth it to worry about something you can’t control.
• Stay Hungry Not Thirsty (The Reformed Broker): You should listen to this guy!
• Investing versus my mortgage: how I discovered that I’m not as brave as I thought (Monevator): yes, risk tolerance matters. And you have to look after the basics.
• 100 Year Old Investment Advice (Novel Investor): it is fun to read the quotes from a 100 year old book on investment and realise that the rules have changes very little (if at all).
• Where Does the Money Go When the Market Is Down? (Oblivious Investor): a straight forward answer to a very interesting question.

This is all for today.

Hope you had a great weekend and your week will rock!

photo credit: Night comes via photopin (license)