Getting Ahead for the Little Guy
Okay, I don’t really want to be down on mutual funds. I’ve had money in mutual funds for years. Often because I had no choice, due to my 401k program. For someone who knew next to nothing about … well, anything… this was a great idea. I dumped my money into a combination of four [...]
Dollar-cost averaging is a fairly well-known marketing ploy investment strategy whereby the investor invests a fixed amount every month to maintain the fund manager’s income limit his downside risk even in a troublesome market, and make sure the investor has some money in play when those occasional big rallies happen.
But really, the best thing about [...]
I found an advertisement on the web offering a systems for options trading that promised no risk. That’s right, you couldn’t lose any money using this system.
I already know how to do that, so I didn’t spring the $300 for the plan. And I’m happy to share my no-risk options trading system with you, absolutely [...]
We had a really cool, easy, painless way of increasing our savings every month. We kept a “buffer” in our checking account. The buffer was large enough to handle emergencies. Any time we finished a month extra money above the the buffer level, we skimmed it out and put it into our mutual funds.
It only [...]
Rebates are a great marketing trick for products. It allows them to temporarily drop the apparent price of a product in the eyes of the consumer, and allows them to “float” the difference between the income and the sans-rebate price until they redeem the rebate. And – perhaps most importantly – most consumers don’t ever [...]
Donald Trump, when he was 9 billion in debt, reportedly saw a beggar on the street at one point and thought to himself, “That beggar is 9 billion dollars richer than me.” And somehow, he pulled himself out of the (posh) gutter he found himself in and regained his wealth in the matter of a [...]
Speaking of gambling versus investing, here’s a little tidbit that I’m sure someone MUST have told me before I started actively investing, but I apparently have a terrible memory:
Leave yourself room to maneuver! Keep some money on the sidelines or in a form you can easily liquidate to deal with emergencies. Or unexpected opportunities.
When working [...]
For years, I had the vision in my mind that professional investors were like high-roller gamblers, wheeling and dealing, playing fast and loose, trading insider tips as much as real estate properties or stocks.
While I can’t claim to have exhaustively profiled successful investors, after having met some professionals in the field, and comparing notes and [...]
As a tightwad fiscally conservative individual, I’ve managed to avoid getting into much “consumer debt.” House, car, and education have been it, for the most part – though for a while there, during and shortly after college, the ol’ credit card racked up an impressive (by starving college students’ perspective) balance.
But I’m used to thinking [...]
At my wife’s request, I ended up watching Becoming Jane last weekend. And I’m man enough to admit that I enjoyed it.
A central focus of the movie was… money. Or more specifically, the lack of ways to attain it. For the gentry, it was all about marrying into it, inheriting it, or some other means [...]