Personal Finance and Investing

It can sure seem at times that when it comes to personal finance and investing, armchair experts are a dime a dozen. Each one with his or her own formulas and theories on how you should manage your money, and the best way to invest it for the highest rate of return. Now for a while there it was real estate.

 

Now the recent recession sent them all packing though, as home prices plunged, and so many paper millionaires who had invested everything in real estate were left penny less. So then where are all those investment advisers now with their fool proof plans on how to get rich with interest only home loans?

 

The answer to that is that they’re all probably all hunkered down in their dens writing new books on how to get rich buying stocks on margin in the upcoming stock market boom. After all as the old stock market saying goes “whatever goes down must come back up”.

 

Or perhaps they are busy advising everyone to buy gold and silver because in the same way that the real estate market did for a number of decades, prices just seem to keep going up with no end in sight. What they of course will fail to mention, is that it’s the folks selling gold at $1,500 that are really making the money.

 

Speaking of gold, are you aware that there’s not one person’s name to be found in history books that became wealthy from mining gold in the greatCaliforniagold rush? Not one. This in spite of the fact that untold millions and even billions of dollars were pulled from the ground in the two decades after gold was discovered in 1848.

 

On the other hand, the books that chronicle that era are chock full with the names of men who built huge fortunes through merchandising and land speculation. Men with names like Levi Strauss and Leland Stanford who fanned the flames of gold hysteria to drive prospectors from one town to another where they had set up stores and or bought and subdivided land.

 

So then what are the lessons to be learned though it all because with so much gained and lost there has to be something in the way of wisdom you can pick up? Both from those who lost as well as those who gained. Perhaps something that’s not too complex to digest easily.

 

The answer to that is that there are plenty of lessons to be learned but the most important one is that there is no such thing as a “no or low risk” investment with a high rate of return. The problem here though, is that all too often new investors tend to focus too intently on the potential gains, when they should be giving the risk level equal attention time.

 

What you need to know is that the art of investing and successful personal finance is the art of managing risk. Risk will always be there and the day that you lose track of it due to tunnel vision focus on potential gains is the day that you set yourself up to take a fall.