All in Investment
The one thing that is missing on the busy school calendar is of course learning about money management. For sure they learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide but they don’t learn how to budget, live within their means, save and invest. Where are the kids going to learn about this stuff then?
The thing I have learnt about gold in the last year and a half, that I would not have learned if I had not dipped my toes in the water and actually bought some is that gold is EXTREMELY volatile. Investing in gold is like share trading on 10X speed; everything moves so FAST.
I’m actually not in search of money, I’m instead searching for HAPPINESS. And despite the well worn phrase “money can’t buy you happiness”, I disagree. The two are interlinked and have a symbiotic relationship.
So, it’s a different kind of blog for me this week. I still got up bright and early each morning and instead of researching things I wanted to write about I fell down the rabbit hole of the internet instead. And what exactly did I get out of a week of Google searches? Education.
One questions I ask is “if you were given $10,000 right now what would you do”? I picked that amount because in my mind it is enough to be significant, $1,000 just doesn’t make people sit up and listen, but the thought of a sudden and unexpected $10,000 does.
Now, we Kiwi’s don’t like to self congratulate, it’s frowned upon. But stuff it, I’m going to… This week marks one year since I started this blog! Cripes, I can’t believe it has gone by so quick AND that I have managed to dream up something to discuss each week.
All your working life you are trying to increase your net worth so that when you finally stop working you start to slowly spend it to live on. If upon retirement each year you take 4% out of your pot of savings it will take about 30 years to boil the pot dry. So what can you live on a year? Do you need to invest $100K, $200 or $500K?
Is it just me or are people confusing saving for a house with saving for retirement? I keep hearing about first home buyers all the time and how difficult it is to get into the market. But the question I keep asking myself is “why do people use their KiwiSaver as their primary mode of saving for a deposit?”
Investing is like shopping for toothpaste. There is a range of companies offering a very similar product. There are differences, most of which are minor and you just have to cut through all the jargon and choose an option. If you get too bogged down in the detail it just all becomes too difficult and you will end up doing nothing.
