Do not Save Money
When you save, you lose.
In this age when inflation is rising as it has never been before but wages staying the same, we are playing a dangerous game. More dangerous than before when it comes to our personal finances. Because you have to be really certain about what you are doing to avoid mistakes. You might have thought “you are very wrong” when you see the title, but there is a point as to what I want to talk about because saving your money is not the solution to financial freedom. But why? Why do I say this when everyone is saying the opposite? Because the conservatism about everyday life (it could be about anything, not only religion) could spread to your personal finances, too.
To look at it into perspective, let’s look at how much your money grows when you save your money, aka put your money into your bank account that pays some or no interest. Let’s say that your bank pays no interest, and you have $10,000 in the bank account in 2010. You did not touch this money for ten straight years. If you are living in the USA, the long-term inflation rate of the USA is around %3. In 2020 (which is a 10-year timespan), your money will be worth $7,440. Meaning, you can not buy everything with $10,000 in 2020 that you were able to buy back in 2010.
“Investing is not about saving money, it is about making money from what you have saved.”
You probably already know that, but many people fail to actually invest with their money and let it sit in their bank account for eternity until that money is rubbish. We have to understand that the only reason to hold cash is for the emergency fund which you might need in case of an emergency (duh). Other than that, all of your money should work for you, you should not work for money %100. The point here is to find out what kind of investment do you want to make, aggressive, defensive, etc? People are afraid of the idea that investments are dangerous and you could lose all your money. The fact that you can lose some money does not change the fact that your money sitting in the bank is decreasing every day. So, you have to act, and investing does not have to be risky, and as statistics shows, if you hold for the long-term, many people (more than %90) did not lose a single cent.
Choose your strategy
When you actually decide to do something with your money, that’s the tricky part because if you don’t choose well, you can actually lose your money (either all of it or some of it). Now, you might say “what?” after reading the part above this chapter. What we are talking about is to hold for the long-term and not trade for short-term because that is the thing that will get you to lose your money. That is the reason why you must be content with your strategy and do not change ideas in between thinking you want some quick buck, because if you are not lucky as hell, you are not gonna get rick quick and even if you do, you probably do not have the financial literacy to hold on to that money, so learn it on the way, earn slowly.
“Indeciveness is worse than making the worse decision possible.”
Place a certain amount from your wage
What many people can’t do or just do not want to do is to place a certain amount from their monthly income to their investment accounts. None of us got any kind of financial education, so it might feel like SPENDING money when we are transferring money to our investment account and investing but it is actually INVESTING, not spending, and should not be regarded as spending from your wage, you are just saving up money while it is earning an average of %10 interest every year. Feels amazing, right? Of course, there are risks involved, but there is risk in everything, and when you put your money in your bank account sitting, you have a %100 chance of your money losing its value even if we would not have been experiencing a historic pandemic.
Considering all this, you have to come up with a budget for your monthly income and maybe put it in an Excel sheet and save everything and make a plan for yourself. And every month, even before paying your rent or utilities, put that money into your investments, may it be stocks, bonds, ETFs, whatever you have chosen, put your money in your investment. In the book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” (I know, I know, it is a cliche) the author mentions if you invest the moment you get your paycheck and act as your income is what you have after you put away the investments, it will make you hustle more and find more ways to earn more money to live off the life you want.
Let it ride
When we invest our money, especially in stocks, we tend to check them every moment to see if you are miraculously rich under a single minute. Do not do that, let your investments ride for years, and decades. They will produce more money for you in the future than you have and you will have better things than you would have if you did not invest. The key here is to let it ride and stop looking at it anytime. This is the mistake that many people does, looking at their investments. I can not emphasize this enough,
Do.Not.Look.At.Your.Investments!
Once you master the skill of letting it ride and making it a life-long skill, you will win the investment game and as Kiyosaki says, “get out of the rat race” pretty quickly. So, there are several steps to not saving money and investing, and you have to learn and excel at every one of them to successfully do this. Your money is in better hands when you invest them because your money is run by business owners that can handle billions of dollars (you are putting your money into billions of dollars worth companies, so yeah). I think this is better than letting them sit there in the hands of a middle-class person, right?
